By Ben Johnson

In the closing days of the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris has branded herself a prayer warrior who believes everyone ought to be able to live out the Christian faith — one day after saying she would reject any religious exemption for pro-life professionals who refuse to participate in an abortion. That moment came during the vice president’s CNN town hall, hosted by Anderson Cooper on Wednesday. The event, which some have called her “closing argument,” featured a number of notable moments that Christians should remember.

1. Harris Will Let You ‘Live Your Faith’? Not if You’re Pro-Life

Media coverage of the event has focused on the fact that Kamala Harris said she prays “every day, sometimes twice a day.” But Harris claimed to understand that faith extends far beyond a private relationship or intellectual assent to embrace the totality of the believer’s life. While assuring viewers of her long-ago church attendance, Harris (who is not known as a stalwart woman of faith) said, “I was raised … to believe that your faith is a verb. You live your faith.”

Harris’s statement that faith must be lived out makes her position on abortion all the more indefensible. One day earlier, MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson asked her, “What concessions would be on the table” to pass a national abortion expansion act? “Religious exemptions, for example — Is that something that you would consider if the Republicans control Congress?”

“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris shot back. “A basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and that cannot be negotiable — which is that, we need to put back in the protections of Roe v. Wade, and that is it.”

In fact, the Constitution recognizes that American citizens enjoy the God-given freedom of religion, and it has never contained a constitutional “right” to abortion — an act legal scholars argue is prohibited by the 14th Amendment. The First Amendment forbids the government from eroding the free exercise of religion, such as refusing to take an innocent human being’s life as a condition of working in the healing professions.

But let’s leave aside the Constitution (as most politicians are happy to do) and take the vice president at her word. When Harris acknowledges that “you live your faith” and then says she will not allow people of faith to refrain from abortion, she has promised to deny Christians the right to practice their faith. She has vowed to compel or coerce Christians into participating in one of the greatest sins. She has consciously declared she will crush the constitutional rights of certain kinds of Christians — specifically, those who hold to the 2,000-year-old biblical (and scientific) teaching that life begins at conception; that is, the ones who disagree with her.

But allowing selective permission is the opposite of an unalienable right. And Harris’s refusal to respect conscience rights represents just one facet of her abortion totalism.

2. Smearing the Pro-Life Movement: ‘Women Have Died because of These Laws’

In the issue that has defined her campaign, abortion, Harris recycled a defamatory canard against the pro-life movement. “Now, in 20 states we have Trump abortion bans that include punishing health care providers,” by which she means abortionists. “Women have died, women have died because of these laws,” she lied. Harris also fibbed that the Dobbs decision had created “restrictions on access to in vitro fertilization” and “an effort to limit access to contraception.”

As usual, the media did not fact-check Kamala Harris in real time, and CNN’s post-event fact-check did not cover these false assertions.

As this author has noted, the women Harris is referring to died due to the abortion industry. Amber Thurman traveled to North Carolina but, after she arrived minutes late for her “abortion care” appointment, the abortion office gave her the abortion pill and sent her home. Thurman experienced a common side effect of mifepristone — an incomplete abortion — suffered extreme pain for four days, then died.

The other women Harris cites died under similar circumstances. The doctors who refused them treatment defied, rather than followed, the legal and ethical standards of care demanded by pro-life states — possibly because they believed dangerous misinformation about pro-life laws emanating from politicians like Harris.

If Kamala Harris did believe women were dying from these laws, then one would have to conclude that she places the abortion industry’s unrestricted freedom above the health and safety of women. “You have cast this as a literal matter of life and death,” Hallie Jackson pointed out in her MSNBC interview. “What specific concessions would you be willing to make in order to get something done on abortion access as quickly as possible?” Harris’s answer to MSNBC came out nearly word-for-word the same as her response to Anderson Cooper: she would consider no limitations on abortion whatsoever, even as she claims “women have died” from the status quo.

3. Stack the Supreme Court

Harris signaled her willingness to distort constitutional order when asked if she would “expand” the Supreme Court to 12 during CNN’s town hall. “I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the court,” she said. She then fell back to her standard, evasive non-response: “And we can study what that actually looks like.”

