Air Date 8/2/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
The Kamala Harris presidential campaign has been on a wild ride since it unexpectedly began less than two weeks ago. Record fundraising, organic enthusiasm not seen since Obama, And the ugly pushback to match.
Sources providing our Top Takes in under 50 minutes today include Kate Abu, Bad Queers. The Majority Report, Pablo Torre Finds Out, Woke AF Daily, and Dateline: White House.
Then in the additional Deeper Dive half of the show, there'll be more on three topics:
Section A: Misogynoir Defined;
Section B: Misogynoir in Action; and
Section C: The Talk of the Town.
This Is What DEI Means (And Why Conservatives Get Super Racist With It) - Kate Abu - Air Date 7-29-24
KATE ABU: You might have heard the phrase DEI recently. It's the Right's new descriptor for Kamala Harris.
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: DEI got us Kamala Harris as a vice president.
She is a DEI candidate.
She has proven to America why DEI doesn't work.
KATE ABU: Now, [00:01:00] this kind of talk is nothing new for the vice president. Throughout Harris's career, she's been accused of sleeping her way to the top, playing the race card, and lacking qualifications because of her race and gender. She even has her own birther conspiracy theory.
But while those attacks might play well on Fox News or Steven Crowder's show,
STEVEN CROWDER: She's like a biracial werewolf.
KATE ABU: that kind of overt racism is a bit much for a general election. So instead, right wingers have taken to spamming their new favorite acronym when talking about Harris.
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: People get mad when you say Harris is the hood ornament of DEI.
The only reason Kamala is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie to seal the nomination.
She very well might be the first DEI president.
KATE ABU: Now, even with the euphemism, Republicans know this isn't a winning message. In fact, GOP leadership told lawmakers to stop making race comments about Harris.
But even if they stopped calling her a DEI vice president today, the label has stuck in the current lexicon. And whether you heard it [00:02:00] from Newsmax, Ted Cruz or your boomer uncle, the implication is the same: DEI is black or gay or feminine or disabled or poor.
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: This woman who is literally a DEI hire.
KATE ABU: The point is, DEI is the Right's latest dog whistle, the alphabetical successor to CRT, ESG and SJW. When said to the right audience, DEI means replacing white men with Black women. Hardworking farmers with communist drag queens. It's probably gonna make your kid gay, or at least a Chappell Roan fan.
DEI is everything your estranged father is terrified of, but with a corporate-sounding label so he can say it in public.
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: What does that sound like? The witch trials, except they replaced drowning with racial justice. You die by DEI either way.
KATE ABU: Earlier this month, I talked about how the Right would struggle if Kamala Harris ran for president.
So this week for Mother Jones, I'm going to dive into what DEI actually is. Its real definition, what it means to Republicans, and how it's [00:03:00] evolved from previous dog whistles.
In reality, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It often refers to inclusion policies, like the ones you'd see at companies or at a school. These can relate to someone's gender, age, sexual orientation, disability status, and a ton of other personal identifiers, i. e. diversity. The goal of this idea is to create an equitable playing field by accounting for institutional discrimination and disadvantage to give everyone the same chance at opportunity. Of course, this would include every person.
Affirmative action was one of the first DEI-type policies. Title IX could also fall into this category. So while the term DEI is more recent, the idea is not. Simply put, don't discriminate against someone's race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else it would be dickish to hate.
So that's what DEI originally meant, or at least what it was supposed to mean. But now it's in the hands of right wing assholes. So like Pepe the Frog, fedoras, and the okay symbol, these losers have [00:04:00] perverted another innocuous thing.
Now to people like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, here's what DEI means.
Woke society has prioritized skin color and sexual orientation over actual skills. This means a lot of jobs are being filled by incompetent candidates, who are somehow always prioritized over straight white men. Funny how that works. Oh, you have a black surgeon? Yeah, you'll probably die on the table. A woman is piloting your flight? I mean, I'd be worried. Oh, and if your law school just fell in the rankings? Remember, it's the gay's fault.
The really convenient part about all of this is you can apply it to anything, for any reason, without any proof. Especially the bad stuff. Let's just say, totally hypothetical, a ship crashed into a bridge in a major American city, tragically killing six, and destroying a major route for highway and maritime traffic. Let's just say that happened. Sure, maybe it was because there was an electrical problem with the boat, so it couldn't stop. But what if we just blamed it on DEI instead? Wouldn't that be so much [00:05:00] easier? A train derails; DEI. Crypto bros crash a bank; DEI. Boeing spends years prioritizing profits over passenger safety; DEI.
