MAGA Republicans are subjecting Vice President Kamala Harris to a barrage of racist and sexist attacks as she has stormed out in front as the likely 2024 nominee in the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race.
In just the past 48 hours, Harris has been targeted by resurgent “birthers” who claim she’s not a natural-born citizen and by Trumpy Bible-thumpers who claim she’s a biblical “Jezebel” — a reference to a temptress who misled the faithful into idolatry and sexual depravity. GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said that “100 percent, she was a DEI hire” insisting of Biden’s choice of Harris: “When you go down that route, you get mediocrity.”
The attacks from the far right are as predictable as they are distasteful — reflecting a “based” far-right culture that sees unvarnished expressions of bigotry as a virtue. The attacks center on Harris’ race and gender, and frequently include the claim, as Burchett did, that she is a “DEI” candidate. While technically shorthand for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” DEI has taken on the function of a coded slur that right wingers can now hurl at minorities. (As the journalist Eric Kleefeld puts it: “DEI is pronounced with a hard-R sound.”) While primarily wielded against people of color, it’s also used to attack women and LGBTQ Americans.
Republicans began tripping over themselves to promote racist tropes about Harris as soon as Biden withdrew.
Trump White House veteran Kellyanne Connway blasted Harris on Fox News as lazy (“doesn’t work hard”) and inarticulate (“she does not speak well”). Wyoming GOP Rep. Harriet Hageman claimed Harris is “intellectually … the bottom of the barrel,” while also insisting she was chosen for vice president as a “DEI hire.” Other Republicans have claimed Democrats would rather rally around another standard bearer, but are supposedly saddled with Harris out of demographic obligation: “A lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), “because of her ethnic background.”
In truth, the attacks on Harris began soon after Biden’s debate faceplant jump-started public debate about his fitness for reelection. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration deputy who remains a star in the MAGA orbit, went back to the 1950s with his appraisal of Harris, referring to her with a word that would have been posted on segregated facilities in the Deep South: “She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored. Therefore, she’s got to be good.”
Other attacks have centered on the vice president’s sexuality, with some on the right picking over Harris’ well-documented romantic relationship in the mid-1990s with Willie Brown, the far-older, larger-than-life California machine politician, or the fact that she once dated the famous talk-show host Montel Williams.
Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of Pastors for Trump and a former GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma posted on July 3 on X that “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go.” He responded to critics of his sexist attack with rejoinders like: “The biblical term is whore if you feel safer with that word,” adding that “harlot is also another option haha.”
The Murdoch-owned New York Post dressed up its DEI broadside at Harris in the form of a business column. The author of the book Go Woke, Go Broke, Charles Gasparinio, wrote under the screamer headline: “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”
Gasparino, whose bio reportedly used to falsely claim that he was a Pulitzer nominee, also took aim at the VP’s intelligence. He called Harris — the Howard University and U.C. Hastings Law graduate, former San Francisco DA, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator, and current vice president — “the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America,” and claimed her rise to the nomination would only come because the “Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold.”
More recently, Lance Wallnau — a Christian nationalist who is tight with the MAGA movement — jumbled up both race and sexuality to blast Harris for embodying “the spirit of Jezebel” — a jab that members of the religious right have long used against female Democratic politicians. But Wallnau warned that Harris will be “even more ominous than Hillary” Clinton, because, he said: “she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” For his part, Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance is laughing off — or perhaps laughing at — what he paints as Democratic oversensitivity to the bigoted behavior of the right.
“Democrats say it’s racist to believe … well they say it’s racist to do anything,” Vance said at a rally in his hometown suburb of Middletown, Ohio, on Monday. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist too.”
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