I dislike imprecise analogies. But there’s something profoundly disturbing about the Kamala Harris presidential candidacy.

The term “Manchurian Candidate” was, of course, famously coined as the title of a 1959 novel by Richard Condon. The titular character of the novel is a U.S. Senator who’s running for Vice President but becomes the presidential candidate after the assassination of his running mate. Unbeknownst to his voters, he’s under the spell of China and intent on installing a Chinese communist dictatorship upon emerging victorious.

A general image of a “Manchurian Candidate” has stuck in popular culture, being a puppet politician under the influence of a foreign power, and hence a token of corruption and disloyalty to their own country.

Far be it from me to accuse Kamala Harris of being under the influence of any foreign power, or being disloyal or corrupt — that’s the domain of Democrats unable to cope with electoral defeat. That said, her campaign has been a very peculiar phenomenon to observe.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden led the way here. Obama ran as the enigmatic and charismatic young man whose radical political views the media were for partisan reasons unwilling to investigate and litigate. Biden ran a basement campaign during which the first signs of dementia were already discernible, along with “spontaneous” Q&As where it was obvious he was reading his answers from a teleprompter, and clumsily so. He, too, got a full pass from the nation’s newspapers and TV stations.

Absent an inquisitive media there is no punishment, and therefore no corrective mechanism, for a political party behaving in such an egregious manner. A curious press corps would have hampered Obama’s candidacy and destroyed Biden’s. But alas, for at least sixteen years now the media have reserved their curiosity for one party only, and for one candidate in particular during much of that time. Or do you believe that, had Hunter’s laptop been Ivanka’s, 40% of the electorate would have still never heard about it?

Whatever the media’s faults between 2008 and 2020, they are dwarfed by their obnoxious partisanship in 2024. Nobody will deny that Obama was a skilled and talented politician, regardless of his political views. And nobody will ignore Biden’s past stature as a Senator and Vice President, his present state notwithstanding. But this year we have a candidate in Harris who is so visibly unsuited for the job that to suggest otherwise rises to the level of gaslighting. And yet gaslighting is precisely what’s happening.

We have only to point at the continual repetition of the same sentence whenever her teleprompter goes down. Or her reverting to word salads each time she’s the least bit pressed on an issue by an otherwise friendly interviewer, from an outlet which, it goes without saying, would have skewered Donald Trump for offering similar non-answers. Or her ever-dominating dumb, nervous cackle employed to mask an utter lack of thought.

Moreover, her economic ideas over the course of a few months veered from being altogether absent to wholly stupid (anti-price gouging measures to curb inflation) to tiresome clichés (“the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes!”). And she’s shamelessly flip-flopped on issues ranging from immigration to fracking without nary a peep from the media.

A picture has emerged of a candidate without a single idea of her own, who’s being spoon fed lines by a team of strategists and consultants desperate to make her look like the reasonable, centrist candidate. It seems like they’re having her throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, constantly making her change course: from this position to the next, and from no interviews to interviews well-nigh every single day.

Yet each and every time she’s put to the test, she crumbles and her speech devolves from being somewhat intelligible into tongue-tied babbling. The moment of this transition from coherent to incoherent sentences is usually recognized by a pause and short stammer, after which she’s off to the races and her audience is left puzzled. The interview on 60 Minutes made this painfully clear. Harris’ brain goes into error mode the second she runs out of studied lines. And it can hardly be said that Bill Whitaker tried very hard.

Equally noticeably, the same people surrounding her also surrounded Obama and Biden. The same submissive media who propped up those two are currently also propping up Harris. Her image, campaign, and platform are being manufactured before our eyes by a team of savvy Democratic operatives. There is no grassroots support for Harris, who never received one primary vote and whose rally audiences are padded with people being bused in for the occasion. And the masses, deceived as they are by the media, would never know. If there’s not something “Manchurian” about all this, I don’t know what is.

We get it, Democrats: Trump has many personal flaws and he’s an imperfect candidate, and he makes your heads explode. But frankly, our side is done apologizing for a candidate to a party which can’t police its own, and brings to the table utterly incompetent candidates for office who have no business whatsoever to come within a hundred miles of said office, but who nevertheless get there due to the fact that our country is now blessed by a media and wider culture which are completely in the tank for your team.

This country learned the hard way during the past four years, when the dollar lost 25% of its value and we gained God knows how many illegal immigrants who will be on a fast track to U.S. citizenship if Harris wins and will change our demographic make-up forever. We look like fools on the international stage, and no enemy takes us seriously any longer. Heck, Iran fears Israel more than us at the moment.

The tweeting right is becoming all giddy about the polls and about a supposed landslide in which even California may be in play. In a country where the popular vote has colored blue in seven of the past eight presidential elections that latter part is just stupid. But perhaps they’re correct about a landslide. There’s only one poll which counts, though, as they say, and Republicans should never get complacent.

I do know that if Kamala Harris wins next month, she will have been carried to victory solely by her campaign team and a sycophantic media, and not by a single original, thoughtful or intellectual idea of her own. Let alone by an ability to express such ideas in a lucid fashion. She’ll be a mere puppet of the unelected cabal surrounding her, the very people who are running the United States today on Joe Biden’s behalf.

It’s a scary thought, and frankly unbecoming in a country which is supposed to have a government for, of, and by the people.