After decades of dominating the judicial branch, former President Donald Trump appointed three justices and enough federal judges to constitute a constitutional legacy. Now, the losing Left seems eager to change the rules. President Joe Biden (remember him?) unveiled a plan to “reform” the Supreme Court that established an 18-year term limit for justices, instead of the lifetime appointment established by the Founding Fathers. The move suggests that Harris “hates checks and balances in our constitutional republic,” said Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, who found the view “disqualifying.” 

Harris plans to highlight the alleged health threats of pro-life laws at a campaign stop in Texas on Friday.

4. Overturn the Filibuster

Part of Harris’s commitment to winning at all costs came, again, as she promised to expand abortion to all 50 states. Federal laws pass if they receive a majority of the House of Representatives, as well as the 60 Senate votes necessary to overcome the filibuster and move toward cloture. When Anderson Cooper asked how she would pass a pro-abortion bill that has no national consensus, Harris again wanted to move the goalposts.

“I think we need to take a look at the filibuster, to be honest with you,” she responded, setting the rare precedent of answering a question.

“It is fascinating and disturbing all at the same time that this has become her number one policy objective: abortion-on-demand until birth. And she’s willing to do away with anything that gets in the way,” Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Thursday. He noted that the filibuster may have disappeared already without the support of “two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who would not blow up the filibuster.”

The willingness to change institutional rules hints that Harris will continue the weaponization of government against pro-life advocates, right-to-life organizations, and Catholic dads (especially if they attend the traditional Latin Mass). Her steadfastness comes as the abortion industry has unveiled a $100 million initiative, known as Abortion Access Now, to support Harris and other pro-abortion candidates for the long term.

5. Did VP Harris Call Trump’s Border Wall a Good Idea?

Aside from her abortion fundamentalism, Kamala Harris has distinguished herself as one of the nation’s foremost advocates (and practitioners) of open borders. Yet she appeared to call Donald Trump’s signature idea of a border wall a good idea during the CNN town hall.

Anderson Cooper pointed out the weak “bipartisan” immigration bill that “does call for $650 million that was earmarked under Trump to actually still go to build the wall.”

“You called it ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and a ‘Medieval vanity project,’” Cooper pointed out. “So, you do not think it is stupid anymore?”

“I am not afraid of good ideas where they occur,” Harris replied.

Voters regularly rank immigration as the second or third most important issue in the 2024 election, favoring President Trump by as much as 35 points. So, it comes as little surprise that Harris would wish to back away from her radical hostility to border enforcement. She has said Donald Trump’s immigration policy constituted a “crime against humanity,” compared ICE with the Ku Klux Klan, considered abolishing ICE, and declared that anyone who opposes amnesty for at least six million illegal immigrants is “failing an important moral test.”

Failure is precisely the word most observers apply to Harris’s immigration policy. New statistics reveal that illegal immigration reached its second-highest level in American history in 2024, with 2.9 million illegal border crossings. All four years of the Biden-Harris administration have set records for illegal immigration: 3.2 million in FY 2023, 2.76 million in FY 2022, and 1.95 million in FY 2021.

Not counting “gotaways” who evaded detection, a total of 10,825,387 illegal border crossings took place nationwide during the four fiscal years of Harris’s tenure as “Border Czar,” which Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) described as “one of the most catastrophic failures in American history.”

6. Kamala Harris Calls Herself a ‘Nerd’ Who Studies Too Much

Incredibly, Harris tried to blame her inability to answer any question in real time on the fact that she is a closet policy wonk. “I may not be quick to have the answer as soon as you ask it, about a specific policy issue, sometimes, because I’m gonna want to research it. I’m gonna want to study it. I’m kind of a nerd sometimes, I confess!” she exclaimed.

Harris further reinforced her claim to secret, unspoken competence when asked if she had ever made a mistake. “In my role as vice president, I mean, I have probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well-versed on issues,” she said, hinting that she did not appreciate the unvetted question. “I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well-versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.”

Kamala Harris has not earned a reputation for studiousness, intellectual curiosity, or mastery of subject matter. To the contrary, The Washington Post has reported, “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.” One former staffer told the newspaper that, when working for Harris, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work.” That may explain why Harris had a 92% staff turnover during her first three years as vice president, according to the late Adam Andrzejewski, founder of the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.

