Vice President Kamala Harris on Capitol Hill, Jan. 10, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)
On Monday morning, less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden announced his exit from the 2024 presidential race and anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as his heir apparent, far-right influencers took to social media to hurl racial epithets at the first mixed-race, female presidential candidate in history.
Here’s a sampling:
- “The leading Democrat presidential candidate’s mother was named Shyamala Gopalan,” Stew Peters, a former bounty hunter and current live streamer, posted to his 620,000 followers. “That should be enough for disqualification.” In recent months, Peters has amped up his vitriol against Indians and Americans of Indian descent.
- Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right media platform Gab, singled out a potential running mate for Harris, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. Torba referred to Shapiro as a “demon” in a post to his 400,000 followers on X.
- Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist “groyper” influencer, was bi-partisan in his post on X to 377,000 followers, “If Trump had been assassinated last week, the presidential election would be between Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris…Two nonwhite liberal women who could never win a national primary by popular vote. What a nightmare.”
- To his 169,000 followers on X, Auron MacIntrye, a pundit on the far-right media platform Blaze, warned, “They’re literally going to spend the next few months running the DEI candidate and calling everyone who opposes her sexist Hitler.”
- Adding his voice to the chorus was self-appointed prophet Lance Wallnau, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic pastors who claim that God speaks to them. In a broadcast that the extremist watchdog group Right Wing Watch captured, Wallnau called Harris “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” In this, he was referring to the notion that the Biblical character Jezebel is the embodiment of a false prophet.
- As Media Matters has reported, a subset of far-right pundits also has retooled the “birther” conspiracy theory that former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and applied it to Harris. “Is Kamala Harris eligible to be president under the US Constitution’s “Citizenship Clause?” mused Tom Fitton, president of the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch, to his 2.6 million followers on X.
So far, following President Biden’s endorsement of Harris to replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee, she is the frontrunner, raking in record amounts of campaign contributions. It’s probably safe to say that if she secures the official party nomination, the racist attacks will likely show no signs of abating.