Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor
Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor
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Kamala Harris' great-great-great-great grandfather was 'notorious' Irish slave owner who bought Jamaican plantation and travelled to London to fight abolition, historian claims
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California
Kamala Harris, right, with her mother Shyamala Gopalan at a Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco in 2007
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was the daughter of an Indian diplomat and a women's rights activist, graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen, and, in order to avoid an arranged marriage, went to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue graduate studies. There, she met another graduate student, Donald Harris (together left), from Jamaica, who was studying for his Ph.D. in economics, during a political protest. Pictured right: Harris and her mother, who died in 2009. Her father Donald is 85
‘An extremely bad man’: Ballymoney reacts to news of Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor – The Irish Times
Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris dated San Francisco's first black mayor Wilile Brown in the 1990s, while he was still married but separated from his wife. Pictured together a dinner in 1995
Howard student: Kamala Harris (right) was at the Washington D.C. college known as the 'black Harvard' when she and friend Gwen Whitfield (left) took part in an anti-apartheid protest in November 1982
President Joe Biden has announced that he will not seek re-election and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee (pictured together on the 4th of July)
Harris's husband Doug Emhoff is a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. The two married at a small ceremony in Santa Barbara in 2014, after they met on a blind date a year earlier. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage: Cole and Ella. Harris calls herself 'Momala,' the name she says her stepchildren gave her
Donald Trump has given his verdict on Kamala - and says she will be easier to beat than Biden
But Trump did donate to her campaign just over a decade ago
Donald Harris holds his daughter, Kamala, in 1965. Professor Harris has spoken about their family history and believes they are related to Hamilton Brown, a notorious slaver and plantation owner
Iris Finegan holds her great granddaughter, Kamala Harris, in Jamaica. Iris was a farmer and educator known as 'Miss Iris' in the family
Beau Biden introduced Harris to his father, who was serving as Barack Obama's vice president at the time. Joe Biden endorsed Harris early on in her Senate campaign, noting she was a friend of his son. 'Beau always supported her,' he said in his endorsement. Pictured: Harris with California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Barack Obama in 2011, when she was California's Attorney General
Now happily married to entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, Harris has little to say about Brown and does not mention his name once in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold
Harris and Emhoff have been married since 2014, and he could become the first Second Gentleman if Biden is to win the presidency
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Bibby Gets a Standing Ovation From US Congress For Lying About Not Murdering More Innocent Palestinian Women And Children In Gaza 26th July 2024 Part 6
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US Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has Irish links but don't expect a visit - Limerick Live
We can forgive Kamala Harris for not pursuing her possible family link to an odious NI slave trader
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a campaign event
Kamala Harris on a family trip from the west coast to New York in September 1966, where she was photographed in Harlem
Harris is shown as a child, left, with her younger sister Maya, center, and mother Shyamala Gopalan, who was a biomedical scientist. She grew up in Oakland, California
Kamala Harris' mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a 25-year-old academic when her first daughter arrived. Kamala Harris has a younger sister, Maya, with whom she was photographed on Christmas Day 1968
Harris, back row at left, in an undated family photo. Next to her, from left, are her grandmother Rajam Gopalan, grandfather P.V. Gopalan and sister, Maya Harris. With them are Maya's daughter, Meena, left, and Harris' cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Historian delves into US Vice-President and likely Democrat election candidate
In 2002, she challenged San Francisco's incumbent district attorney, the progressive Terence Hallinan, who was her former boss. She quit the office - known for it disorganization and low conviction rates - and launched her campaign against him. Her tenure as the city's top cop was not without controversy, particularly a case that made national news. In 2004, shortly after she took over in the DA's office, she declined to pursue the death penalty for a gang member accused of shooting 29-year-old San Francisco cop Isaac Espinoza - despite heavy political pressure from the police union
Kamala Harris ‘links’ to Antrim slave owner | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
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How Irish is Kamala Harris? US vice president’s Irish roots explained
Kamala Harris ancestor links with Antrim town - Alpha Newspaper Group
One of Kamala Harris' great-great-great-grandfathers hailed from Co Antrim, but genealogists might be wise to steer clear of the branch of this particular family tree.
Kamala Harris, the most likely Democratic Nominee for the USA Presidential Election is reported to have a Slave Trade Ancestor, It has been reported that her four times great grandfather was a man called Hamilton Brown. who was a 19th-century slave owner in Ireland who is claimed to have owned slaves in Jamaica,
US vice president Kamala Harris listens during a breakfast in honor of the then taoiseach Leo Varadka on March 15th this year
‘An extremely bad man’: Ballymoney reacts to news of Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor – The Irish Times
Kamala Harris' great-great-great-great grandfather was 'notorious' Irish slave owner who bought Jamaican plantation and travelled to London to fight abolition, historian claims
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, yesterda
Kamala Harris is descended from an owner of 120-plus slaves who ran a Jamaican plantation and fought against the abolition of the abhorrent trade, a British historian claimed today.
Donald Harris holds his daughter, Kamala, in 1965. Professor Harris has spoken about their family history and believes they are related to Hamilton Brown, a notorious slaver and plantation owner
The Democrat would-be President is of Indian and Afro-Jamaican descent with her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, born in Madras, now Chennai, while her father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica.
The first attack ad pitting Kamala Harris against Donald Trump was released shortly after President Biden
announced he would not seek re-election.
Iris Finegan holds her great granddaughter, Kamala Harris, in Jamaica. Iris was a farmer and educator known as 'Miss Iris' in the family
President Joe Biden has announced that he will not seek re-election and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee (pictured together on the 4th of July)
Donald Trump has given his verdict on Kamala - and says she will be easier to beat than Biden
A plantation in Saint Ann Parish, where ancestor Hamilton Brown settled from Northern Ireland. Kamala's father grew up in the same area of Jamaica
The Vice-President's father, a Stanford University academic who is 85, was born in Brown's Town on the Caribbean island – named after Hamilton Brown, who is believed to be Kamala's slave-owning great-great-great-great grandfather.
In an article published by the Jamaica Globe in 2019, Kamala's father Professor Harris wrote: 'My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown) descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown's Town, a town in Jamaica.'
Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken said today that Brown was a 'notorious' slaver and 'not nice fellow' who was born in Antrim but later settled in Jamaica.
'I actually thought this was going to be a nice story, like (former US presidents) McKinley, Nixon, Jackson, Roosevelt, all of whom have links to Antrim, but it wasn’t', he said.
Brown travelled to London to protest against the abolition of slavery and then turned his attention to Irish migrants when he was no longer allowed to enslave Africans, Mr McCracken told the Belfast Telegraph.
Mr McCracken has examined Kamala’s UK roots after it was discovered she has ancestry in Co Antrim through Hamilton Brown.
'Hamilton Brown was a notorious figure, and not a nice fellow,' he said.
'Hamilton was born in Antrim, just north of Ballymoney, before he moved to Jamaica as a teenager. That's where he became a bookmaker, and then a plantation owner, and therefore a slave owner.
'His gravestone is in Saint Ann in Jamaica, which lists his birthplace as Antrim.
'He had numerous slaves, in fact Hamilton Brown routinely travelled back and forth to London to protest the abolishment of slavery.
