Harry Sisson, the downy-faced youth who made a name for himself telling young voters that Biden was a wonderful, brilliant man and that Kamala was even more wonderful and brilliant, has been accused of being a sex predator who enticed multiple women to send him nude pictures of themselves. Sisson’s story reminds us how little we know about the people who emerge suddenly as thought leaders and politicians. In our disconnected world, filled with broken communities, we are ripe for exploitation by “Manchurian candidates.”

The Manchurian Candidate was a noirish 1962 Cold War thriller that had the communist Chinese and the Soviets come up with a fiendish plot to destroy America: They captured American soldiers to become unwitting assassins. Eventually, some of the brainwashed soldiers break through the mass hypnosis to get to the truth in time to deal with a plot to kill a presidential candidate.

Since the movie’s debut, the phrase “Manchurian candidate” has come to refer to a political figure that the public believes they know, without realizing that the candidate is a phony, a living, breathing Potemkin village behind which an ugly truth lies.

Harry Sisson, if the charges against him are true, is a “Manchurian influencer.” Beardless, perky, and oh-so-wholesome looking, Sisson spent the 2024 campaign assuring social media users that Biden was the man and, when Biden dropped out, that Kamala was the woman. Here’s just one example of Sisson’s work during the campaign—and when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all:

He's Beaver Cleaver all grown up and turned into a Democrat activist.

Except maybe he’s not unless Beaver Cleaver also allegedly solicited naked pictures from women and then verbally abused them after the fact. Yup, that’s the claim against Sisson. A lot of women are making the same charge, and they seem to have the screen grabs to prove their case. I won’t clog this post with all the videos and screen grabs because they’re not really the point, but you can see them here. Nothing alleged against Sisson is illegal, but all of the claims, if true, reveal a sordid, manipulative man utterly unlike his wholesome persona.

The Harry Sisson story crossed my computer screen at the same time that I received an email from a friend noting how impossible it is to tell who our political candidates really are today. And that followed on the heels of Governor Ron DeSantis warning about Democrats affixing an “R” to their political identity just to win Florida elections. In other words, dozens of real “Manchurian candidates.”

And of course, from 2008-2016 and again from 2020-2024, America experienced the ultimate Manchurian candidate—Barack Obama, who held power as both president and puppet master. To this day, we still know almost nothing about Obama’s years at Occidental College and Columbia University. We do know that he ran on one platform (a moderate uniter) and governed on another (a radical race hustler).

In the old days, one of the bulwarks against the “Manchurians,” as I think of them, was that people came from actual communities, not leftist communist organized communities. Sure, people in those days also had their nasty little secrets, but their neighbors and co-workers still had a pretty good fix on who they were and what their values were.

Now, though, people explode on the internet, and we discover only later that they got funding from hidden billionaires and leftist societies that we taxpayers inadvertently enriched. We voters really don’t know who they are or what values they bring to the table, whether as “influencers” or candidates.

The notable exception has always been Donald Trump. In 2016, when Trump looked at the landscape and promised to make America great again, voters knew exactly who he was, for he’d been ubiquitous for forty years. Sure, he was a womanizer (although wise voters understood that the whole “grab ‘em”  charge was a fraudulent narrative) and that he’d been a Democrat, but Trump has been open about everything in his life—and he’s succeeded at everything, even if he had to be tough and take hard losses to do so. By 2024, voters knew Trump even better and voted for him in greater numbers than before. He is the “anti-Manchurian.”

Now that I’ve commented on a modern phenomenon, I really don’t have a solution to offer other than to be on guard against candidates who appear out of nowhere, even if they seem conservative. Don’t trust, but do verify everything you can about a candidate. Most of us may no longer live in small towns and neighborhoods anymore, where there’s first-hand knowledge and collective memory, but the internet never forgets.

Image: X screen grab.