Sometimes “What if?” questions are merely counterfactual academic exercises. Sometimes, however, they are existential conundrums. The question, “What if Kamala Harris wins the 2024 presidential election?” belongs firmly in the latter category. As I have noted elsewhere, I believe Donald Trump will not only win, but win resoundingly. All the same, the huge influx of illegal immigrants, strategically managed by Biden and Harris to be maximally advantageous, combined with the disastrous state of our voter rolls, might mean even if Trump wins, he doesn’t end up in the Oval Office. So: what if?

Imagine you are a mini-Rip Van Winkle. You sink into a deep slumber on November 4 and do not awaken until, say, December 2026. You won’t have missed the original American Revolution, as the first Rip did. But you will have missed another revolution that undid many aspects of the first. You won’t be subservient to a foreign king in far-away England. You will now be utterly subservient to a tiny, home-breed oligarchy. Will it quarter its troops—otherwise known as illegal immigrants—in your homes? Maybe. In fact, some Democratic politicians have suggested just that. And of course, dropping thousands of foreign criminals into your small town, a notorious practice that has become increasingly popular under the Biden-Harris Administration, has pretty much the same effect.

Expect such community-destroying expedients to multiply if Harris wins. Here are few other features of the new Kamalist dispensation you will discover as you shake off the cobwebs of your long slumber.

First, you will discover that there are no longer any any swing states in America. As Elon Musk observed, the Democrats will declare illegal migrants legal voters by fiat, thus transforming America into a one-party state. What Gavin Newsom just did in California, banning local checks on voter ID, will be nationalized. No voter ID, no meaningful elections.

And speaking of Elon Musk, X will be regulated into oblivion—or, if not into oblivion, then at least into a reliable adjunct of the propaganda press now replicating the Democratic narrative. Remember, John Kerry, speaking recently from the World Economic Forum, said that the First Amendment was the great “block” in the battle against “disinformation.” If the Democrats win, he said, they can “change,” that is, gut, the First Amendment.

In a similar vein, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly called for greater supervision—that is, censorship—of social media. People who spread “disinformation,” she said, should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.” Forget about the fact that she actually paid for “opposition research” against Donald Trump and then assiduously spread the gigantic disinformation of the Russia Collusion hoax in order to discredit him. In one revealing comment, Clinton acknowledged that the real threat of platforms like X under Elon Musk was that “we”—that is, people who agree with Hillary Clinton—“lose total control.” We can’t have that, now.

Back in 2019, Harris herself evinced a similar sentiment. Donald Trump, she said, had lost the “privileges” of free speech. No one was there to explain the difference between a “privilege” and a constitutional right to the vice president. Clearly, the distinction does not signify under the new dispensation. Robert Reich, the first secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, recently took to the pages of the reliably left-wing English paper The Guardian to tell the world that “Elon Musk is out of control. Here is how to rein him in.” What was Musk’s tort? It was twofold. First, he allowed people to speak their minds on X, even if what they said ran counter to the prevailing elite narrative. Second, he himself said things with which those sentries disagreed.

In short, Elon Musk was at fault because the opinions he and others expressed were influencing people. “They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people,” Harris said in an interview, “without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Just who would be on hand to provide the requisite “oversight or regulation”? You guessed it: Harris, Walz, & Co. “We will direct Law Enforcement to counter this extremism,” said Harris. “We will hold Social Media Platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms…because they have a responsibility to our Democracy.” As I have been fond of pointing out, the phrase “our democracy” has come to mean “their oligarchy.” If you are now fully awake, you will know that the old-time liberal Jonathan Turley was right: “A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech.”

In addition to saying farewell to free speech, if Harris-Walz should win we can also say sayonara to the filibuster. To understand why that procedural change is a big deal, step back and consider what its disappearance would license. In one interview, Harris explained, “I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom.” Former Democrat Joe Manchin refused to endorse Harris in part because of her opposition to the filibuster. “She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy,” the West Virginia Senator said. “It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”

Getting rid of the filibuster will not only affect Harris’s efforts to rubber-stamp the wholesale slaughter of unborn infants. It is also a preliminary maneuver designed to smooth the way to packing the Supreme Court, which has been such a thorn in the side of Democrats in recent years. Expanding the Supreme Court by adding “progressive” justices will probably be a step on the way to instituting some sort of term limits to the position, based on age, possibly, or length of service.