'He would come back to Ireland to take migrants back to Jamaica to work once slavery was abolished. A quote refers to him as "making slaves of migrants" in Ireland.'
In 2019, it was reported that Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826.
Kamala is not believed to have spoken publicly about these roots, which take her all the way back to the UK. Reuters fact checkers have said that Kamala is likely to be a descendant of both slaves and slave owners.
It is not uncommon for African Americans or people of Caribbean heritage to be descended from a slave owners. This is because it was common for slave masters to rape their female slaves.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, yesterday
If Kamala manages to beat Donald Trump and is elected in November, Kamala will become the latest US president to have links to Ireland.
Mr Biden is very proud of his own Irish heritage, with links to Mayo and Louth.
'Hamilton was born in Antrim, just north of Ballymoney, before he moved to Jamaica as a teenager. That's where he became a bookmaker, and then a plantation owner, and therefore a slave owner.
'His gravestone is in Saint Ann in Jamaica, which lists his birthplace as Antrim.
'He had numerous slaves, in fact Hamilton Brown routinely travelled back and forth to London to protest the abolishment of slavery'.
He told the Belfast Telegraph: 'He would come back to Ireland to take migrants back to Jamaica to work once slavery was abolished. A quote refers to him as "making slaves of migrants" in Ireland.'
In 2019, it was reported that Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826, respectively.
Kamala is not believed to have spoken publicly about these roots, which take her all the way back to the UK. Reuters fact checkers have said that Kamala is likely to be a descendant of both slaves and slave owners.
Kamala's own story is equally extraordinary. She rose to Vice-President after being California's attorney general and a US senator having originally been a local prosecutor in Alameda County, California, in the early 1990s.
Just like her boss Joe Biden, Kamala Harris is also known for gaffes and 'word salad' speeches.
From describing AI as a 'kind of a fancy thing' that is 'first of all two letters' to a recent baffling blunder where she called the 2024 election 'the most election of our lifetime', the vice-president's abilities as an orator have long been in question.
She also once confused North and South Korea, mistakenly said 220million Americans died of Covid-19 and joked that people aged between 18 and 24 are 'really stupid'.
And the 59-year-old also has a reputation for badly misjudging a social situation and laughing at the wrong moment, including once when she was asked a question about the fate of desperate Ukrainian refugees.
Ms Harris is happily married to LA lawyer Doug Emhoff but there are also claims that her affair with flamboyant California Democrat and San Francisco's first black mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s - when he was 61 and she was 31 - also gave the presidential hopeful's career the boost she needed to get to where she is today.
'Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco', Brown said in 2019 at the ripe age of 86.
In 2001 she briefly dated American talk show host Montel Williams. Today he didn't endorse Kamala Harris for President after Mr Biden dropped out. Instead he backed Wes Moore, who has since endorsed Vice President Harris.
The first attack ad pitting Kamala Harris against Donald Trump was released shortly after President Biden announced he would not seek re-election.
President Joe Biden has announced that he will not seek re-election and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee (pictured together on the 4th of July)
Donald Trump has given his verdict on Kamala - and says she will be easier to beat than Biden
Donald Trump has given his verdict on Kamala - and says she will be easier to beat than Biden
But Trump did donate to her campaign just over a decade ago
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was the daughter of an Indian diplomat and a women's rights activist, graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen, and, in order to avoid an arranged marriage, went to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue graduate studies. There, she met another graduate student, Donald Harris, from Jamaica, who was studying for his Ph.D. in economics, during a political protest
Kamala Harris, right, with her mother Shyamala Gopalan at a Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco in 2007
Howard student: Kamala Harris (right) was at the Washington D.C. college known as the 'black Harvard' when she and friend Gwen Whitfield (left) took part in an anti-apartheid protest in November 1982
Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris dated San Francisco's first black mayor Wilile Brown in the 1990s, while he was still married but separated from his wife. Pictured together a dinner in 1995
Harris's husband Doug Emhoff is a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. The two married at a small ceremony in Santa Barbara in 2014, after they met on a blind date a year earlier. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage: Cole and Ella. Harris calls herself 'Momala,' the name she says her stepchildren gave her
But before he swapped The Apprentice for politics, just over a decade ago Donald Trump himself donated thousands of dollars to Kamala's re-election campaign while she was California's attorney general.
Now the Republican nominee insists she will be even easier to defeat than Joe Biden, declaring: 'She's so f***ing bad. She's so pathetic'. He has also called her 'as crazy as a bed bug' and has given her the nickname: 'Laffin' Kamala Harris'.
Ms Harris, whose left-wing politics were forged by her mother and time at the so-called 'black Harvard' in Washington DC, has been at Mr Biden's side since he was elected in 2020 - and after his decision to reject the democratic nomination she is now aiming to become the first black female to head a major party's US presidential ticket.
The key question for Democrats today is whether she is the woman to beat Trump in November - or whether after her gaffes and public speaking struggles she is the liability her rival and his supporters say she is.
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Kamala was immediately endorsed by President Joe Biden after he sensationally withdrew from the 2024 presidential race on Sunday. And within minutes of his statement released a campaign video bringing the fight to Trump.
The Clintons have said they will give their 'full endorsement' to Kamala Harris - but the Obamas are yet to decide publicly.
Ms Harris is viewed as a fighter by her supporters.
Describing her own attitude to life she once said: 'Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open, and sometimes they won't— and then you need to kick that f***ing door down'.
But she may face a fight from rivals, including her old friend Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California.
According to Betfair Exchange, Kamala Harris is now 12/5 to win November's Presidential Election. Back in February her odds to win the Presidency were as big as 100/1. Donald Trump has been the heavy favourite since April and earlier this week he was as short as 4/7 to win in November, however since the news that Biden is to step down from the race, his odds have drifted slightly to 4/6.
Kamala was born October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents who met as civil rights activists.
Her home town and nearby Berkeley were at the heart of the racial and social justice movements of the time, and Ms Harris was both a product and a beneficiary.
She spoke often about attending demonstrations in a stroller and growing up around adults 'who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice'. In first grade, she was bused to school as part of the second class to integrate into Berkeley's public education.
Ms Harris has been hailed by supporters as a trailblazer.
The daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she rose from local prosecutor to California's attorney general before becoming a US senator.
Kamala's mother Shyamala died in 2009 aged 70. Her father Donald, an academic, is 85.
Harris' sister, Maya, is a lawyer and MSNBC political analyst while her brother-in-law, Tony West, is general counsel of Uber.
Kamala, a stepmother-of-two, made history in 2020 by becoming the first black, Asian, and female Vice President.
Critics, however, have attacked her poor public speaking skills.
And some polls have shown her to be less popular than Mr Biden in the vital swing states that are likely to settle the election.
One recent poll gave Ms Harris a 29 per cent favourability rating, with 49 per cent rating her unfavourably.
Her opponents argue that letting her run for high office would amount to admitting defeat. As a result, challengers to a Harris nomination are bound to come forward.
