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Far-right communities online are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris after speculation that she may replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in the US election.
But rather than focusing on her policies, experience, or ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have focused instead on her sex life, her race, and rethreading old conspiracies about her eligibility to be president.
These attacks have been spurred on by former President Donald Trump. “He just quit, you know—he’s quitting the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the Daily Beast last week and subsequently posted by Trump to his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump adds. “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s so fucking bad.”
On July 4, Trump posted about Harris on Truth Social. “She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician!” he wrote. “Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Trump’s comments referenced Harris’ relationship with Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, in the mid-1990s. Though right-wing critics have accused her of having an affair with Brown because he was married at the time, a Reuters fact check from 2020 outlines how Brown had been separated from his wife for a decade before he began dating Harris.
The White House pushed back against Trump’s attacks. “I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing,” Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected like any other vice president before her who was in that room. It is appalling that, I’m going to be careful here, that a former president is saying that about a current vice president. And we should call that out—it is not OK.”
But after Trump’s comments, the former president's supporters and far-right figures quickly began to attack Harris.
Harris has served in elected office for decades as a district attorney, state attorney general, senator, and vice president. Still, the vast majority of the attacks were both racist and sexist, and made some reference to her performing sexual acts and insinuating that they had to do with her success.
“Kamala is just as brain dead as Biden,” far-right troll Laura Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “She pretends to be black, she has a documented history of giving blowjobs to Willie Brown to climb the ladder, and she’s obsessed with killing babies.”
“Willi Brown's F–k toy makes good,” one member of the extremist message board The Donald wrote in response to a post about her possibly replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Far-right posters also suggested that her race has played a major role in her success.
“This is why DEI is particularly dangerous: idiots like her are lifted up above far smarter people so she starts to believe she’s the smartest one in the room,” a member of The Donald wrote last week.
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“She’s dumb, brown, and will do ANYTHING for power,” one member of The Donald wrote. “Like a retarded brown Hillary.” Another added: “Reminder she is like 20% black. Any darkness she has is from her Indian mother, her father is a mulatto Jamaican.” A user on Gab, the social network popular with white supremacists, wrote: “Is she black. Is she Indian. Who knows! That's just part of the fun.”
These discussions were not limited to fringe online message boards. On the Fox News show Outnumbered, host Julie Banderas said that her daughters “speak more eloquently” than Harris before adding: “I’m sorry, just being a minority does not make you fit for president.”
On Saturday, the New York Post ran an op-ed entitled: “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”
Harris was born in the US and she is eligible to be president. Despite this, some members of extremist Telegram channels were sharing a website dedicated to claiming Harris was ineligible. “She is not a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN,” one Telegram user wrote. Questions and conspiracies about Harris’ parents’ heritage have proliferated online as well, in a similar vein to the untrue birther conspiracy that plagued former President Barack Obama for years.
Donald Harris, Kamala Harris’ father, was born in Jamaica before moving to the US where he worked as an economist and professor at Stanford University before retiring. Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India. When she moved to the US, she worked as a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The conspiracy still took hold on X over the weekend, with multiple posts from blue check accounts racking up hundreds of thousands of views that claimed Harris was an “anchor baby” as her parents were not US citizens at the time of her birth and she was, therefore, ineligible to be president. Most of these posts did not have attached Community Notes to inform viewers that the claims were inaccurate.
The conspiracies and lies about Harris were not limited to US extremists, however. On the website of the state-backed Press TV in Iran, one article covering the possibility of Harris becoming president claimed: “Kamala Harris will become president if Biden is removed but she is incompetent and suspected inebriate, and known for her ‘word salads,’ that is, inability to construct a cogent sentence—probably due to the suspected alcoholism.”