But this tactic is nothing new. Remember three years ago when CRT was all the rage? Or two years ago when it was ESG? And "grooming" was pretty big last year. All of those words are synonyms for everything the Right hates. They're dog whistles, or phrases that mean something different, depending on who's listening to them.
You hear DEI and you probably think of your job's HR department. But for your QAnon uncle, DEI is an activation phrase to send the most unhinged memes in the family group chat.
ARCHIVAL CLIPS: You die by DEI either way.
KATE ABU: The Right loves to use dog whistles, especially as society advances and becomes more inclusive and less welcoming to bigotry.
A really good example of this is Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. Republican strategist Lee Atwater once explained that by 1968, using the "n" word on the campaign trail would actually hurt you, for the first time in, [00:06:00] you know, the history of the country. So instead of having a less racist agenda, Republicans just had to use more abstract terms, like "states' rights" and "forced busing." They weren't saying the slur, but they still got the message across to their supporters.
These phrases have evolved over time. Welfare queens, globalist elites, Barack Hussein Obama. But they all evoke the same feeling: a hostility towards an "other." And DEI is just the latest addition to this long, shitty trend.
Because sure, you can hold six elected offices. You can have an entire law career before that. You can even be the vice president of the United States. But if you just add those three little letters, D E I, it is instantly invalidated by the assertion that every single one of your accomplishments is because of how society treats your race and gender, rather than despite it.
Political Plot Twists | Episode 219 - Bad Queers - Air Date 7-29-24
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: We're coming up on one full week of this Biden announcement and Kamala Harris stepping up. She's [00:07:00] secured all the delegates that she'll need to going into the Democratic National Convention, got endorsements from all the people who would really actually compete with her for this position. And it's -- ah! -- it's a breath of fresh air. We're all feeling great. I think we're all feeling great. The Trump administration is scrambling. They're trying to tell them to stop being racist. They're like, you can't say, they're trying to throw everything at Kamala. They're trying to slut shame her again, where it's, I'm sorry, she was hot. She was a baddie.
So, J. D. Vance, there's buyer's remorse already, cause he's bawling on his face.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Yeah. You heard that they're actually thinking of knocking him out.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: I see. I mean, they gotta do something.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: They were like, erh, we gotta go back. And so they were thinking of getting Nikki, Nikki Haley. Is that her name?
Oh, what's her name?
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Nikki Haley. You want that? Name change as well. I think her name's Nimrata, but all right, Nikki. All right.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Well, that's what they're thinking to help keep up with all of the things. Plus, with his recent speech where he tried to placate it as [00:08:00] we weren't going into a socialist nation, but we're not going into a socialist nation as a woman leading the socialist nation and he was just like, we don't want a female running this thing and we can't have a female running the socialist nation. And I was like, whoever thought about that part of the speech to try and be like, Oh, we're going to lead with socialist nation, but we don't want a woman and he started with "the woman" that wasn't going to lead the socialist station and I just, I said, sir, sir, the women already hate you. Yeah. They hate you.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Did you hear how many white women were on a call to raise the money? They heard what the Black women did and how much money they raised within a few hours and the white women said, we will double down and triple raise. So they came on and had like 140,000 of them and raised eight and a half million in 90 minutes. I was like, yes, white women. Put out those checkbooks. It was a lot. Take your monies. Do the things. Millions at least. Was it 8 million? It was millions. It was. It was millions. I checked this morning. I know they broke the [00:09:00] Zoom record. As of this morning. As of this morning. Okay. Eight and a half million dollars raised, but they had like 140,000 ish people on the call. Okay. Yeah.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: So, yeah. J. D. Vance, all of his soundbites are coming back to obviously bite him in the ass. But my favorite new one was, he's somewhere and he was trying to make a joke about him drinking Mountain Dew would be called racist. And the crowd was like [clearing throat] and there was one clap is like [silence] And I know Trump is like, who the fuck selected him? Cause you know, obviously Trump doesn't work.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: He's probably picked it out of the hat, honestly.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: They care less, right? 'Cause they were in cruise control.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: They really were. it was all in front of them. They had all this momentum. again. They saw the light. The assassination attempt was a boost for that side. At least again because the Democrats were fighting and we just didn't know how it was going to go and all that. And now it is just a completely different world.