Supporters arrived at the White House as she put herself forward at the Democrats' unity candidate
Kamala Harris on a family trip from the west coast to New York in September 1966, where she was photographed in Harlem
Harris is shown as a child, left, with her younger sister Maya, center, and mother Shyamala Gopalan, who was a biomedical scientist. She grew up in Oakland, California
New arrival: Kamala Harris' mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a 25-year-old academic when her first daughter arrived.
Kamala Harris has a younger sister, Maya, with whom she was photographed on Christmas Day 196
Harris, back row at left, in an undated family photo. Next to her, from left, are her grandmother Rajam Gopalan, grandfather P.V. Gopalan and sister, Maya Harris. With them are Maya's daughter, Meena, left, and Harris' cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
In 2002, she challenged San Francisco's incumbent district attorney, the progressive Terence Hallinan, who was her former boss. She quit the office - known for it disorganization and low conviction rates - and launched her campaign against him. Her tenure as the city's top cop was not without controversy, particularly a case that made national news. In 2004, shortly after she took over in the DA's office, she declined to pursue the death penalty for a gang member accused of shooting 29-year-old San Francisco cop Isaac Espinoza - despite heavy political pressure from the police union
Beau Biden introduced Harris to his father, who was serving as Barack Obama's vice president at the time. Joe Biden endorsed Harris early on in her Senate campaign, noting she was a friend of his son. 'Beau always supported her,' he said in his endorsement. Pictured: Harris with California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Barack Obama in 2011, when she was California's Attorney General
Ms Harris's parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother alongside her younger sister, Maya.
She attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which became a source of sisterhood and political support over the years.
The Simpsons predicted it again! Fans go wild over viral meme comparing Kamala Harris in purple suit to Lisa's presidential look from THAT eerie year 2000 episode
After graduating, Ms Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for law school and chose a career as a prosecutor, a move that surprised her activist family.
She said she believed that working for change inside the system was just as important as agitating from outside. By 2003, she was running for her first political office, taking on the longtime San Francisco district attorney.
Few city residents knew her name, and Ms Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside grocery stores to meet people. She won and quickly showed a willingness to chart her own path.
Months into her tenure, Ms Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the killer of a young police officer killed in the line of duty, fraying her relationship with city police.
The episode did not stop her political ascent. In late 2007, while still serving as district attorney, she was knocking on doors in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama.
After he became president, Mr Obama endorsed her in her 2010 race for California attorney general.
Once elected to statewide office, she pledged to uphold the death penalty despite her moral opposition to it. She refused to defend Proposition 8, a voter-backed initiative banning same-sex marriage.
Ms Harris also played a key role in a 25 billion-dollar (£19.3 billion) settlement with the nation's mortgage lenders following the foreclosure crisis.
As killings of young black men by police received more attention, Ms Harris implemented some changes, including tracking racial data in police stops, but did not pursue more aggressive measures such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Ms Harris's record as a prosecutor would dog her when she launched a presidential bid in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded swifter change.
But during her time on the job, she also forged a fortuitous relationship with Beau Biden, Joe Biden's son who was then Delaware's attorney general. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and his friendship with Ms Harris figured heavily years later as his father chose Ms Harris to be his running mate.
Ms Harris married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014, and she became stepmother to Emhoff's two children, Ella and Cole, who referred to her as 'Momala'.
Ms Harris had a rare opportunity to advance politically when Senator Barbara Boxer, who had served for more than two decades, announced she would not run again in 2016.
In office, Ms Harris quickly became part of the Democratic resistance to Donald Trump and gained recognition for her pointed questioning of his nominees.
Now happily married to entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, Harris has little to say about Brown and does not mention his name once in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold
In one memorable moment, she pressed now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew any laws that gave government the power to regulate a man's body. He did not, and the line of questioning galvanised women and abortion rights activists.
A little more than two years after becoming a senator, Ms Harris announced her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But her campaign was marred by infighting and she failed to gain traction, ultimately dropping out before the Iowa caucuses.
THE PEOPLE WHO SHAPED KAMALA HARRIS
Shyamala Gopalan
Harris' mother was the daughter of an Indian diplomat and a women's rights activist, graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen, and, in order to avoid an arranged marriage, went to the University of California at Berkeley. She was one of the prominent breast cancer researchers in the country. She died of colon cancer in 2009.
Donald Harris
Harris' father is a retired economics professor from Stanford. He originally is from Jamaica and met Gopalan at a political protest when they were both students at Berkley. The couple divorced when Harris was seven.
P.V. Gopalan
Harris' maternal grandfather. He was an Indian freedom fighter in the independence movement during the final years of British rule, and a career civil servant who became a diplomat in later life. Harris, when she was five, visited her grandfather when he was on assignment in Lusaka, Zambia. The two kept up a long correspondence and she credits him with her interest in public service.
Maya Harris
Harris' sister who works as a public policy advocate and served as chair of Harris' presidential campaign. Maya Harris also served as a policy adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, as a leader at the American Civil Liberties Union, and as a vice president at the Ford Foundation. The sisters are separated by two years – Kamala is the oldest – and spoke of their close childhood.
Meena Harris
Kamala's niece, born when Maya was 17 and had recently graduated high school. Kamala and Shyamala helped raised Meena while Maya went to college. Maya is now a mother herself, making Harris a great-aunt.
Doug Emhoff
Harris's husband who is a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. The two married at a small ceremony in Santa Barbara in 2014, after they met on a blind date a year earlier. Maya officiated. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage: Cole and Ella. Harris calls herself 'Momala,' the name she says her stepchildren gave her.
Eight months later, Mr Biden selected Ms Harris as his running mate. As he introduced her to the nation, Mr Biden reflected on what her nomination meant for 'little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities'.
'Today, just maybe, they're seeing themselves for the first time in a new way, as the stuff of presidents and vice presidents,' he said.
Once in the job, Ms Harris worked to stem migration from Central America, but her efforts did not stop the movement of people leaving their corrupt and impoverished countries to seek safety and prosperity in the US.
Nor was there much progress to be made on voting rights, another issue that was part of Ms Harris' portfolio. When Republicans limited ballot access in various states, Democrats lacked the necessary muscle in Congress to push back at the national level.
Ms Harris eventually carved out a role as the administration's most outspoken advocate for reproductive rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark case that had guaranteed abortion access nationwide.
Much of Ms Harris's work has focused on bolstering her party's coalition of women, young people and voters of colour. And in halls of power dominated by men - both in Washington and around the world - she has remained keenly aware of her status as a political pioneer.
She often repeated a line she credited to her mother: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'
Ms Harris last night vowed to 'earn and win' the Democratic presidential nomination after being endorsed by Joe Biden as his successor.
The Vice President, 59, thanked Mr Biden for his 'extraordinary leadership' and for making a 'selfless and patriotic act' by stepping aside from the race for the White House.
Ms Harris said: 'I am honoured to have the President's endorsement, and my intention is to earn and win this nomination. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party – and unite our nation – to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.
'We have 107 days until election day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.'
After revealing that he was not accepting the Democratic nomination, Mr Biden, 81, posted on X: 'My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it's been the best decision I've made.
'Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats – it's time to come together and beat Trump. Let's do this.'
Full-scale internal Democratic election processes cannot take place as Mr Biden has already been chosen as the candidate, so contenders will have to put themselves forward at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month.
