Vice President Kamala Harris is “a radical” who was born in the U.S., grew up in Canada and whose values were shaped by spending her early adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That was the revelation of National Review Political columnist John Fund, speaking at the recent Gun Rights Policy Conference in San Diego, co-sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
It was not the only topic Fund discussed. He also offered some interesting new study data about public and private attitudes regarding gun ownership.
But it was his observations about Harris, now running to beckome the next president, which seemed to amuse the audience.
He noted his San Francisco roots, explaining that he has known Kamala Harris “for a long time.”
“I have personally known Kamala Harris for a quarter-century,” Fund stated, “and let me tell you, reports that she is rock stupid are actually incorrect. I wouldn’t say that she is a rocket scientist. In fact the best description I ever had of her (was) from one of her closest friends who said you could walk through her deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet, but she is not stupid. You don’t rise to the pinnacle of American politics by being stupid.”
Fund opened his remarks by reminding SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb about his prediction at last year’s GRPC in Phoenix, “I predicted 100 percent that Joe Biden would not be the 2024 nominee.”
Fund said Biden was ultimately forced out of his re-election bid earlier this year after his horrid performance during the June debate with Donald Trump. He said the November election will be competitive, as current polling indicates with its rollercoaster numbers. If Harris wins, gun owners will have their hands full.
He explained how Harris came to hold her current views. She grew up in Canada, having been born in the U.S. She went there with her mother after her parents divorced. She attended high school in Canada and went to college there for two years.
“She went from French Canada to the isosceles triangle of San Francisco, Berkley and Oakland that I grew up in,” Fund described. “There is no more unrepresentative part of America on the planet if you’re talking about American values, than the San Francisco Bay Area and she spent her entire career in that hothouse environment being radicalized. And she is a radical.”
Meanwhile, Fund also discussed a recent study by a Massachusetts-based think tank looking into the differences between what Americans say publicly and what they think privately has revealed, among other things, that a majority of people (59%) “publicly agree that the government has too much control, but only half (50%) hold this belief in private.”
The same study, he said, also shows most people support private gun ownership, while 26 percent publicly support outlawing guns. Privately, however, the same study revealed only 22 percent hold that view.
It’s part of a 145-page report called the Social Pressure Index (SPI), which Fund revealed to the GRPC audience.
Fund said the study, conducted by Populace, was designed to estimate “the gap between Americans’ privately held beliefs and their publicly stated opinions.”
Younger Americans—referred to generically as “Gen Z”—show stronger support for gun ownership than the previous generation, identified as Millennials, 40% to 37%, Fund noted.
The SPI is described as “a private opinion research study that reveals Americans’ true opinions about sensitive topics from a nationally representative sample of American adults, including more than 19,000 completed responses.”
The SPI report also says that White and Hispanic Americans “are least supportive of outlawing gun ownership in public (24% and 31%, respectively), and their private support is even lower (16% and 20%, respectively).”
“Likewise,” the report reveals, “a minority of Black and Asian Americans agree that gun ownership should be illegal, with roughly one in three supporting this view both publicly and privately (ranging from 32% to 41% agreement).”
