Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party 2020 presidential nominee, announced yesterday that Kamala Harris would be his running mate in his election campaign against President Donald Trump. GOP-aligned political and media personalities immediately attacked Harris, laughably claiming that she is a radical extremist, questioning her ethnicity, and portraying her as “evil.”
American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp declared his long-term plan to smear any opponent of Trump as a socialist had begun.
“The battle lines and are settled. It’s America v Socialism,” Schlapp wrote. “Game on.”
Schlapp is the spouse of Trump campaign official Mercedes Schlapp.
Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk asserted that Harris was chosen by Biden because Democrats chose the vice presidential candidate “solely on the color of their skin.” In at tweet, he also called Harris one of the “most unpopular, callous, Marxists in the country.”
Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro claimed Harris was “radical” and selected to appease liberals on Twitter.
“Kamala Harris is a far-left radical with a shocking inability to connect on a personal level; she’s rehearsed and mechanical,” Shapiro wrote. “Her record is wide-open to serious attack. She adds nothing to the Biden ticket other than checking some boxes for the Twitter blue checks.”
Joshua Lawson at The Federalist wrote that if Biden and Harris make it to the White House, Harris will “pose a genuine threat to the values that built the United States of America.” Lawson wrote that Harris is the “functional leftist leader” of the Democratic Party’s “creeping extremism.”
Right-wing talker Mark Levin, who is white, ranted about Harris’ ethnicity, unprompted.
Mark Levin kicked off his show tonight by ranting unprompted about Kamala Harris’ ethnicity. pic.twitter.com/w4Z2aLX9Yj
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) August 12, 2020
“Kamala Harris is not an African-American. She is Indian and Jamaican. Jamaica is part of the Caribbean. India is out there near China,” Levin said. “I only point that out because if you dare raise that you’re attacked. But the truth is, she’s not.”
Dinesh D’Souza also questioned Harris’ ethnicity and used it to attack her on the issue of reparations for slavery. Harris has not said she supports reparations; she has acknowledged the issue, expressed the need to study the issue, and suggested that funding for mental health treatment African Americans experiencing inter-generational trauma due to systemic racism and their ancestors’ experience of slavery as one possible aspect of a reparations effort.
“I’m not saying Kamala Harris is to blame for her slaveowner heritage. But by the same logic whites descended from slaveowners aren’t to blame either. So why are we talking about reparations?” D’Souza said. “If whites enjoy the present effects of past exploitation, so does Harris. Make her pay!”
Mike Cernovich, known for pushing the dangerous Pizzagate conspiracy theory, wrote that Harris was “evil” because, he claimed, she “kept innocent men in prison” as California’s attorney general. “Evil is a term that should be reserved for…. evil. Not stuff you think is wrong, but truly demonic behavior,” he said.
Candace Owens, PragerU podcast host and Blexit founder, took to Twitter to joke that she respected Joe Biden “for finding a Vice Presidential mate that locked up *almost* as many black men as he did.”
But some right-wing extremists were unhappy with current lines of attack against Harris, arguing that they did not go far enough to smear Harris, whom they are casting as a “Black nationalist.”
White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes said of Harris, “The problem with Kamala Harris is not that she was too tough on crime— it’s that she is a militant black nationalist and far-left radical who wants to dismantle America. That’s the angle.” Fuentes tagged the Trump campaign in his tweet.
Failed North Carolina GOP candidate Pete D’Abrosca wrote that Harris “is a radical black nationalist who will stoke racial tensions until America descends into a full-blown race war.” Like Fuentes, he tagged the Trump campaign in his tweet, and wrote, “That’s the messaging. Not ‘hurr durr she put minorities in jail.’”
