#The Republican false narrative of DEI

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Unlocking DEI's Impact on Academic Success

Diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies foster a learning environment where all students can thrive and understand complex academic content. Photo by Matthew Bamberg What is the purpose of a university? For most of the classical liberal tradition, the purpose of the university was to produce scholarship in pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. — Christopher Rufo DEI is so much…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Vittoria Elliott at Wired:

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn. On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media. This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics. “It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so. “He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.” Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread. “There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says. Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

Ever since Elon Musk gotten ahold of X (formerly Twitter), he has turned it into a playground for far-right extremism.

[mariacallous]

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn.

On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media.

This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics.

“It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so.

“He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.”

Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread.

“There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says.

Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

The actual composition of the site’s user base has changed, with people who had been kicked off the platform for violating Twitter’s community standards being let back on under Musk. Trump himself was famously unbanned, but a wide array of avowed white supremacists, conspiracists, and neo-Nazis also flooded back onto the platform, including far-right pundit Nick Fuentes, QAnon proponent Liz Crokin, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and election denier Mike Lindell.

The platform’s new blue check system, which allows anyone willing to purchase a subscription to get a marker that previously confirmed they were who they claimed to be next to their name, has also contributed to the growing misinformation problem. While the system used to be free and reserved for verified public figures, politicians, and journalists, anonymous accounts like @Sprinter99800 and @ShadowofEzra are now able to use the algorithmic boost offered by the subscription model to spread misinformation about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, respectively. Blue check accounts are, further, incentivized to spread outrageous claims because they can be paid based on how much engagement their posts get.

“He has a very obvious political agenda,” says one former member of Twitter’s policy team. Looking back at the last few years, they referred to Musk’s release of what he dubbed the “Twitter Files,” a cache of internal documents. The documents, according to Musk, revealed the political biases of the platform’s previous leaders—according to others, they showed mundane interactions with researchers and government employees—but also led to the doxing and harassment of former trust and safety employees and misinformation researchers.

Musk has also used the platform to put his thumb on the scale of politics outside the United States.

Last year, after Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection, his supporters stormed the country’s legislature, in an echo of January 6, 2021. In April, Musk defied an order from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to remove the accounts of far-right actors who, the court said, violated the country’s laws by undermining confidence in the country’s electoral processes. X then released the court’s confidential orders to the Congressional Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which then made them public. Experts and government officials at the time said the move was a deliberate attempt by a foreign billionaire to undermine the country’s democratic institutions.

While Musk has repeatedly asserted that he took over Twitter to preserve its commitment to free speech, the company has complied with censorship from right-leaning governments. Last year, the company complied with an order from Turkey’s authoritarian government to censor content ahead of the country’s elections and blocked a BBC documentary about India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi.

Instances like this, the first former employee tells WIRED, show that Musk is an entirely different actor than other tech CEOs, unbothered by the kinds of laws or norms that could be used to reign in another company. Musk doesn’t appear to be cowed by penalties like fines for spreading misinformation that are meant to keep billionaires and companies in check to protect the public interest.

“Regulation is not written for overtly malicious actors,” says the first former employee. “We don't have good regulation anywhere in the world that thinks about corporate entities like that … and it’s certainly not how we are used to treating a man who owns multiple companies.”

Because Musk’s own politics and priorities appear so clear, even decisions made seemingly without a political agenda can be interpreted as part of one. Last week, the X account for White Dudes for Harris was booted from the platform, causing many supporters of the vice president to wonder if this was Musk’s own political preferences playing out on X in real time. But a third former Twitter trust and safety employee who spoke with WIRED says it appears to be a pretty standard suspension that can happen when someone who has been banned from the platform in the past makes a new account. “Whoever set up the account most likely had an email address, IP address, or phone number that matched an account that had previously been banned on the platform. That would automatically be a penalty.”

The former employee says that the fact that people could not be sure if it was the result of Musk’s politics, or just a good old-fashioned moderation snafu is the real problem: “The fact that we have to ask those questions just shows the trust is gone. The misinformation has won.”

In an interview with the Atlantic, Musk said he would accept the results of the election should Harris win. But whether that will hold true in November is still cause for concern. Last week, after the Venezuelan elections wrapped in what experts said appeared to be a stolen victory for the country’s current president Nicolás Maduro, Musk railed against Maduro on X, even challenging him to a physical fight.