If elected, Ms Harris's husband Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, would become America's first ever First Gentleman, after two and a half centuries of First Ladies. Michelle Obama, wife of former President Barack Obama, has been touted by some as a potential presidential hopeful.
Mrs Obama has given no indication she would consider seeking public office. Neither has Hollywood actor George Clooney, another fantasy pick for the role, who is a prominent fundraiser and donor to the Democratic Party.
Other Democratic contenders include Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan; California governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
US Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has Irish links but don't expect a visit - Limerick Live
Justin Kelly 24 Jul 202
US Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has Irish links but don't expect a visit
The likely Democratic candidate for the US Presidential race has ties to Ireland but may not be the type of connections she will want to embrace
Ireland has a long association with US presidents, from John F Kennedy to Obama and most recently Joe Biden who visited Louth and Mayo tracing his roots just last year.
A year is a long time in US politics especially and now Donald Trump, who owns Doonbeg hotel and golf resort in Clare, is the frontrunner for the US Presidential election and Joe Biden has dropped out with just over 100 days to go before polling.
Vice President Kamala Harris looks like being the Democratic replacement and has already held a rally in Milwaukee as she becomes her campaign to become the first female president of the US.
Obama had Offaly, Biden has Mayo and Louth, and it seems Kamala Harris has Antrim but her Irish connection is not one she will be embracing.
It has emerged that Kamala Harris has Irish roots through her dad's family. His paternal grandmother was Christiana Brown who decended from Hamilton Brown, a "slave owner" in Jamaica who had come from Antrim.
There is a potential second Irish link through her father's maternal grandmother who was called Iris Finegan but experts have found this claim hard to prove due to poor records.
It seems our link to the possible future US president are tenuous at best and given the fact one of those links is through a slave owner, Kamala Harris is unlikely to be boarding Air Force One and heading to Ireland if elected - at least not for ancestral reasons.
How Irish is Kamala Harris? US vice president’s Irish roots explained
- https://irishheritagenews.ie/how-irish-is-kamala-harris-vice-presidents-irish-roots/
- How Irish is Kamala Harris? (pic: official portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris;
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According to her father, US Vice President Kamala Harris is descended from Hamilton Brown – a prominent plantation owner and notorious slave owner in Jamaica, who was born in Co. Antrim in 1776.
As the world turns its attention to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, there is renewed interest in the vice president’s family history. Kamala Harris has formerly celebrated America’s “enduring friendship” with Ireland but is unlikely to dwell upon her genealogical connections to the country.
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Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to immigrant parents, Donald J. Harris from Jamaica and Shyamala Gopalan from India. It is not uncommon for people of Caribbean heritage to be descended from slave owners, and a few years ago, Donald J. Harris acknowledged his family’s slave-owning past in an article in Jamaica Global.
He explained that slave-owner Hamilton Brown was an ancestor of his paternal grandmother, Miss Chrishy (Christiana Brown), but he did not specify the exact nature of this familial relationship. Some sources, including a recent Irish Times article, claim that Brown is possibly Kamala Harris’ paternal great-great-great-great-grandfather but this remains unsubstantiated.
- Research by Stephen McCracken, a historian from Limavady now living near Antrim town, indicates that Brown was born just north of Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, in 1776, seemingly to a Protestant family of Ulster-Scots heritage.
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The Irish formed a significant portion of the early white population in the British colony of Jamaica. Hamilton Brown emigrated to this Caribbean Island around 1795, initially working as an estate bookkeeper before amassing extensive land holdings. He became a wealthy cattle breeder and sugar plantation owner, at various times owning, managing or serving as executor for several dozen estates in Jamaica (mostly in St Ann’s Parish), including one he named “Antrim” after the county of his birth.
- Cardiff Hall, residence and estate of John Blagrove, in St Ann’s Parish, Jamaica, c.1824 (source: “A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica” by James Hakewill (1825), via archive.org). Hamilton Brown also owned multiple plantations in St Ann’s.
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Brown was also a prolific slave owner. According to one record in the UK National Archives (Kew), Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826, comprising 74 females and 47 males.
In the Jamaican House of Assembly, Brown represented the (all-white) electorate of St Ann’s Parish for over two decades. He was a staunch opponent of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and once told a visiting Methodist minister, Henry Whitely, that his slaves, whom he claimed enjoyed “happiness and comfort”, had more advantages than the poor in England. Shortly thereafter, the same minister witnessed a man cracking a cart-whip to drive a group of slaves, including women, to ‘Work! work!’”, as well as other horrific scenes on the island’s estates.
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After the abolition of slavery, Brown received about £20,000 in compensation for the loss of several hundred slaves and sought additional compensation, amounting to several thousand pounds, which was ultimately unsuccessful. His numerous claims are documented by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.
In the latter half of the 1830s, Brown sent his ship, the James Ray, to Antrim, to collect hundreds of Irish migrants and bring them to Jamaica. He employed some of them and planted others in St Ann’s, apparently in an attempt to prevent freed slaves from acquiring the land.
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Brown also founded Brown’s Town (originally named “Hamilton Town”) in St Ann’s Parish and commissioned the construction of St Mark’s Anglican Church there. Donald J. Harris (Kamala’s father) lived in the town founded by his alleged ancestor and was baptized and confirmed as a child in St Mark’s Church.
Hamilton Brown died in 1843 after being thrown from his gig and is buried in St Mark’s; his memorial reads:
“Sacred to the memory of HAMILTON BROWN Esq. Native of the County Antrim, Ireland, who departed this life on the 18th Sept 1843 in the 68th year of his age. He was the FOUNDER OF THIS TOWN. Was 22 years one of the Representatives for this parish in the Honble. House of Assembly. His name will long be cherished.”
Interestingly, Kamala Harris’ paternal grandmother, Beryl Christie, bore the Irish surname Finegan, though it remains unclear if this signifies another possible genetic link to Ireland.
- Historian delves into US Vice-President and likely Democrat election candidate Kamala Harris ‘links’ to Antrim slave owner | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
- https://www.belfasttelegraph.
co.uk/news/politics/historian- delves-into-kamala-harris- links-to-antrim-slave-owner/ a2096875466.html 
- US Vice-President Kamala Harris
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A historian from Limavady has shed light on the apparent Co Antrim links of US Vice-President Kamala Harris as the world turns its attention to the Democratic Party’s likely election candidate.
Stephen McCracken examined her Northern Irish roots after it was discovered she has ancestry in Co Antrim through her slave-owning great-great-great-great grandfather Hamilton Brown.
Kamal's Links To Ballymoney
The Ballymoney Chronicle story this week about Kamala Harris's Irish roots in Co Antrim
The grave of Hamilton Brown in Jamaica shows that he was born in Antrim in 1776 and died in Jamaica. He was a direct ancestor of US Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris
‘An extremely bad man’: Ballymoney reacts to news of Kamala Harris’s Irish slave-owning ancestor
One woman with links to Co Antrim-born slaver Hamilton Brown says it will be a difficult history to package
At The Winsome Lady clothes shop in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, photographs of the town’s most famous sons cover an entire wall.
Among them is the 25th president of the US, William McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901. His ancestral home is close to the neighbouring village of Dervock.