Lost Forever

As your head clears from your long sleep you will notice many other changes. A nationwide electric car mandate has been promulgated and is being enforced. But because Harris has also instituted a ban on fracking and coal, there is not enough power to charge all the cars and trucks. So another item on the Democratic wish list—the suppression of private car ownership (except for the nomenklatura)—is starting to make headway. Car sales have already plummeted as more and more people queue up for the bus or autonomous vehicle car-pooling.

There are other quotidian inconveniences. Gas stoves are said to be a source of pollution, which is said to be a source of “climate change.” So that old Viking stove in your kitchen is now subject to a $5,000-a-year tax, soon to be elevated to $7,500.

Stumbling groggily through the streets of this new America, you discover that the Catholic Church has continued its transformation from a Bible-based religion into a sort of social club. Some are already sponsoring abortion clinics in their basements even as the church hierarchy ponders how to avoid the threatened loss of their tax-exempt status if church teaching does not explicitly embrace polyamory, transsexual marriages, and female priests—a title that is increasingly being replaced by the word “shaman” (or in especially advanced parishes, “shemen”).

Since innovation requires competition and competition results in losers as well as winners, innovation is now strictly regulated. Elon Musk’s SpaceX transformed the space industry and, by 2024, was launching the majority of space missions at a fraction of the cost NASA could manage. But Musk, who is now serving a long prison term, did not hire refugees and asylum seekers, so he was sued by the DOJ. Soon after Harris took office, SpaceX was nationalized. After a massive DEI initiative, the company’s payroll (I won’t say “workforce”) now boasts more than 20% black, refugee, or transexual employees. Some critics grumble privately that this victory for diversity has come at the cost of ending any actual space launches. A company spokesman noted that one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, and besides, social progress often entails a reformulation of business goals. Just because SpaceX has not launched any rockets in the past year does not mean that it is not committed to sending the first African American LGBTQ+ astronaut to Mars.

As your eyes clear and you make your way around your old neighborhood, you are surprised at what changes have occurred. Your neighborhood used to be a quiet middle-class backwater. Now it is home to several Section 8 housing projects. Parents no longer let their children out to play unsupervised. Drugs and other badges of social pathology—which we are encouraged to call “markers of diversity”—are everywhere.

Back before Harris-Walz won, you would hear many conservatives complain about our “two-tier” system of justice and the “weaponization” of the DOJ and FBI. One of the first things you do after emerging from your long sleep is to try to catch up on the news. Everything seems to be wonderful. Talk of joy is everywhere. You try to check on some of your favorite news sites. Many have been shuttered. Those that remain have adopted a new, uniformly upbeat editorial line. There was a record harvest last year. Unemployment is unheard of. The country seems to be at war in several distant locations, but the details are sparse. There are rumors of food shortages and social unrest, but they are ignored or denied by the always-on screens you see everywhere. There is no talk of a two-tier justice system anymore, but you remember an old poem by the 16th-century English courtier John Harington: “Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason? / for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

What if Kamala Harris wins in 2024? Her victory will also be the victory of what people used to call “the administrative state,” “the deep state.” You will no longer hear such terms, partly because talking about the new political apparatus that governs us is dangerous, partly because the ultimate victory of the administration state will make any criticism impotent. Just as in the Soviet Union after the consolidation of Bolshevik power, all opposition to the regime will be criminalized. As a precaution, free speech will be rebaptized as “potential disinformation.” Not just the First Amendment but the Constitution as a whole will be retired as an “undemocratic,” otiose holdover from a bygone era of racist privilege and patriarchal tyranny. Elections will still be held, but they will be transformed into festivals of affirmation. Voters will no longer make a choice: they will simply, but with mandatory cheer, certify the status quo.

The codicil to the question “What if Kamala Harris wins?” is “What should the Right’s response to such a scenario be?” In two words: prevent it. If it happens, there can be no response, just ineffectual grumbling. Some timid souls will talk about the dignity of losing with grace or of fighting nobly as an opposition party. But such people are deluded. There would be no opposition, not really. John Adams, who would certainly be on Harris’s list of proscribed authors (assuming she knew who he was), understood exactly what was at stake. In a letter to his wife in 1775, he noted that while besieged “Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property…a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.” That is the voice of wisdom. Bear it in mind.