“What does it look like if this same sort of advocacy happens come November or December, in which he really believes that the election has been stolen or the vote counts aren't there?” the former employee says. It’s the same type of question that the former trust and safety teams were asking themselves about Trump during the 2020 presidential election. “It's very eerily kind of the same situation, except it’s the CEO and owner of the platform making those decisions, who also has the final say in content moderation decisions.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Kiyah Willis

Published: Jun 17, 2024

Not your typical red pill narrative

There are so many “why I left the left” stories, but I promise you this isn’t your typical red pill narrative. I didn't go from a Democrat to a Republican or a woke leftist to a conservative. This false dichotomy—this idea that there's only left and right—is how I got into this mess in the first place. I want to discuss how I ended up on the left, why I left the left, and where I stand now as someone disappointed by both political options we are presented with today.

As a Gen Z individual, I witnessed social media indoctrinating many people my age into wokeness. For me, it was through school. My home culture played a part, especially the heavy emphasis on identity politics, where being black was supposed to determine my decisions, particularly political ones. But the full woke hierarchy—the idea that every aspect of your identity has to be categorized as either oppressed or oppressor—was introduced to me through my school’s DEI program. Affinity groups at school, separated by race to discuss oppression, introduced me to the privilege-oppressed hierarchy, or what could be called the “whose-feelings-matter-more hierarchy.”

I learned that white people were more privileged than non-white people, men more privileged than women, straight people more privileged than gay people, Christians more privileged than Muslims, and so on. This was supposed to determine a person's morality—judging people not by their actions or words but by these arbitrary labels of “oppressed” or “privileged” based on group identity.

At first, I didn’t buy into the DEI identity politics because it contradicted what I saw with my own eyes. I had friends of all races. I had friends that were men. I had friends that I was being told were more “privileged” than I was, but I never felt oppressed or harmed by them. However, my views changed in 2016 when Trump was nominated for president. As a high school senior in Texas, I didn’t know much about his politics (I wasn’t following any of his speeches), but I heard from teachers that if Trump were elected, America would become a post-apocalyptic hellscape where my rights would be violated, and I would be enslaved or put into a concentration camp because I was a black woman.

Living in a predominantly Republican area, many of my friends supported Trump. I never questioned their support of Trump’s policies; I simply assumed my friends—my white friends, my male friends—were voting for someone who wanted to harm me because they were privileged. That was what I was being told and taught in school.

The next year, I went to MIT in Boston—one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states—where the DEI and identity politics culture was even more intense. Everyone was paranoid about offending someone due to the serious social and academic repercussions. The DEI department at MIT was super intense, and you could get in serious trouble for offending someone with “hate speech,” a loosely defined term that pretty much meant asking, (1) Did you offend someone?, (2) How badly were their feelings hurt?, (3) And where are they relative to you in the hierarchy? The answers would determine what repercussions you’d face.

I don’t want to pretend this had everything to do with the people around me. There was no one putting a gun to my head and telling me I had to accept these crazy ideas. No one forced me to believe that you had to validate everyone’s pronouns and identities or else you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t wear certain makeup or hairstyles or you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t state certain factual truths about history or the world, or else you were harming people. All of these were ideas that I accepted willingly.

One of the craziest things that I believed during that time was that I was non-binary. For one thing, I wasn’t a very stereotypical girly girl, and I had (and still have) some traditionally masculine traits. I tend to prefer leadership positions, and I was told that if I didn’t identify as non-binary, I would be invalidating the people who did because I shared similarities with them in the way that I acted and behaved. But honestly, there was a second, subconscious reason: I knew, on some level, that if I identified as non-binary, I would gain more oppression points in the hierarchy. I wouldn’t feel so paranoid about my words offending people.

This paranoia (of offending people) was so intense—at least for me, and I would assume for others—that I was willing to accept something or to claim that I was something that wasn’t true. By the end of my first semester in college, I was at my most woke. I was paranoid about offending people, sensitive to being offended, and aggressive in policing others’ actions and words. I even reported people to the DEI department for being offensive. (I was a menace!)

But things changed when I got sick and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. At 18, I ended up in the hospital with half of my body paralyzed, the youngest person in the adult ward of the hospital, in need of 24/7 care.

Even though I identified as non-binary, I was still biologically female. Needing a female nurse for my safety and personal comfort conflicted with my identity as non-binary and the fear of offending someone. To ask for a female nurse—to acknowledge a difference between male and female—meant invalidating my own non-binary identity. More importantly, I wondered about the hospital’s definition of “female.” What if I got a nurse who identified as a woman but wasn’t what I was asking for? In that case, I’d have to clarify what I meant by “female” or “woman,” which might offend someone. Offending someone (I thought at the time) meant harming them, which was the worst thing I could do.