Today, talk at the counter of the family-run shop on Main Street in Ballymoney turns to presumptive Democratic nominee and US vice-president Kamala Harris – and her reported local roots.
Front-page headlines in Thursday’s edition of the town’s weekly newspaper announced “Kamala’s links to Ballymoney” amid revelations she is a descendant of Hamilton Brown, a “notorious” slave owner born in Co Antrim in 1766 who emigrated to Jamaica, where he ran a sugar plantation.
The New York Post was among other papers to carry the story on the back on genealogical research placing Brown as Harris’s paternal great-great-great-great-
“Hamilton Brown won’t be going on our wall,” says Winifred Mellot, owner of The Winsome Lady, “but I’ll tell you something, if Kamala Harris has connections here, we’ll certainly celebrate her.”
This small farming town is a unionist stronghold where lamp-posts are bedecked with union flags.
“Of course, our nickname – that none of us like – was always ‘cow town’,” says Mellot, who is also president of Ballymoney’s Chamber of Commerce and champions its 2023 status as High Street of the Year.
“Because we are sandwiched between Coleraine and Ballymena, people tend to bypass us,” she says. “What put Ballymoney on the map was the motorbike riders; they’re all from here. So to have someone like Kamala linked to us ... I think it’s absolutely brilliant.”
Archive letters tracked down by Antrim historian Stephen McCracken connected Hamilton Brown to his birthplace in Bracough, a townland north of Ballymoney.
After a “bit more digging”, he says, he discovered that Brown was an “extremely bad man” who travelled to London to appeal the abolition of slavery across the British empire in 1832.
“It’s not a good story, it’s not one I wanted to tell, but you know what, we can’t change our history,” says McCracken. “The last couple of days, I’ve been getting a wee bit of abuse over it. People have been asking me why I’ve publicised it. But Kamala is making history.”
Walking down High Street on his lunchbreak, livestock dealer Malachy McKenna agrees “it’s a big story, all right”.
“I’ve never heard the name Hamilton Brown. Unless someone digs something up, you don’t hear about it, do you?” he says. “The fact he was a slave owner and Kamala Harris is the first female and first black vice-president – and could be the next president – it’s wonderful the way things come back.”
The ancestral research follows earlier research by Harris’s father, Stanford University economist Donald Harris, who wrote in 2019 that Kamala’s great-grandmother, Christiana Brown, was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, “who is on the record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town, a town in Jamaica”.
Some Ballymoney residents have no interest in the development – “Never heard tell of him,” say two women – but shoe shop manager Sharon McClelland says Harris’s genealogy will make her follow the presidential race more closely.
“It does make you curious, doesn’t it? It’s really interesting,” she says.
Alan Millar, a senior reporter with the Ballymoney Chronicle, says the paper’s front page “hasn’t caused so much of a stir as yet. I think Ballymoney people would be quite reticent to speak about this.”
For one woman who has traced her ancestry to Hamilton Brown’s sister, the revelation is “complicated”.
“When I first heard about Brown and Kamala Harris, I was intrigued because I thought I’d got a distinguished ancestor. But the more you look at Hamilton Brown, the less you like him. He was a thug, not to put too fine a point on it,” says Linde Lunney.
The retired researcher, who grew up on a Co Antrim farm and worked for the Dictionary of Irish Biography in Dublin, believes it will be a difficult history for the tourist board to “package”.
“It’s very hard to disentangle any of these stories from the slave trade without dirt getting underneath somebody’s fingers,” says Lunney.
She accepts it is a remarkable genealogy. “It’s a story rather than a celebration or a ‘welcome home, Kamala Harris’.”
“Don’t you just wonder what Hamilton Brown would have thought of his great-great-great-great-
But a DUP councillor for the area argues that the exploration of Harris’s ancestry is “not condoning” the actions of a figure like Brown.
“All our histories are not perfect so we have to take that in the round,” says Mervyn Storey. “And if Ballymoney can have part of that genealogy and history, then I think that’s something we should pursue. If Kamala Harris was to become the next president of the United States of America, I can assure you there would be an invitation going to her to come and visit Ballymoney.
“A presidential visit to Ballymoney is certainly something that we would all welcome.”
Kamala Harris ancestor links with Antrim town - Alpha Newspaper Group
Kamala Harris ancestor links with Antrim town
How Irish is Kamala Harris? (pic: official portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris; photographer: Lawrence Jackson; source: whitehouse.gov; public domain).
REVEALED: VICE-PRESIDENT-ELECT BOASTS IRISH HERITAGE AS WELL AS INCOMING PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
By Damian Mullan
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Wednesday 20 January 2021 11:19
TODAY, Wednesday, begins a new chapter in American politics as Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States of America and just the latest to boast strong family ties with Ireland.
The president-elect has spoken many times of his Irish ancestry. His great-great grandfather Patrick Blewitt was born in Ballina, county Mayo, in 1832, and left Ireland in the autumn of 1850 to settle in America.
Less well documented, however, is the reported connection with Ireland of vice-president-elect Kamala Harris, the first woman and the first black and Asian-American elevated to serve in a role a heartbeat from the presidency.
In an article which first appeared in our sister paper The Antrim Guardian, it was revealed that local historian Stephen McCracken had uncovered a link between the former senator from California and the town of Antrim.
Stephen had been researching the direct link between Randalstown and President Woodrow Wilson and between Ezekiel Vance - the saviour of Antrim during the 1798 rebellion - and President Andrew Johnston when he made an unexpected discovery.
Vice-President Elect Harris, a former Attorney General of California and District Attorney of San Francisco, is of mixed race. Her father is Jamaican and her mother is from India.
It has been reported that her four times great grandfather was a man called Hamilton Brown.
And Hamilton was born in Antrim in 1776.
According to the Senator’s father Donald Harris, a retired Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961, the Harris family descends directly from Brown, who was a 19th-century slave owner.
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown (Antrim) who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Antrim Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me)," he is reported to have said.
“The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter…”
Hamilton Brown, who died in 1843 following a carriage accident, was an Antrim born Irish sugar planter and slave owner in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica.
He represented Saint Ann Parish in the House of Assembly of Jamaica for 22 years.
A man of considerable means, he gave his name to Hamilton Town in Saint Ann Parish, now Brown’s Town.
He even named one of his sugar plantations ‘Antrim’.
He started his career in Jamaica from humble roots as an Irish emigrant book keeper but he soon realised that the plantations were the best route to personal wealth.
It was difficult, back-breaking work - but the burden was lessened considerably if the labour was carried out by slaves.
And the Antrim man had no moral objection to that. A religious man - he built the original St Mark’s Anglican Church where he worshipped - he was nevertheless unapologetic about the subjugation of others.
In later life he would argue that slaves in Jamaica were better off than the poor in England, and therefore the British Government should not interfere.
However, findings about the conditions of life for slaves in Jamaica could not have been further from the outlandish claims made by Brown and his fellow colonial settlers.
After the abolition in 1833 Hamilton recruited workers from across county Antrim. Scores of them set sail for Jamaica in one of Brown’s ships.
They eventually settled in Saint Ann Parish and worked the Brown estates.