Kamala in the polls, if you believe the polls, has made ground on him in a lot of [00:10:00] battleground states. Of course, the fundraising this one week alone has been record breaking. I think they're about to do a White Dudes for Kamala call. So we'll see what the white men raise.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: And yeah, it's just new energy. We haven't been this excited about a Democratic nominee since Obama. So it's been a while since we had that feeling. We've been in a loveless marriage with the Democrats, with them shelling out candidates that are like mm, yeah.
So it's been exciting and it's been exciting to see Kamala's work pushed to the forefront. She's ready for this moment. Beyoncé gave her rights to Freedom.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Like the fastest turnaround I have seen for Beyoncé. It's like Dr. Yvette Noel Sher, Beyoncé's publicist, knew what was going to be done. She probably already had a mini list to send to Beyoncé to be like, I'm assuming they're going to ask for one of these songs; how do you feel? Beyoncé's like, give them all to her. Give them, give them all. Yeah. Like quick, quick words. That whoever was the person that made sure to hit up like It was like they [00:11:00] knew and they knew who to call because Beyoncé doesn't approve things out of a timeline if she doesn't, but Beyoncé is also a political baddie and she does like to support folks. And I feel like as soon as she decided to give Freedom to the campaign, which also was hilarious because I realized how many of the white men in my life don't know the importance of that song. Like my manager was like, is that a really popular song to be able to go with the campaign? And I said, sir, I need you to go listen with the lyrics on.
Yeah. The closed captions. But to see that quick turnaround, I think that also pushed a lot of momentum because everybody was like, Oh, if Beyoncé is turning Freedom around in less than 24 hours, and then they made a campaign ad off of it, like we're off, we're out and ready to go.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: And people are like, Oh, I hope we could keep this momentum up. I absolutely think we can. We have like, at this point, I think close to a hundred days before the election. The Democratic National Convention is coming up August 19th through the [00:12:00] 22nd. It's going to be in Chicago. Are you going to go?
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: You know, I wasn't gonna.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Put your boots on the ground, but a wire --
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Might just go and just for the vibes.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be a show.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: I might have to make an appearance. I don't, you know, that wasn't anything that I was really interested in, but now, Might have to go download the app. I might have to go see what events I can attend. I might have to go and see some things because it's in my backyard.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: Yeah. If the RNC had Hulk Hogan and Amber Rose, like, can you imagine if, they've talked, obviously, let's just say Beyoncé performs Freedom. Kendrick Lamar is there. They've talked about a Taylor Swift endorsement.
SHANA, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: If Taylor Swift came out and said it on top of Beyoncé saying it, it's a wrap. It's a wrap. It's a wrap. It's over. It's a fucking wrap.
KRIS, CO-HOST, BAD QUEERS: And again, no one's been this energized since Obama because we just don't usually get candidates that are, A, younger, but B, just like [00:13:00] qualified to do the job. Obviously, Kamala's meme ability is skyrocketing. There's so many clips. And it's funny because the people like us who have been like, She's been working, are now seeing she's been working. these clips of her vice presidency. And then, you know, even back when she was in the Senate and I've seen some clips of her when she was attorney general here in California and a DA in San Francisco, she's just been doing the work. I'm seeing old Obama campaign photos and videos. Like she's been around politics for a while. She's not without her flaws, but people are debunking some of the stuff put out by the Russian bots that was prevalent in the 2020 election when she was running for president.
People are doing the work of seeing about her actual criminal record, which is she didn't lock thousands of Black men up and all this bullshit lies.
And yeah, and people are excited. Like, she's fun. I've seen her Make America Laugh Again stuff. I want a shirt!
Israel Furious With Harris Over This Speech - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 7-28-24
KAMALA HARRIS: I have met with the families [00:14:00] of these American hostages multiple times now, and I've told them each time they are not alone and I stand with them. And President Biden and I are working every day to bring them home. I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over two million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity. What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children, and desperate, hungry people fleeing [00:15:00] for safety, sometimes displaced for the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.
Thanks to the leadership of our president, Joe Biden, there is a deal on the table for a ceasefire and a hostage deal. And it is important that we recall what the deal involves. The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza. In the second phase, the Israeli military would withdraw from Gaza entirely, and it would lead to a permanent end to the hostilities. It is time for this war to end and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages [00:16:00] are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self determination.
