As Harris steps up to face Trump, far-right attacks follow

Publish date: 2024-08-14

As President Biden’s reelection bid fizzled over the last month, the right-wing targeting of Vice President Harris picked up steam, starting with a return of old racist and sexist memes.

The weaker Biden appeared, the more intense the attacks became, with extremism monitors warning of a threatening undercurrent to rhetoric calling Harris a “demon” or a “DEI hire.”

Biden’s July 21 decision to exit the race and endorse the vice president turned that stream of hostility into a torrent. Within hours, far-right forums were awash in vitriol aimed at almost every aspect of Harris’s identity, mounting what analysts call a smear campaign led by the most intolerant — and menacing — elements of Donald Trump’s MAGA universe.

For example, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, speaking to Britain’s right-wing GB News, described Harris as “this disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin color.”

The backlash is a glimpse of what Harris could face if she wins, say extremism monitors, who fear a far-right resurgence like the one that followed the election of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, only worse because of factors including social media and the nation’s deep polarization.

The pile-on also fits the pattern of studies showing that women candidates — and particularly women of color — experience online abuse and threats for seeking election at any level, from school board seats to the Oval Office. The intimidation campaigns elevate the risk of real-world attacks by the violent far right, analysts say, a concern that takes on urgency as thousands of Black and Brown women across the country pledge street-level organizing to get out the vote for Harris.

“She represents what it means to try to have a multiracial democracy, a feminist democracy — and that’s what they don’t want,” said Alexandria Onuoha, a researcher at Suffolk University in Boston who studies extremist targeting of Black women and girls. “It’s not just VP anymore. This is the big leagues now. It’s going to be even more aggressive.”

Harris’s backstory is a smorgasbord for extremists across ideologies: A mixed-race daughter of immigrants grows up to become California attorney general before making it to the United States Senate and, eventually, the White House.

Neo-Nazis go after her Indian and Jamaican ancestry and use antisemitic slurs against her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff. Anti-government types call Harris “a cop” because of her prosecutor days. QAnon-style conspiracy theorists portray her as part of a deep-state cabal; they spread fake photos of Harris with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Christian nationalists, meanwhile, cast her as Jezebel, the biblical symbol of womanly wickedness. Lance Wallnau, a prominent pro-Trump Christian nationalist, responded to Harris’s ascent with a video saying she represents “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary [Clinton] because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger.”

More mainstream conservatives, too, engage in the racist and sexist dog whistling. Some Republican lawmakers mispronounce “Kamala,” for example, or promote conspiratorial thinking about her rise. At MAGA rallies, T-shirts and bumper stickers deride Harris with slogans that imply that she traded sexual favors for political gain.

“This is what comes with the territory when you are a woman of color and in the arena,” said a Harris campaign worker who also was involved with her 2020 primary effort, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive campaign matters. “It’s kind of a testament to the fact that Republicans have a race problem themselves — that’s pretty clear-cut.”

In the first two days of Harris’s campaign, online discussion of her among high-profile right-wing politicians and influencers grew to almost six times the typical volume, according to a Washington Post analysis. Sexual and racial themes dominated the chatter; dozens of influential figures on the right shared crude sexual remarks about Harris on social media. The spread of a debunked theory that Harris was ineligible for the presidency for citizenship reasons spiked after Biden endorsed her for the presidency.

“X and Telegram are essentially a free-for-all where we’re seeing a ton of conspiracy theories,” said Freddy Cruz, a researcher and program manager at Western States Center, an anti-extremism watchdog group. “It looks like there’s a new conspiracy theory every hour.”

The campaign against Harris borrows heavily from the earlier targeting of Obama, the country’s first Black president.

Once again, “birther” conspiracy theories are spreading quickly online, racking up millions of views for posts showing Harris’s purported birth certificate alongside a debunked argument that she’s ineligible to run because of her foreign-born parents. Harris is legally eligible and was born in Oakland, Calif.

Other commenters are stoking racial divisions by asserting that Harris isn’t really Black, suggesting that her Caribbean roots don’t represent Black Americans — a tactic that also was used against Obama, whose father was Kenyan.

“They are very aggressive at latching onto and continuing to repeat baseless accusations,” Cruz said. “In Obama’s case, it was about skin color and supposed religion. We’re seeing a lot of attacks on Vice President Harris that are conspiracy theories laced with racism and sexism.”