Harris was also recently caught in a plagiarism scandal over her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”

7. Kamala Harris Calls Donald Trump a ‘Fascist.’ Yawn.

Perhaps the least surprising part of the town hall occurred early on, when Harris said Trump harbors positive feelings for the political ideology of Adolf Hiter and Benito Mussolini.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Anderson Cooper asked.

“Yes, I do,” replied Harris so rapidly she stepped on Cooper’s question. 

The two were discussing debunked comments from former Trump White House chief-of-staff John Kelly that President Trump said he wanted generals like the ones from Nazi Germany. But the tactic of accusing Republican presidential candidates of “fascism” is nearly as old as Joe Biden.

“President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool,” read a headline from The New York Times on October 26, 1948, describing an attack Harry Truman made against ultra-moderate Republican Thomas Dewey. As Pat Buchanan (himself a frequent recipient of the fascist slur) rightly noted:

“Since the 1930s, ‘fascist’ has been a term of hate and abuse used by the Left against the Right, as in the Harry Truman campaign. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to see in the Goldwater campaign ‘dangerous signs of Hitlerism.’ Twin the words, ‘Reagan, fascism’ in Google and 1,800,000 references pop up.”

Even the latest charges of “fascism” seem old and tired: Kelly made the same outrageous claim in 2022.

8. Kamala Harris Will Have No Enemies List?

Harris has tried to make the 2024 presidential election a referendum on Donald Trump, rather than a discussion of the past four years or the future policies she would implement. She claimed during the CNN town hall that “the difference between us is that he’s going to have an enemies list. I’m going to have a to-do list to work on your concerns.”

That might be belied by Harris presiding over a Justice Department that has prosecuted Donald Trump during a presidential election — and Trump is far from her only target. The Biden-Harris administration has so many enemies that the House of Representatives opened a subcommittee dedicated to documenting its Weaponization of Government. Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner noted, “The Biden-Harris DOJ created a special task force to prosecute pro-lifers. The charges were frivolous and they lost in court, but only after upending the life of Mark Houck and others, whose crime was angering Planned Parenthood.”

“She has an enemies list,” Carney noted.

9. Where Is the Love?

Observers across the political spectrum agree that the Harris-Walz campaign is wearing thin. Harris, who launched her internal party coup with a message of “joy” and “vibes,” appears to be wearing out her welcome with her own voters. Numerous times throughout the CNN town hall, Harris delivered applause lines to which not a soul clapped and punchlines that elicited not a chuckle. At one point, she tried to stir up the lethargic audience by exclaiming, “Let’s not be afraid of having a little bit of joy!”

Silence followed.

Democrats may dutifully vote for Kamala Harris, but clearly, the thrill is gone.

10. ‘Word Salad City’: CNN’s Reactions Were Brutal

One of the most notable factors of the Kamala Harris/CNN town hall is network analysts’ responses. CNN, which has spent eight years trying to distinguish itself as the most anti-Trump network on cable television, could not muster the strength to praise her performance. 

“I’ll just tell you what I’m hearing from people who I have been talking to,” began Dana Bash. “If her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that. And some people have asked, ‘Is she being held to a different standard?’ Maybe, but that’s maybe the world she is living in. And on the question of who she is, people are understanding that a little more. But what she will do, the question about her legislative priorities — name one. There wasn’t one.”

Bash is hardly Harris-hostile. She proved so helpful while conducting candidate Harris’s first interview with a major network 39 days after being anointed the Democratic Party’s unelected presidential nominee that, at one point, Bash resorted to asking a multiple choice question.

Bash seemingly paled by comparison with her colleague, David Axelrod. “When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to, kind of, go to word salad city,” said Axelrod, who compared Harris negatively with Bill Clinton’s skill with retail politics. “You do want to relate to the people in front of you. She didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t ask them questions. She didn’t address them, particularly. She was giving set pieces too much.”

Again, Axelrod, a left-wing Democrat, served as chief strategist and senior advisor to Barack Obama (who reportedly wanted Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to fill the top spot after Biden’s ouster rather than Harris).

Perhaps the most telling reaction came from the Philadelphia-area audience Harris hoped to court. As Anderson Cooper announced that the town hall had come to an end, the audience responded with muted applause akin to a polite golf clap. 

They might have at least been grateful the Kamala Harris spectacle had come to an end.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.