Joe Hildebrand opinion: Elite leftists confused by strange normal folk

Kamala Harris made her first major appearance since losing the US election to Donald Trump … at a Gold Coast real estate conference. It tells you everything you need to know about elite leftists today, writes Joe Hildebrand.

For years, scientists have wondered where a body ended up after disappearing into a black hole.

Today we know: A Gold Coast real estate conference.

This was, as we found out last week, the afterlife of former vice-president Kamala Harris, who led the Democrats to oblivion at last year’s US election.

Yes, the announcement that Harris’s first major booking since losing to Donald Trump would be at the Gold Coast Conference and Exhibition Centre was not an elaborate practical joke, as many had assumed, but something that actually happened.

And this tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Democratic Party in America today.

Former US Vice President Kamala Harris attends the 2025 AREC Convention at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Broad Beach Queensland. Picture: NewsWire / Scott Powick

Just when you think something is so ridiculous that it has to be satire, it turns out that is what they are actually doing.

This brings us to the Democrats’ latest attempt to figure out what went wrong in 2024 and why they were abandoned by a tsunami of young and working-class male voters.

Their solution? Not a day in a coalmine or steelworks or behind the wheel of a cab – that would be too easy.

Then-US President Joe Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris, whose disastrous election performance has been backed up by Democrats’ recovery strategy that defies belief. Picture: AFP

Instead they have developed a $20m program called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan”, which will “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces”.

Again, this is not a joke. Or rather it is, but it is happening in real life.

One gets the impression they are going to shoot some poor working Schmoe with a tranq dart so they can probe him in a lab.

Even the New York Times, which obtained a copy of this “prospectus”, was clearly alarmed by what it was looking at.

“Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new ­projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places,” its article read.

When the most elitist newspaper in the country accuses you of being ­elitist, you know you have really crossed the event horizon into ­another dimension.

And yet again, this is really happening. Little wonder the few remaining sane Democrats are heading for a padded cell.

Strategist Michael Ceraso told Fox News he found it “hilarious” that “people in suits are hanging out at ­luxury hotels asking how they can talk to day-to-day Americans”.

And of course this is exactly the ­reason why male and working-class voters have turned off the Democrats in the first place.

They look and sound like a bunch of rich, urban, tertiary-educated elites because they are a bunch of rich, urban, tertiary-educated elites. Just imagine having to develop a “strategic plan” on how to talk to ­ordinary people, let alone describing its purpose – with a straight face – to “study the syntax, language and ­content that gains attention and virality in these spaces”.

Hearing language like that would likely garner this response from a coal miner.

Just imagine a coalminer or a ­steelworker reading those words and then looking up at the grad student ­interviewing him.

How on earth did that ever get put to paper?

How did no one read it and say “Holy hell guys, if this gets out it will destroy the party”? Where were all the strategists to stop this?

And this is when the full comic ­horror reveals itself: These are the strategists.

Again, it quite literally defies belief and yet it is somehow real.

Former US Vice President Kamala Harris was spotted having dinner at the Bathers' Pavilion at Balmoral with her husband, Doug Emhoff – another moving nod to the working class. Picture: 9 NEWS

It was really in the New York Times and Kamala Harris was really at the Australian Real Estate Conference.

(And she also really had dinner at Bathers Pavilion on Balmoral Beach beforehand – another moving nod to the working man.)

And the terror of it is that these ­people are the ones who are supposed to be representing the interests of workers.

They tell us so themselves, albeit ­incomprehensibly.

Little wonder the workers themselves beg to differ.

It is not workers, but the American Democrats who are the ultimate case study in this experiment.

This is what happens when progressive parties are overrun by wealthy elites instead of ordinary working people.

And for all their university degrees they are still not smart enough to see it.

They are snuffing out the party just like dimwitted Lenny did to the ­rabbits in Of Mice and Men.

How’s this for an idea on how to reach working people: Live with them. Be one of them. Have them in your ranks.

And never – I repeat never – use the word “spaces” in their presence.

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