In 1836 he brought a further 185 people from Antrim.
In 1840 he embarked on a further failed mission to try and bring more people from the ‘old country’ but his efforts were widely condemned for ‘making slaves of the migrants.'
Hamilton Brown is buried at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Brown’s Town.
The memorial to him reads: ‘Sacred to the memory of HAMILTON BROWN Esq. Native of the County Antrim, Ireland, who departed this life on the 18th Sept 1843 in the 68th year of his age. He was the FOUNDER OF THIS TOWN. Was 22 years one of the Representatives for this parish in the Honourable. House of Assembly. His name will long be cherished.'
I suppose it depends who you ask.
A few years ago when Barack Obama ran for president an article was circulated by a local Dublin paper confirming his Irish Roots.
This set in motion a tour of Ireland and having that famous pint with his relatives in rural Ireland.
Perhaps Vice President Harris will do the same and visit the award winning Castle Gardens or have a pint in any one of the public houses in Antrim!
Kamala Harris initially sought the Presidential nomination in 2018 for the 2020 race however dropped out in December 2019 after a string of fiery exchanges against Joe Biden on race related matters.
She continued to maintain a high profile, notably becoming a leading advocate for social-justice reform following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, an African American who had been in police custody.
Her star is certainly in the ascendancy - but will the question of her heritage play a role?
Respected fact checking website Snopes certainly thinks so.
While the senator’s father is an impeccable source, they have followed the paper trail to investigate his claims - and at present the file has been marked ‘unproven.'
“There is no doubt that Hamilton Brown was a prominent plantation owner in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th century, owned slaves, and also advocated against the abolition of slavery and sought to downplay the difficult working and living conditions of slaves in Jamaica,” they say.
“However, we have been unable to verify that a line of descent exists between the modern-day Harris family and the 19th-century slave owner.
“As such, the claim that an ancestor of Senator Harris owned slaves in Jamaica remains unproven. If evidence emerges that verifies that line of descent, we will update this fact check accordingly.”
They do not rule out that possibility but have warned against using the link for political gain.
“Even if it is the case that the Harris family, by way of Christiana Brown, are descendants of Hamilton Brown, those who seek to attack or undermine Senator Harris for the wrongdoing of a man who died almost 200 years ago should first gain a better understanding of the often complicated, traumatic histories of black families in the United States — and tread much more carefully,” they say.
Nevertheless, Donal Kelly of Antrim Town Tours said, if true, it would be exciting news for the town.
“I was delighted to hear about this link and it will help to highlight the fantastic history and international connections Antrim has all around the world," he claimed.
“This new discovery with Kamala Harris' ancestor coming from Antrim can only bolster our tourism offering especially in the very important US market.”
The new incumbents formally take up office on January 20.
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We can forgive Kamala Harris for not pursuing her possible family link to an odious NI slave trader
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a distinguished research scientist, once asked her daughter, now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for the US presidency.
The question was in the context of Harris’s antecedents, evenly split between Jamaica and India.
Kamala Harris: Three ways Donald Trump will try to end the honeymoon
https://www.bbc.com/news/
Anthony Zurcher
At a moment of unprecedented turbulence in modern American political history, Kamala Harris is having a remarkably smooth ride. It may not last long.
Tony Fabrizio, Donald Trump’s campaign pollster, calls it a “Harris Honeymoon” – where a combination of good press and positive energy have combined to give the Democrat a surge of momentum.
The thing about honeymoons, of course, is that they come to an end. The realities of married life, or in this case the relationship between Ms Harris and the American voting public, has a way of reasserting itself.
For now, the champagne corks are flying for team Harris and Democrats may be experiencing an unfamiliar emotion – hope. But Republicans, after initially being caught somewhat flatfooted by Mr Biden’s historic announcement, are redirecting their fire at the new presumptive nominee.
Here’s a look at three areas on which their recent attacks have focused – and some ways Democrats may try to deflect them.
1. Calling Harris a 'radical' leftist
The travails of Ms Harris’ unsuccessful campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are well documented. They include a lack of clear messaging, a campaign rife with internal discord and a candidate who was prone to awkward interviews and gaffes.
Something else happened during the then-senator’s ill-fated presidential bid, however. She – like many of the candidates in that race – tacked sharply to the left, to be more in line with Democratic primary voters.
“There was a lot of pressure on those guys from the activist base,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice-president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “When you’re competing in a primary, your political priorities are very different than the sprint to the finish in a general election.”
Over the course of 2019 – in debates and interviews - Ms Harris endorsed scrapping private health insurance for a government-run system. She praised policing reform, including redirecting law-enforcement budgets to other priorities. She endorsed decriminalising undocumented entry into the US and entertained abolishing Ice, the immigration and customs enforcement agency. She backed the sweeping Green New Deal environmental legislation and supported a ban on fracking and off-shore drilling.
Now those positions could come back to haunt her.
Harris seen at a presidential primary debate in 2019, alongside Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden
David McCormick, a Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, was quick to produce a television advertisement hitting on Ms Harris’ 2019 positions and tying them to his opponent, Democratic Senator Bob Casey.
And Trump has released a video titled "MEET SAN FRANCISCO RADICAL KAMALA HARRIS" that includes many of the policies she backed during that time.
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called it a “blueprint” for how to attack the vice-president.
“She can argue, correctly, that good leaders change their position on policy and they don’t change her principles,” Mr Bennett, the Democratic strategist, said. “None of her principles have changed.”
If she doesn’t do that convincingly, she could lose support from independent and undecided voters that will determine the outcome of the election in key swing states.
2. Tying Harris to Biden's record
Polls show the Biden campaign had been floundering for months. His immigration policies were unpopular. Even though inflation has eased and the economy is growing, voters still blamed him for higher prices. His ongoing support for Israel in the Gaza War was sapping his support among young voters.
Ms Harris, in her role as vice-president, will at least be somewhat tied to the entirety of the current administration’s record – for better or for worse.
Republicans are already trying to hang the immigration issue around her neck, labelling her as the administration’s “border czar” – an inaccurate but damaging characterisation that was also used by the media. They cite her past statements on immigration and a claim, during an interview in 2022, that the “border is secure”.
“Kamala Harris is currently only known as a failed and unpopular vice-president who knifed her boss in the back to secure a nomination she couldn’t earn, but voters are about to learn, it gets worse,” Taylor Budowich, who runs the political action committee affiliated with the Trump campaign, said in a statement touting $32m in upcoming television advertisements targeting the vice-president.
Migrant arrivals and detentions are down after historic highs earlier in Biden's term
According to Mr Bennett, Ms Harris won’t be able to fully distance herself from the Biden record, but she might be able to put it in new light for voters, even in the face of Republican attacks.
“What she can do is make this about the future in ways that were going to be very difficult for an 81-year-old guy to do,” he says. “She can argue that Trump wan#ts only to look backward.”
3. Attacking her years as a prosecutor
In the first public rally of her presidential campaign, Ms Harris unveiled a particularly pointed line of attack against the former president. Noting that she had served as a courtroom prosecutor and as California’s attorney general, she said she had faced off against “perpetrators of all kinds”.
“So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,” she concluded.