So I’m sitting in the hospital, and I’m weighing these two alternatives: Either (1) I prioritize my safety, which means I have to give up everything that I think is moral, or (2) I do what I think is right, but that means putting myself potentially in a more dangerous situation. I decided to put my safety first. I asked for a female nurse. I was ready to specify what I wanted, but I was in Texas at the time, and this was 2018, so it was not an issue. Gender ideology wasn’t very widespread; they knew exactly what I was talking about, and I ended up with a nurse who was a woman.

But this led to a moral crisis. What I believed to be moral and what I believed to be true were at odds. And it wasn’t just this dilemma—I’d discovered a serious flaw in my entire path of thinking, a deeper philosophical issue. Were reality and morality incompatible? Surely, that couldn’t be right.

Returning to school, I had a lot of questions: Is it true that hurting someone’s feelings is the worst thing that we can do and is actually the equivalent of physically harming someone? We are pretending that “man” and “woman” don’t have definitions, but this conflicts with biological reality. Why are we doing this? Is it healthy to constantly live in fear and be paranoid about being a bad person when nothing that you’re doing or saying has any bad intent?

These questions led to a lot of pushback. Some people seemed nervous that I was asking questions, and they would either quickly change the topic or whisper something like, “Oh, of course, these ideas are true. Why are you even asking? We don’t ask if these ideas are true. It’s just obvious.” Some got angry: “Why are you asking questions?! Trump supporters ask these types of questions! Fox News right-wing conspiracy theorists ask these types of questions! Are you a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist?—because that means that you’re against us! Either you’re with us, or you’re against us, and if you’re asking these questions, you’re siding with the people who are trying to enslave you and put you in concentration camps and doing all of these evil things!” These reactions were, in retrospect, a very obvious red flag, and I wish that at this point I’d realized I was in a kind of cult, but unfortunately, I didn’t.

If it’s not obvious, everything that I believed at this time was something somebody else said that I blindly followed as if it were true. I didn’t have the self-esteem to think through these ideas and consider whether they made sense. My peers, family members, friends, and mentors accepted these ideas, so I had no legitimate reason to question or challenge them. I fell back into accepting these beliefs, or at least that’s how I made it appear. While I reverted to calling myself non-binary, policing other people’s language, and reporting people to the DEI department, I secretly struggled with the idea that this was all wrong.

I began to realize there were so many cracks, inconsistencies, and illogical aspects to what I believed that I couldn’t put my head back in the sand and pretend they weren’t there. This was a really hard time in my life. I became depressed because I believed that asking these questions and searching for the truth made me a bad person.

Then the COVID pandemic came along, which surprisingly saved my life. During lockdowns, I was forced to sit with my thoughts and acknowledge the doubts and confusions that I had without any of the external influences that kept me trapped in this mindset. After thinking things through, I concluded that almost everything I believed was bullshit. But I still needed an extra push to fully trust my brain.

I was struggling with that self-esteem bit when I coincidentally had a conversation with my brother, who was not a Trump supporter, didn’t watch Fox News, wasn’t a right-wing conspiracy theorist, and had no interest in politics at all. Out of nowhere, he asked me, “Have you met these people in Boston who are crazy? They can’t define what a woman is. They’re offended by everything. They think facts don’t matter if they hurt people’s feelings.” Hearing this from my non-political brother made me realize I wasn’t the only person asking these questions. It was the nudge I needed to accept that it’s okay to ask questions and to explore alternatives to the woke nonsense I’d been taught. I started to pay attention to what was happening around me and think through what people were saying, what they believed, and why.

COVID may have been the catalyst for me to reassess my beliefs, but it also hit me particularly hard. Living with an autoimmune disorder, I was one of the individuals the government claimed their policies around lockdowns, mask requirements, vaccine mandates, and other measures were intended to protect. Unfortunately, they did the opposite. I know how to take care of my health. I’ve been doing it for years. I know when to wear a mask, but the government mask mandate—in Boston, you had to wear masks in public spaces—caused the price of masks to skyrocket and, in many places, created a shortage. Getting a mask under those policies was much harder for me.

