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The Harris campaign desperately tries to create the appearance of excitement.

The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is in full swing, and in keeping with the Democrats’ safe space neo-segregationist principles, it organized a series of mass Zoom calls oriented to different demographic groups. Inspired by a supposedly organic gathering of 90,000 black women on Zoom, other “identity groups” wanted in, with conclaves planned for “Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women, and white men.” Not wishing to intrude on anyone’s curated spaces, I logged on to “White Dudes for Harris” on Monday night to see what the Harris campaign was asking of me and 100 million other white American men.

The moderator of the event was a scraggly-bearded and top-knotted Democrat political operative called Ross Morales Rocketto, who kicked off the meeting by “addressing the elephant in the room,” namely the problematic nature of an assembly of white men, “because throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on.” Rocketto explained that “masculinity as a trope has been coopted by the MAGA Right into something that feeds into the loneliness epidemic,” leading ultimately to destructive behaviors.

Rocketto introduced the evening’s introductory speaker who, unsurprisingly, was black. Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, served as a kind of validator, reassuring anyone concerned about an all-white gathering of men that he “represents millions of members who come from all ethnicities, including a lot of white dudes.” Mitchell cautioned that “white nationalists in MAGA want to speak for you,” and the failure to denounce them signals our acceptance. “Don’t allow this fringe cult to speak for you,” he urged us, but stand up “in the spirit of solidarity” with Kamala Harris and “get in formation with the forces uniting against fascism.”

The first ten minutes of what turned out to be a 3-hour call set the tone: reject the Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings of your MAGA past, white man, and cast your lot with the common run of humanity. The following speakers delivered variations on this theme, some less eloquently than others. Jeff Bridges, who played “the Dude” in The Big Lebowski, somewhat ramblingly suggested that white men would be better off if they rejected the Vice President’s call for her supporters to “fight,” and instead embraced “surrender.” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg praised Harris’s emphasis on “Freedom” as a theme of her campaign, and spoke of the “freedom of the Inflation Reduction Act,” and the “freedom of infrastructure.”

This synod, and others in the series of demographically-focused virtual gatherings, represents the waning thrill of the Democrats’ exciting honeymoon with their newfound candidate. The three weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance were a dark night of the soul for the Democrat Party and its media handmaidens. For the first time in years, the newspapers and television networks delivered conflicting reports about politics as different factions behind the scenes offered various scenarios of how the Biden campaign would play out. In the absence of a coherent narrative delivered from a single authoritative source, reporters floundered as they tried to make sense of a complex and changing course of events. Trained only in stenography, their confusion mirrored the discombobulation behind the scenes.

The evident dismissal of Joe Biden from the campaign, reportedly organized as a kind of palace coup or putsch by party grandees, followed by the installation of Vice President Harris, gave everyone involved—from insiders to reporters to donors to image makers—an adrenaline rush. It was a relief to have a candidate who, despite her other flaws, wouldn’t dissociate while on television.

The nonstop public relations orgy of adulation that has attended Harris’s emergence as the candidate, however, has not had much impact offline. For all the talk about energy, excitement, and “vibes,” poll numbers have not flipped, and the race on the ground is not all that different from what it was before Biden stepped down. Electoral politics are additive. Are there many Trump voters who will be brought over from the other side because Kamala Harris is now at the top of the ticket? Not hardly. At best, the campaign can hope to convince some halfhearted Biden-leaners actually to turn up.

Hence the Harris campaign is vigorously churning its base with Zoom events—which smack, frankly, of depressing pandemic-era virtual happy hours—to create the appearance of froth. But the same dreary realities that plagued Biden—crime, inflation, and immigration—infect Harris, too. As the bloom fades from the rose, Harris will have to hold unscripted press conferences and interviews, and address her central role in the Biden Administration’s disastrous policy decisions, and her specifc awareness about the President’s declining faculties. That won’t be fun.

Instead, the campaign is leaning into absurdities such as celebrating the candidate’s sense of “joy.” Witness impeachment puppetmaster Norm Eisen and Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin—possibly the grimmest pair of vampiric supporters imaginable—praising the joy of Kamala Harris. Or alternatively, note the sudden use of “weird” to describe Trump and J.D. Vance, as though the 2024 election were a junior high school contest for prom king, and one faction was saying their competitors give everyone “the Ick.” This is not the sign of a vibrant campaign.

The Democrats are a fragmented coalition of identities that makes no sense politically. But they have Hollywood and its masters of illusion and narrative working overtime to create the appearance of momentum and electricity. Their bet is that they can keep the kaleidoscope spinning before the electorate notices that they are 30 percent poorer than they were under Trump, their cities are a mess, and the border is still open. If the music stops before November 5, the Harris campaign will find itself pantomiming to a skeptical audience.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.