Craig Varoga, a Democratic campaign consultant and adjunct instructor at American University, calls the vice-president’s law-enforcement background her “superpower” – one that she was not fully able to use on the Democratic campaign trail in 2019, when policing reform was a top issue.
But Trump's campaign is already showing signs on how they might respond. His campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, made his bones in the Republican Party by taking on another Democratic candidate’s supposed superpower and turning it against him.
Back in 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry was touting his record as a decorated Vietnam War veteran as proof that he would be an effective commander-in-chief during the Iraq War. Mr LaCivita spearheaded a series of attack adverts questioning Mr Kerry’s patriotism and heroism, featuring sailors who served with Kerry on a Navy swift boat patrolling the rivers and shorelines in Vietnam.
It gave rise to the term “Swift-boating” – which means to disarm a candidate by attacking their perceived strength.
And it looks like Trump's campaign is gearing up for attacks on the vice-president's prosecutorial record.
On one hand, they are hitting her for being too tough – particularly on black men for drug crimes – in an attempt to undermine support from her base. On the other, they are citing instances where Ms Harris either chose not to prosecute or allowed the parole of individuals who went on to commit new crimes.
Mr Varoga concedes that Democrats botched their response to the Swift-boat attacks in 2004, but he says they’ve learned their lesson and Ms Harris will be ready for the onslaught.
“If LaCivita thinks he’s going to fool the entire Democratic establishment again, he can live with that delusion and also lose,” he said.
A race to define Harris
In his memo, Mr Fabrizio said that Ms Harris “can’t change who she is or what she’s done”. He promised that voters will soon view her as Mr Biden’s “partner and co-pilot” and learn about her “dangerously liberal record”.
The upcoming advertising onslaught, along with Trump’s public statements and rally attacks, will be the tip of this Republican spear.
Meanwhile, Ms Harris and her campaign will work to offer their own definition of who the candidate is and what she stands for.
One particularly effective way to do this, according to Mr Varoga, is with her selection of a vice-presidential running mate.
“It’s the first real decision that a candidate for president makes that’s out there for the public to see,” he said. “That will go a long way toward people understanding what kind of future she’s going to pursue.”
If she opts for a more moderate partner, it could make voters more inclined to believe that she will govern from the centre, rather than as the leftist candidate Republicans make her out to be.
In the weeks ahead, the fight to define Ms Harris – through her word, through her votes and through her past campaigns – will go a long way towards determining how the public views her when they head to the ballot box in November.
It will shape whether the honeymoon ends in heartbreak for Democrats or a union that lasts for the next four years.
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Trump teams up with Vance to try and swing Democrat-leaning state
Trump teams up with Vance to try and swing Democrat-leaning state
worldRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, rallied supporters on Saturday in a state that has not backed a Republican candidate for the White House since 1972.
The rally in St Cloud, Minnesota, was designed as a sign of the campaign’s bullishness about its prospects across the Midwest, particularly when President Joe Biden was showing signs of weakness ahead of his decision to exit the campaign.
Mr Trump, who won Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to lose them four years later, has increasingly focused on Minnesota as a state where he would like to put Democrats on defence.
The rally is a gamble, potentially forcing the likely Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Democrats to devote resources in a state they would likely otherwise ignore.
But it could also be risky for Mr Trump to spend time in places that might prove to be a reach with Ms Harris leading the ticket when he could otherwise focus on maintaining his support in more traditional battlegrounds.
Mr Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half to cheering crowds holding signs supporting police and calling for the deportation of migrants in the country illegally. He continued a pattern of escalating attacks against Ms Harris on immigration and crime.
He called her a “crazy liberal” and accused her of wanting to “defund the police”, while he said, by contrast, he wants to “overfund the police”.
“She has no clue; she’s evil,” Mr Trump said, suggesting Ms Harris had failed at her tasks related to the border as vice president.
“Kamala Harris’ deadly destruction of America’s borders is completely and totally disqualifying for her to be president.”
Mr Trump called out Ms Harris for a 2020 post she made after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a campaign event
The post encouraged people to help protesters by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which had been working on reforming the bail system and posted criminal bail for people as part of a campaign to address inequities in the system.
Though Ms Harris did not contribute to the fund herself, her tweet was among celebrities and high-profile people who helped donations flow into the cash-strapped non-profit, helping it quickly raise 34 million dollars.
In the immediate aftermath of the protests and unrest, the group actually spent little bailing out protesters.
Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, called Mr Trump’s attack line “a desperate lie from a desperate campaign” that cannot change the fact that its candidate has been convicted of multiple felonies.
Mr Trump also knocked the vice president as an “absolute radical” on abortion, seemingly sensing an opening to attack her on the issue after she has become the Biden administration’s most vocal proponent of abortion rights.
Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance
He wrongly suggested Ms Harris wants abortion “right up until birth and after birth”. Infanticide is criminalised in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.
Yet the former president also recycled much of his past material targeting Mr Biden, showing how his campaign has sought to keep the incumbent president’s pitfalls fresh in voters’ minds even after Mr Biden has ended his candidacy and endorsed Ms Harris.
Mr Trump’s remarks followed a spirited speech from Mr Vance, in which he leaned heavily into issues that animate the Republican base, particularly security at the US-Mexico border and crime.
He also took a broadside against the news media, arguing that journalists were comparing the first black woman and person of South Asian descent to lead a major party ticket to Martin Luther King Jr.
In May, Mr Trump headlined a Republican fundraiser in St Paul, where he boasted he could win the state and made explicit appeals to the iron-mining range in northeast Minnesota, where he hopes a heavy population of blue-collar and union workers will shift to Republicans after years of being solidly Democratic.
Appealing to that population has also helped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz land on the list of about a dozen Democrats potentially being vetted to be Ms Harris’ running mate.
Mr Walz posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, poking fun at Mr Trump’s visit to his state.
“Donald Trump is coming back to the State of Hockey tomorrow for the hat trick,” Mr Walz wrote. “He lost Minnesota in ’16, ’20, and he’ll lose it again in ’24.”
Saturday’s rally occurred at the Herb Brooks National Hockey Centre, a 5,159-seat hockey arena.
Donald Trump is coming back to the State of Hockey tomorrow for the hat trick. He lost Minnesota in ‘16, ‘20, and he’ll lose it again in ‘24. https://t.co/0QAcscrbyB
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) July 27, 2024
After surviving the July 13 assassination attempt on him at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Mr Trump has only had events at indoor venues.
But in a post on his social media network, he said he would schedule outdoor stops, claiming the Secret Service had agreed to “substantially step up” its operations.
Secret Service officials would not say whether the agency had agreed to expand operations at Mr Trump’s campaign events or had any concerns about him potentially resuming outdoor gatherings.
“Ensuring the safety and security of our protectees is our highest priority,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.
“In the interest of maintaining operational integrity, we are not able to comment on specifics of our protective means or methods.”
Earlier on Saturday, Mr Trump spoke at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, laying out a plan to embrace cryptocurrency if elected and promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower”.
Mr Trump has not always supported cryptocurrency but recently changed his attitude toward digital tokens.
Also on Saturday, Ms Harris ramped up her campaign for president with her first fundraiser since becoming the Democrats’ likely White House nominee.
