(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Vice President Kamala Harris has recently used rhetoric reminiscent of Karl Marx, the author of The Communist Manifesto, in her attempts to define “equity.”
A video compilation shared by the conservative page End Wokeness on Friday showed Harris discussing the concepts of “equitable distribution” and “everybody ends up in the same place.”
These remarks came as Harris explained the difference between “equality” and “equity” and why the latter is needed in public policy.
“It has to be about a goal saying, ‘Everybody should end up in the same place.’ And since we didn’t start in the same place, some folks might need more. Equitable distribution,” Harris said in an undated video.
In a C-SPAN video, she added, “Equality suggests often, ‘Everybody should get the same thing.’ Well, that often assumes everybody started out in the same place. As opposed to equity, which is everyone should end up in the same place.”
In response, End Wokeness labeled Harris’s words as “communism,” echoing long-standing beliefs that talk of equity often has communistic undertones.
Rob Jenkins, an author and professor at Georgia State University, described equity as “Marxist redistributionism writ large” in a 2023 opinion piece for Campus Reform.
Marx, Jenkins wrote, sought to “to tear down every long-standing system and replace it with something that, in his view, would be more just. We know how that worked out.”
Dr. Bradley Gitz, a professor at Lyon College and columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, echoed Jenkins’s sentiments in a 2021 column.
Equity is “now being used to deceptively market the new Marxism and which has been made the centerpiece of the Biden administration agenda,” he wrote.
“In the traditional Marxist approach, inequalities were unjust consequences of the private ownership of property that defined capitalism; in the new Marxist approach, racial disparities are the unjust consequences of racism and the broader system of white supremacy,” Dr. Gitz added.
Weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, then-candidate Joe Biden had to defend his policies amid worries they resembled Marxist-inspired ideas.
“Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist,” Biden said at the time.
He ultimately chose Harris, then a U.S. senator from California who had run for the Democratic nomination to the left of Biden.
ECONOMY: President Biden this week said, "I'm a capitalist. I'm a good friend of Bernie's but we disagree. I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist." pic.twitter.com/fV0sHhJ4wR
— Forbes (@Forbes) December 12, 2021