SAM SEDER: And I just want to correct something I think on your behalf, Emma. "The what the actual f", says Emma. "Do you really think her speech wasn't that much different from Biden's or the boilerplate Democrat, instead of talking points?" That was a reference to a response to the protesters. I mean this speech—and again, it's just a speech, or comments or however you want to call it —is definitely different rhetoric than Biden has been using. And, uh, that can only go as far as it can go. And it may not be sufficient for folks who voted uncommitted. There's certainly some uncommitted delegates in, uh, I think in Minnesota who have come out and spoken to [00:17:00] this. There are others who want, I guess, more explicit rhetoric and perhaps a pledge to condition military aid. And I think it will be seen if she will go that far in the coming weeks. She's been the candidate for five or six days. She's still a member of the administration. But the rhetoric has changed. That's sort of, uh, necessary, but insufficient. I know, Emma, you were looking at what Trita Parsi was writing.
EMMA VIGELAND: Yeah. Trita, we've had on the show a bunch of times and is quite critical of the Gaza policy by the Biden administration. He said, "Kamala clearly broke with Biden on Israel in terms of rhetoric and tone, but there was also a substance shift. Biden has disingenuously claimed that Hamas blocked a ceasefire deal. By saying that she urged Netanyahu to 'clinch the deal', Kamala [00:18:00] pointed to the real obstacle". And that is, these are the kind of subtleties that we're going to need to look for, as I was saying earlier, to indicate movement on that front. I wish she were going further, but she has to both balance her role in the administration, as I said earlier, and her campaign. I hope she meets with the uncommitted people. I hope she gives a more concrete answer on this. But this other news item was important too, that Netanyahu was reportedly pissed by her comments. Both her private comments to him, and what she said in public.
This was a report in Axios, Barak Ravid, uh, naturally. The quote is, "Two Israeli officials said Netanyahu's meeting with Biden was much more constructive than their meeting with Harris... than his meeting with Harris". I t's hard for me to see. The fonts kind of small. [00:19:00] But yeah, two Israeli officials said Netanyahu's meeting with Biden was "much more constructive than his meeting with Harris, but stressed the meeting with the vice president wasn't tense or difficult. The Israeli officials says Netanyahu and his team were caught off guard by Harris's on-camera statement and taken aback by its tone, which they said sounded much more critical than Biden's. Harris's statement after the meeting was much more critical than what she told Netanyahu in the meeting, one Israeli official claimed". Although at the same time, they're also claiming in that article that the meeting with Biden was more constructive. So, I'm not sure how you can have it both ways to that degree. So she's trying to signal, I wish she would go further, but I think the overall sentiments I want people to internalize is that we're in a better position than with Biden in the White House, to make meaningful changes in this genocide. Because the point is that she at least is showing [00:20:00] responsiveness to the outrage amongst the base about this and that's what we can hope for in terms of just, like, a practical reality right now.
So, in the meantime, Trump's taking like a hundred million dollars from Miriam Adelson to annex the West Bank, and then Kamala Harris here is better than Biden showing more willingness on this front, and with half of Democrats not showing up to Netanyahu's address, that means that there's a crack in the door with the party right now that hopefully we can exploit.
Share & Rizz & Tell with Mina Kimes and Dan Le Batard - PABLO TORRE FINDS OUT - Air Date 7-26-24
MINA KIMES: Looks, visuals, the importance of visuals to a campaign, to electability, and whether or not they do matter, I think is sort of the subject at hand here. I am talking about the election, but in a pretty narrow way. The two articles that I sent you guys are both about Kamala Harris being memed. One was in Vox by Rebecca Jennings. The headline: "Could [00:21:00] Kamala Harris's brat summer win her the presidency?"
PABLO TORRE: Can we test Dan on whether Dan knows what any of these things mean?
MINA KIMES: Dan, do you know what "brat" is? I know it only in the context of this article that you have sent me, which is that she memes well because she is of pop culture, but I don't know the specifics, no.
PABLO TORRE: That's a no.
MINA KIMES: Okay, so you don't know what it means to be "brat", or who "brat" is or... I think this, this, that actually, and we're not just, I'm not saying that to make fun of Dan. I think it matters to this conversation, which is...
PABLO TORRE: Yes! Absolutely!!
MINA KIMES: ...does any of this matter. It's a reference to Charlie XCX, who basically the same day that Kamala Harris was announced, or rather that Joe Biden stepped down or said he wasn't going to seek reelection and endorsed her, Charlie XCS, XCX, pardon me, who, Dan, is a young pop star who is very big this summer with this "Brat" album? Now, I sound like an old person. Anyways, she said Kamala Harris "is brat", [00:22:00] which is what sort of kicked this off. There's [an] article also in the New York Times by Amanda Hess called "The triumphant comeback of the Kamala Harris meme".