Further, I needed to go to my specialist for treatment, but I had to travel to get there. The government required vaccines to fly, but my disorder makes certain vaccines riskier. I faced a dilemma: Should I risk my health by getting the vaccine or by not getting it? Not getting it would mean that I couldn’t travel to see the one specialist who could treat my rare condition. The shutdowns were another challenge. I preferred staying home to avoid crowded grocery stores, but when they closed all “non-essential” businesses, the remaining “essential” ones became overwhelmed. This, again, led to shortages of necessities like food and medical supplies (not to mention toilet paper!), and since delivery services were also suspended, I was forced to venture out for supplies that were often out of stock. None of these policies improved my life in any way.

I remember confiding to some of my friends (who happened to be woke leftists), “Hey, I have an autoimmune disorder, and these policies are not helping me, I don’t think I support them.” Their unsympathetic response was, “Are you listening to Trump supporters? Are you watching Fox News? Are you suddenly a right-wing conspiracy theorist?!”

Not long after, the BLM riots happened, and I had friends who couldn’t leave their houses because they were under curfew. It became apparent that these riots stemmed from non-factual beliefs about a police shooting. I remember asking questions like, “Do you really think that burning down buildings and businesses is going to get you what you want in this situation, which is policy change?” And the response that I got back was (can you guess?) that I must be a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist. There were no facts or logic behind their beliefs, just parroting what they heard, believing it made them good people.

Many had their “red pill” moment in 2020, leaving the Democrats and embracing conservatism. And let me be honest: when I left the left, I first called myself a conservative, not because I believed everything conservatives said, but because I saw it as the lesser of two evils. When I took the time to explore the full range of ideas out there—because there’s more than just woke or conservative, there’s more than just Democrat or Republican—I realized that I didn’t have to call myself a conservative or woke. Neither label applied. I realized I could reject both, and I did.

The conservative movement has almost all of the same flaws as wokeness. Many conservatives are easily offended, valuing faith and feelings over facts. They might get upset when they see a man wearing a dress, a woman expressing her choice not to marry or have children, or someone speaking Spanish (rather than English) at the grocery store. Many conservatives are religious, and like wokeness, their beliefs often lack a factual or evidentiary basis. Christianity, like gender ideology, relies heavily on subjective belief. I was briefly labeled a conspiracy theorist for expressing some ideas associated with conservatives, and I even joked about it. But there’s truth to the stereotype. Many conservatives blindly accept claims from sources like Fox News or personalities like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens without demanding evidence.

Conservatives often engage in identity politics as well. It’s common to see individuals on social media disparage the achievements of black people, attributing their success to affirmative action or DEI policies without evidence or consideration of the individual’s merits. They make assumptions based solely on race, mirroring the flawed privileged-oppressed hierarchy often associated with the left. This is the point where some will say, “Oh okay, well you’re not an ‘extremist,’ you don’t believe in the extreme left or the extreme right, so therefore you’re a ‘centrist,’ you’re somewhere in the middle—you believe in a mix of both.” Frankly, that’s absurd. I don’t think of myself as halfway between crazy and crazy. Rational thinking is not on a spectrum with crazy at each pole; consequently, I reject this left-right dichotomy altogether. It’s illogical to place conservatives on one end of a spectrum and woke people on the other. I don’t identify as woke, conservative, or a centrist. So, what am I?

First, I am a rational thinker. I value logic, facts, and evidence. I think for myself. You won’t hear me deferring to anybody else to determine my views. I will never say, “Oh yeah, so-and-so thinks this is true, or so-and-so has these credentials, therefore, everything they say is right.” That’s not how I think. I also will never claim morality should be based on people’s feelings regardless of facts; morality and reality are not opposed. Second, I consider myself an individualist. I completely reject the idea that someone’s race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, or any of these unchosen characteristics determine what somebody should say or do, how they should think, or how they should be judged. I have my brain, as everybody else on the planet does, so I will judge each person based on their beliefs and actions in their unique circumstances, not based on some unchosen group they’re part of. Third, I’m a capitalist without apology. I believe in the individual’s capacity for rational thought. Every person should be allowed to live according to what they know best suits their circumstances.

I don’t believe that either the Democrats or the Republicans truly embody these ideals. They fail to grasp that people have their own minds and require the freedom to make decisions for their own lives. This lack of understanding is reflected in their policies. Someone will inevitably say, “Well, you must be a libertarian.” No, I don’t identify as a libertarian, and the reason behind that deserves its own dedicated story (perhaps I’ll share one if there’s enough interest).