The event in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was expected to raise more than 1.4 million dollars, her campaign announced, from an audience of hundreds at the Colonial Theatre.
Venezuela election could see seismic shift or give Nicolas Maduro six more years
BY REGINA GARCIA CANO, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro attend a campaign rally in the Catia neighbourhood of Caracas (Matias Delacroix/AP)
The people of Venezuela are voting in a presidential election the outcome of which will either lead to a seismic shift in politics or extend by another six years the policies that caused the world’s worst peacetime economic collapse.
Whether it is President Nicolas Maduro who is chosen, or his main opponent, retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez, the election will have ripple effects throughout the Americas.
Government opponents and supporters alike have signalled their interest in joining the exodus of 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already left their homes for opportunities abroad should Mr Maduro win another term.
Polls open at 6am local time and the number of eligible voters is estimated to be around 17 million.
Authorities set Sunday’s election to coincide with what would have been the 70th birthday of former President Hugo Chavez, the revered leftist firebrand who died of cancer in 2013, leaving his Bolivarian revolution in the hands of Mr Maduro.
But Mr Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela are more unpopular than ever among many voters who blame his policies for crushing wages, spurring hunger, crippling the oil industry and separating families due to migration.
The 61-year-old is facing off against an opposition that has managed to line up behind a single candidate after years of intraparty divisions and election boycotts that torpedoed their ambitions to topple the ruling party.
Mr Gonzalez, 74, is representing a coalition of opposition parties after being selected in April as a last-minute stand-in for opposition powerhouse Maria Corina Machado, who was blocked by the Maduro-controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice from running for any office for 15 years.
Ms Machado, a former politician, swept the opposition’s October primary with more than 90% of the vote. After she was blocked from joining the presidential race, she chose a college professor as her substitute on the ballot, but the National Electoral Council also barred her from registering. That is when Mr Gonzalez, a political newcomer, was chosen.
Presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado greet supporters at a campaign rally in Barinas (Ariana Cubillos/AP)
Sunday’s ballot also features eight other candidates challenging Mr Maduro, but only Mr Gonzalez threatens his rule.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy. But it went into freefall after Mr Maduro took the helm. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led first to social unrest and then mass emigration.
Sanctions from US president Donald Trump’s administration seeking to force Mr Maduro from power after his 2018 re-election – which the US and dozens of other countries condemned as illegitimate – only deepened the crisis.
In recent days, Mr Maduro has crisscrossed Venezuela, inaugurating hospital wards and highways and visiting rural areas where he had not set foot in years. His pitch to voters is one of economic security, which he underlines with stories of entrepreneurship and references to a stable currency exchange and lower inflation rates.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a meeting with international observers in Caracas (Matias Delacroix/AP)
The capital, Caracas, saw an increase in commercial activity after the pandemic, bolstering an economy the International Monetary Fund forecasts will grow 4% this year – one of the fastest in Latin America – after having shrunk 71% from 2012 to 2020.
“They tried to subjugate our people,” Mr Maduro said of the US during his closing rally in Caracas on Thursday, “but today we are standing tall and ready for victory on the 28th of July”.
But most Venezuelans have not seen any improvement in their quality of life. Many earn less than 200 US dollars (£155) a month, which means families struggle to afford essential items. Some work second and third jobs. A basket of basic staples – sufficient to feed of family of four for a month – costs an estimated 385 dollars (£300).
The opposition has tried to seize on the huge inequities arising from the crisis, during which Venezuelans abandoned their country’s currency, the bolivar, for the US dollar.
Mr Gonzalez and Mr Machado focused much of their campaigning on Venezuela’s vast hinterland, where the economic activity seen in Caracas in recent years failed to materialise. They promised a government that would create sufficient jobs to attract Venezuelans living abroad to return home and reunite with their families.
An April poll by Caracas-based Delphos said about a quarter of Venezuelans were thinking about emigrating if Mr Maduro wins on Sunday. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
A man dressed as an Independence fighter attends a campaign event with opposition presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez in Caracas (Ariana Cubillos/AP)
Most Venezuelans who migrated over the past 11 years settled in Latin America and the Caribbean. In recent years, many began setting their sights on the US.
Both campaigns have distinguished themselves not only for the political movements they represent but also on how they have addressed voters’ hopes and fears.
Mr Maduro’s campaign rallies featured lively electronic merengue dancing as well as speeches attacking his opponents. But after he attracted criticism from leftist allies such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for a comment about a “bloodbath” should he lose, Mr Maduro recoiled.
His son told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the ruling party would peacefully hand over the presidency if it loses – a rare admission of vulnerability out of step with the Maduro campaign’s triumphalist tone.
In contrast, the rallies of Mr Gonzalez and Ms Machado prompted people to cry and chant “Freedom! Freedom!” as the pair passed by.
People handed the devout Catholics rosaries, walked along highways and went through military checkpoints to reach their events. Others video-called their relatives who have migrated to let them catch a glimpse of the candidates.
During a rally in mid-May, Mr Gonzalez asked supporters to imagine “a country in which our airports and borders would be filled with our children returning home”.
TOPICS
- POLITICS, ELECTION, ECONOMY, EMIGRATION,
- NICOLAS MADURO, VENEZUELA, EDMUNDO GONZALEZ,
- MARIA CORINA MACHADO, UNITED SOCIALIST PARTY
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‘Extraordinary’ Neighbours actress Janet Andrewartha dies aged 72
https://www.breakingnews.ie/entertainment/extraordinary-neighbours-actress-janet-andrewartha-dies-aged-72-1655067.html
BY CHARLOTTE MCLAUGHLIN, PA SENIOR ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
Neighbours actress Janet Andrewartha has died at the age of 72, the long-running Australian soap has announced.
The actress played hairdresser Lyn Scully, who was the mother of Stephanie (Carla Bonner), Felicity (Holly Valance), and Michelle (Kate Keltie), and was married to Joe (Shane Connor), for around 20 years from 1999.
The Neighbours official account on Instagram said: “Everyone at Neighbours is deeply saddened by the passing of Janet Andrewartha.
“Beloved by viewers for her role as Ramsay Street’s Lyn Scully, Janet will be remembered for her wide body of work, which includes her memorable turn as Reb Keane in Prisoner.”
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Everyone at Neighbours is deeply saddened by the passing of Janet Andrewartha. Beloved by viewers for her role as Ramsay Street’s Lyn Scully, Janet will be remembered for her wide body of work, which includes her memorable turn as Reb Keane in Prisoner: Cell Block H. Janet had many friendships at Neighbours and one of her most enduring bonds was with Jackie Woodburne, who shared the following words: “Janet was one of the finest actors of her generation, but more than that, she was an extraordinary woman. Passionate, political, curious, delightfully eccentric, generous and fun. To me she was a steadfast friend for over 45 years. I will miss her every day.” Our thoughts are with Janet’s family and loved ones at this time.
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‘Extraordinary’ Neighbours actress Janet Andrewartha dies aged 72
12 killed by mudslide in China amid heavy rain from tropical storm Gaemi
Trump teams up with Vance to try and swing Democrat-leaning state
