If I knew nothing else about Kamala Harris, the following thing would be enough for me to refuse to vote for her. Just last month, on Columbus Day we learned what Harris thinks about Western civilization and the European discoverers who brought it to North America. In short, it is that it and they are to be despised.

We could pretend this is just a fringe issue and preoccupy ourselves with reviewing a list of the top 10 issues of concern to the typical American voter. In that calculation, where the economy tops the list, Harris would come in second, too. This is why the pro-Harris media—which is to say the media—have been yammering so long and so misleadingly recently about the costs of the Trump tariffs. They’re desperate.

Still, the typical American’s concern for the economy, although entirely understandable, seems rather insignificant when the whole culture is danger of collapsing and taking the economy with it.

That is why it seems clear to me that the economy is not the central issue—at least not if we are going to think as a people and in the public interest and not just in terms of what’s best for our own pocketbooks. The culture is upstream of the economy and of politics. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much interested in living in a wealthy country that fundamentally misunderstands basic morality, and I consider democracy just another word unless you have a people in the democracy who are morally grounded and defending their civilizational heritage.

In under two minutes, Harris let her audience know just how much she despises the origins and the traditional culture of this country.

There is the moralizing wagging finger and lecturing about “this shameful past”—a past which, it clear from to this observer, she patently does not even understand very well. Harris speaks of the American experience with native peoples as though there were a single example, anywhere in the history of our species, of the establishment of a new society on the scale of the one that began establishing itself here 500 years ago that did not involve conflict with other human groups which typically culminated in violence. And let’s not pretend that the peoples Europeans met here when they arrived were themselves not perpetrators of violence.

Those peoples who inhabited North America when Columbus arrived were hunter-gatherers and in rare cases primitive farmers. In any case, they were technologically far behind the Europeans who arrived. There are no stories in the history of our planet of two peoples with significantly different levels of technological of development who came to exist on the same territory as equals. That is the way human history works. To mourn that in the case of Euro-Americans is to ignore what has been universally the case while singling out one group for condemnation.

Harris also offers the totally baseless charge that problems suffered by indigenous Americans today are a consequence of European cultural victory over the culture of their ancestors. “Native girls are missing and murdered at alarming rates.” Are we to believe that Christopher Columbus is to blame for this? How, precisely? Without even looking at the data, I can predict with certainty, given how murder always works, that the chief murderers of girls of indigenous American descent are boys and men of indigenous American descent. (Overwhelmingly, murder is a male and an intra-racial phenomenon—men murder much, much more frequently than women, and people kill people who look like them much more often than they kill people who do not). Have these indigenous American male murderers of indigenous American girls and women been acting as the racist agents of Columbus, many centuries later?

And what is the evidence of the claim that indigenous Americans are systematically prevented from voting, as Harris would have us believe? What accounts for it other than the fact that they simply fail in greater proportion than other groups to do the very basic work needed to cast a ballot? Certainly Columbus is to blame, too, for the fact that large numbers of native Americans cannot be bothered to register and to show up at the polling place on Election Day.

And then there is ludicrously huge, hammy, fake smile when she starts reciting all the evidence of indigenous American accomplishment. They are doing “essential” work to preserve American society? That seems a remarkable claim, given that they are only 2 percent of the population. Given those numbers, it is no insult to them but simply a statement of fact that if all the indigenous Americans left the United States tomorrow, the “essential” business of the country would go on more or less just as before.

She further claims that indigenous people serve in the U.S. military at the highest rate of any group. Some activist groups make that claim, I see, but the U.S. military shows that only 1.1 percent of active members of the military are indigenous American. By 2020 census data, about 9.7 million citizens of the country claim indigenous American ancestry, which is where I got the 2 percent figure above. Given these figures, they are serving at rates well under their rate of representation in the general population.

Facts don’t matter to Harris, however. What she has done here serves her purpose which is to deliver a Two Minutes Hate against the United States of America. The entirety of it consists of lies and exaggerations designed to insult and denigrate the objectively great European men who came to this wilderness and carved out a country of tremendous moral achievement and to insinuate that the primitive and frequently barbaric cultures of the people who they found here were equal or even superior to the culture they brought with them.

In her closing remarks at the lone presidential debate, Harris noted that she is a candidate of “the future” and Trump a candidate of “the past.” The future Kamala Harris points toward is one in which traditional America disappears altogether. Harris and others like her among the political elites of this country passionately hate this country’s past, with all its human messiness and its undeniable majesty, which they have transformed into a confrontation between evil Europeans and their innocent victims.

They cannot wait to degrade their country even further.