Despite the abundance of “why I left the left” stories out there, my motivation for sharing this testimonial stems from the realization that many people find themselves in a situation similar to mine. They are abandoning the left, recognizing the presence of an incredibly bizarre and cultish ideology that’s reaching a boiling point. Yet, they’re simultaneously dissatisfied with what they observe in the conservative movement, leaving them feeling lost and unsure where to turn. Like me, they feel politically homeless.

I understand that this sense of political homelessness can be isolating, but I want to assure anyone experiencing these feelings that you are not alone. Countless individuals share our perspective, and I am committed to creating content that challenges the false dichotomy that you must be either left or right, Republican or Democrat, conservative or woke. This notion is fundamentally flawed and simply untrue.

There are many ways of thinking, and I want to explore them on my YouTube channel and in other forums, including the Journal of Free Black Thought. You can be your own person. Build trust in yourself, use your brain, and come to your own conclusions about things. How do you describe your political philosophy or orientation? Do you consider yourself left or right, woke or conservative, Democrat or Republican, or libertarian? Or are you politically homeless like me?

-

Kiyah Willis is a fellow at Objective Standard Institute focusing on cultural trends and their causes and consequences. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kiyah worked as a data analyst before transitioning to philosophy. You can find her advocating reason, individualism, and liberty on Twitter and TikTok and on her Substack, Growing to Truth.

Editors’ note: This essay is a lightly edited transcript of a YouTube monolog. The video is linked below, in the body of the essay.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Li Zhou at Vox:

In their opening wave of attacks on the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, some Republicans are homing in on Vice President Kamala Harris’s race and gender — despite certain party leaders’ pleas for them to steer clear. Members of the religious right have dubbed her a “jezebel,” while other conservative activists suggested that she’s slept her way to the top by citing past romantic relationships she’s had. GOP commentators have also echoed many of the same “birtherism” attacks that were once used against former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming that her candidacy isn’t viable because her parents were Jamaican and Indian immigrants. (Harris is a US citizen who was born in California.) And they’ve tapped into common GOP talking points about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), implying that Harris isn’t up for the job and was selected for VP solely because of her identity.

“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said in a post on X. (Burchett has since said he wishes he hadn’t said this, while adding that it’s the “truth.”) There is a common thread in all these attacks: They take aim at Harris’s identity, rather than her agenda or experience. And they come despite the fact that last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson implored his party to focus their criticisms on policy and politics. “This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever,” Johnson said. Many of these remarks are simply hateful and examples of misogynoir, a compounded form of sexism and racism directed at Harris, a Black and South Asian woman. But there’s a sinister political calculus to them as well. Collectively, they aim to undercut Harris’s legitimacy as a candidate and are one prong of sweeping critiques Republicans have made about her eligibility. Plus, they strive to leverage existing racism and sexism against Harris, activating voters who share those biases.

“They hope to taint her with the suspicion of not having earned the positions she has achieved and harness the fears of those who resent seeing women and people of color in elite spaces,” says Juliet Hooker, a Brown University political scientist and author of Black Grief/White Grievance, a book on race and politics.

[...] These statements include implications that Harris is promiscuous and that she’s weaponized her sexuality to get to where she is — a misogynistic claim that’s often used against successful women to question whether they deserve the position that they’re in. Such attacks have manifested in conservative references to her past relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and repeated offensive taglines like “Joe and the Ho.” That’s often paired with questions about why Harris hasn’t had any biological children, and how that discredits her from being a leader due to claims that she’s not sufficiently invested in the country’s future. Beyond the fact that this line of attack is incredibly dismissive of the role of stepparents in America (Harris is the stepmother to a son and daughter), these sexist statements both superimpose traditional expectations on women and seek to undermine the VP by arguing that she doesn’t conform to those standards.

Racist narratives, including “birtherism” style attacks that question Harris’s citizenship status, similarly seek to cast doubt on whether she’s eligible for office. It’s part of a long tradition of conservatives portraying nonwhite politicians as short of “real Americans” and therefore not fit to hold these positions. And statements referring to Harris as a “DEI candidate” also intend to poke at her qualifications and ignore the significant experience she’d bring as a nominee.

Those remarks stem from Biden’s statement committing to selecting a woman as his number two when he ran for office in 2020. He then narrowed his final list of contenders to include four Black women. Those choices were intended to improve representation and diversity at the highest levels of the party, which had never previously had a Black woman as president or vice president. Republicans, however, have seized on his decision to suggest that Harris was picked only for this reason, and not because she also brought significant qualifications including decades of experience as a legislator and prosecutor. Such monikers are so demeaning because they suggest that people of color are undeserving of the roles they get, and “implies that [they] can only succeed when we are needed to fill quotas, and not because of merit, hard work or talent,” writes Variety’s Clayton Davis. The misogynoir directed at Harris aims to suggest that she’s somehow illegitimate as a candidate, and signals to people who hold these biases that the GOP is a home for them. 