The online and verbal attacks, extremism researchers warn, can influence unrest on the ground. They note that the right-wing uproar over Obama’s election re-energized the anti-government militia movement, which had been largely quiet since the devastating 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by far-right extremist Timothy McVeigh.

“When Obama left office, we normally would’ve expected a little bit of a downturn because they usually relax some of their fervor when a Republican comes back into office,” said Amy Cooter, a researcher who specializes in militia groups at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism. “We didn’t see that because Trump legitimized the fears that they and other folks on the right have.”

Cooter said far-right armed groups stayed active, often organizing in plain sight on Facebook and other social platforms. The picture changed after a pro-Trump mob — with extremist groups in the lead — stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The double blow of social media platforms’ crackdown on militant accounts and a sweeping Justice Department investigation that has resulted in more than 1,000 convictions to date pushed many armed groups underground or to encrypted apps.

One exception is the white-power movement, a sector of the far right that has reasserted itself in an era when others have atomized or are keeping a lower profile, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group. White-supremacist groups are staging pop-up appearances in various parts of the country, often carrying swastika flags and handing out fliers with messages such as “Diversity means fewer white people.”

Recent sites include Nashville, where white-power demonstrators have spread propaganda throughout the month and disrupted a city council meeting. Photos showed men dressed in T-shirts that say “Pro-White” giving Nazi salutes. In Michigan, local news outlets reported, about a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell this month; others were filmed on a nearby highway overpass shouting, “We love Hitler, we love Trump!”

Analysts say they can’t predict whether these groups will ramp up their activities in opposition to Harris, but that the idea of Trump competing against a woman of Black and South Asian heritage presents a common rallying point for disparate factions with different agendas and tactics.

“It’s simple: She’s a Black woman in power and they’re terrified,” said Onuoha, the Suffolk University researcher. “Their mindset is that any woman of color in power is out to take something away from them.”

Last month, the Christian nationalist pastor Clay Nash told worshipers in Boise, Idaho, about a dream in which he was looking out over the Democratic National Convention, which inexplicably was taking place aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln.

In the dream, Nash said, a Jezebel spirit “was shot right through the brain.” He boasted that a friend, knowing his skill as a long-range shooter, suggested Nash was the man for the job.

“How many of you know that being shot through the brain is a dead shot?” Nash asked, according to a video of the remarks. “I believe we’re about to render Jezebel null and void.”

Such visions or prophecies are central to Nash’s subset of Christian nationalism, the independent charismatics of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, which scholars describe as a fast-growing, anti-democratic movement preaching that hard-right Christians should control all aspects of government and society.

A report last year from extremism monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center called the NAR “a new and powerful Christian supremacy movement that is attempting to transform culture and politics in the U.S. and countries across the world into a grim authoritarianism.”

Some NAR leaders have pushed back on descriptions of their goals as violent, insisting that their focus on “spiritual warfare” is figurative, not literal — a stance, analysts say, that allows for plausible deniability should a radicalized follower attack.

Take the example of Nash fantasizing about the killing of Jezebel. The pastor never says in the sermon that the demonic spirit in his vision was a stand-in for Harris.

Among Christian nationalists, however, the vice president repeatedly has been branded as Jezebel, a racialized depiction “used as a stereotype or controlling image of Black womanhood, of Black female sexuality,” said Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a sociologist at Tulane University whose doctoral research focuses on Christian nationalism.

The Washington Post asked Nash for comment about the vision and whether, in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, he would still share a violent dream about a shooting death at a political event. The response was a single sentence in an email: “I did not say or preach this at any time.” The full video of the sermon remains on the Clay Nash Ministries YouTube channel.

A top concern, Gaspard-Hogewood said, is that extreme or unstable followers will now revisit visions like the one Nash expressed and interpret them as prophecies to be fulfilled — with Harris’s expected formal nomination at the Democratic National Convention only weeks away.

Gaspard-Hogewood said dehumanizing portrayals of Harris as an evil, power-hungry demon resonate with pro-Trump Christian voters who have embraced the spiritual warfare narrative.

“It’s both a caricature and a warning in framing her in this way,” she said.

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As Harris steps up to face Trump, far-right attacks follow