Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a Democratic National Committee holiday reception last night: “We cannot let any circumstance or situation or individual ever take away our power.”

Hmmm. Sounds a little insurrection-y, doesn’t it?

As discussed on the Hugh Hewitt program this morning, Harris had a tough job, giving a room full of DNC donors, staffers, and volunteers a chin-up or rah-rah speech after an election cycle where she lost the presidential election, Democrats lost four seats in the U.S. Senate, the GOP held the House, and Democrats lost control of two more state legislative chambers.

(It’s been widely claimed that Harris did not perform better than Joe Biden in 2020 in any county, and that’s not quite true. It stems from an Election Night CNN segment finding that Harris had not performed better than Biden in any state; at the county level, Harris performed 3 percent or better than Biden’s share of the vote in 2020 in 58 counties. For perspective, the U.S. has 3,144 counties. So it’s still a terrible performance, just not quite as god awful as the widely-cited claim makes it sound.)

Anyway, here’s the context of Harris’ pep talk:

Hear me when I say this, that spirit that fuels the countless hours and days and months of work that you have put into this, that spirit can never be defeated. Our spirit is not defeated. We are not defeated. Let’s be clear about that. We are strong. We are clear about why we are in this. And because you’re here right. Now I say again, thank you. Because not only are you clear about all of that, you’re willing to put in the hard work and that work must continue. We cannot let any circumstance or situation or individual will ever take away our power to know why we do what we do and our ability to then get that work done, and especially because we know what we stand for and that’s why we know what to fight for. We here believe in the promise of America. We believe in the promise of freedom, of justice, of opportunity and dignity, not just for some, but for all. We know that, fighting for the promise of America takes hard work. Now, you all can help me finish this. Many of you heard me say it, but we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful. Work. And in the new year, we will continue our work with hope.

Harris is arguing that in some important ways, Democrats were not defeated.

But in just about all of the more important ways, they were.