The MAGA cult’s sexist and racist attacks against Kamala Harris are about fears and anxieties of a woman of color potentially leading the nation.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Molly Olmstead at Slate:

Donald Trump announced his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, this week. That means the vice presidential race is finally underway, adding more fuel to the sense of Republican stability amid Democrats’ existential confusion over Joe Biden’s campaign status. The Trump campaign, and many right-wing actors and pundits, has been trying to ride this momentum even further—by beginning to beef up its attacks on Kamala Harris.

“Kamala Harris is incompetent,” a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told the New York Times. “She’s proven to be the weakest, worst vice president in history, and she has 100 percent supported Joe Biden in every single disastrous policy that he has implemented over the last four years.” Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official, called her a “DEI hire.” The Federalist asserted that Harris “intentionally concealed” problems with the president’s “mental fitness.” (One of the Trump campaign’s Twitter accounts also alleged, “No person is more central to the coverup.”) And Trump himself tossed out a crass reference to a relationship Harris had decades ago, trading on sexist and false accusations that she rose to power by having an affair with a married man. Still, media and misinformation experts say that the right hasn’t yet landed on a centralized narrative to discredit Harris—and that we can expect many more lines of narrative attack to crystalize in the coming months. Because while Harris, a Black woman, has generally faced more animosity than Biden ever did when he was vice president, she has still been treated as an afterthought; disinformation trackers Slate reached out to don’t even register Harris as a major topic of misinformation in the current news cycle. Biden, four years into his presidency, has taken his place in the pantheon of right-wing villains as a corrupt and vindictive member of the elite, both foolish and evil. Kamala’s caricature, on the other hand, still has room to harden.

In the meantime, right-wing media has been throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies conspiracy theories, political communication, and the media, said that Harris has faced all kinds of attacks recently, some explicitly experimental. Some right-wing actors have portrayed her as “part of some kind of grand liberal conspiracy,” Nyhan said. Others claim she is too incompetent to do anything. Those narratives are somewhat in contradiction with each other, but “sometimes, with political figures who are less well defined, there’s a flooding of the zone,” Nyhan said.

In 2020, when Biden chose Harris as his running mate, the main right-wing attack narratives about her were that she was radical, weak, “nasty,” and “angry”; that she was a bigot who was also not Black enough and possibly not a U.S. citizen; and that she wanted to make the U.S. more like California. Outlandish and false conspiracy theories also circulated about Harris, including that she was involved in the baseless child-trafficking conspiracy known as Pizzagate and that she had somehow known in advance that the actor Jussie Smollett was going to stage an attack on himself. Now the general thrust is basically that Harris is deeply unlikable and was a vapid, affirmative action–style hire who lucked her way into power but has done nothing with it. Some of this characterization is built off valid critiques of her time in office and her sometimes-odd speeches.

[...] The racial elements of the Harris attacks are even more blatant. Right-wing stories repeatedly depict her as a woman who failed upward, reaching the White House simply by being a Black woman. The New York Post on July 6 warned that “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.” “Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold,” the author wrote. With that line of attack comes the argument that identity politics is all she knows. Elements of some misleading headlines have included “ ‘Black Trees Matter’—VP Kamala Harris Asks NASA if It Can Track Trees by Race” and “Harris Pitches Race-Based Hurricane Relief.” This Harris, who engages with politics only at the most shallow level, still poses a risk to the country, silly or not, by risking the welfare of white people and stoking racial strife.

But if there’s any question about the racism Harris faces, it should be settled by one undeniable development: Some on the right have previously attempted a birtherism-style assault on her legitimacy as a candidate. That includes a former president and one of the biggest promoters of Obama birtherism. In 2020, before the presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that Harris was not eligible for the office because her parents were immigrants. [...] One thing is for sure: With Biden’s standing in question, and given how unlikely it appears to some voters that the president will be able to finish a full second term, there is little doubt that Harris will be a more prominent target of GOP attacks. And Republicans will be stepping up their attacks in anticipation of a potential vice presidential debate, slated to happen next month.

With VP Kamala Harris being the likely replacement nominee should President Joe Biden (D) step down, the right-wing has ramped up their racist and sexist attacks against Harris.