So, but, both these articles kind of get at the same thing, which is, over the last week—and this is all moving very quickly—Kamala Harris has been embraced by meme culture, by Zoomers, by TikTok in a way we have not seen with a Democratic candidate, certainly not the case with Joe Biden, was not the case with Hillary Clinton. And before we get into whether or not that matters, both of these articles kind of examine why it's happening. And I think what they get at, and I think this is really important, is the reason why it is happening, the reason why it is successful, is that it's ground up. Like, the Harris campaign, which has tentatively embraced some of these memes, are not creating them. These are [00:23:00] not focus grouped. None of it has been deliberate, rather it's young people on all these platforms seeing something in her—and this article kind of gets at what that might be—and deciding to make videos and dances and memes and jokes. She laughs a lot, there's videos of her dancing, she has certain qualities that lend themselves to the format, but I found that very interesting, Pablo, as a start because I think they do hit on something very important, which is you can't force a meme.
PABLO TORRE: Yes. I want to, before we get to whether this impacts the actual election, I think this very question has been something that Democrats have been thirsting for for so long. And I do want to take us all on a tour of just, like, what is happening. Because the multimedia part of this is, as Mina says, being done by, you know, effectively her subreddit, her fans, like, this organized online community that has suddenly come together...
DAN LE BATARD: Democracy. Online democracy.
PABLO TORRE: A grassroots campaign by people who tweet things like, "Why [00:24:00] did I stay up till 3am making a "Von dutch" brat coconut tree edit featuring Kamala Harris, and why can't I stop watching it on repeat?" And it sounds like this.
KAMALA HARRIS: You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
PABLO TORRE: And the thing that we need to remember is what previous attempts at this looked like. Because this is Kamala Harris crowd surfing on an online wave that she only incidentally created, right?, and this is what it looks like when Hillary Clinton tried to tap into viral meme culture.
HILLARY CLINTON: I'm just chillin in Cedar Rapids.
PABLO TORRE: So, you know, there's that.
DAN LE BATARD: This is interesting from a number of [00:25:00] angles to me, including because we have spent a lot of time over the last 12 days declaring this is over, both ways, right? Because the assassination attempt? Everybody said, Oh, the election is over. And now all of a sudden Biden doing what he chose to do and aging out, makes it so that Kamala Harris is in a position now—and I can't believe that I'm saying this—to not just be the young candidate by a lot, because this isn't just young and old, but for the Democratic Party to have a not boring candidate, a not stiff candidate, a candidate that is, if not more presidential, at least more human and, in the currency of the day, more entertaining than boring.
PABLO TORRE: Well, Mina, the thing about all of this is that Kamala Harris's main weakness had been retail politics.
MINA KIMES: Yeah.
PABLO TORRE: Her ability to relate and connect to people in an extemporaneous way. And this has been this [00:26:00] amazing gift from the heavens where she has become a figure that is likable through no actual intent of her own. Like, what she is being cast as essentially—this is a not my quote, I'll just I'll cite it though—she's your "xanned out aunt". And that somehow resonates with people who are like, Oh, I like her now.
MINA KIMES: Yeah, there's like a little bit of an ironic remove here because part of the reason she struggled back in 2020, some of it was what you talked about, the retail politics, the fact she wasn't great on the campaign trail. She just didn't connect with people in a certain way. But also it felt like, Ah, you know, she was kind of like the wrong candidate for the moment. She is perceived as being, well, her whole angle coming up, her career, was tough on crime, sort of center-left. Obviously, that's been changed. The view on that has changed now. And I think that what was a [00:27:00] political weakness at the time now seems to be actually those qualities make her a better candidate for this moment.
But what we're talking about here is not that. It's the fact, that despite that, this phenomena has allowed young people and the left to sort of enjoy her with, like, a level of ironic remove. If I'm reading this correctly.
PABLO TORRE: Yes
MINA KIMES: I think what we're seeing is some of it is due to her innate qualities, which you've kind of alluded to, the fact that she's just straight up more entertaining. But I think all of it is also, there's something strategic about it, or rather, I wouldn't call it "cope", but it's like a way for the young left in particular to embrace her without embracing her. It's almost like, it's not like earnest? Does that make sense?
PABLO TORRE: Right. No, it's actually key, Dan. It's key. And I think there's a parallel weirdly to like how you do your show, Dan, where it's like you're not entirely in [00:28:00] on the best jokes of your show. You're meant to actually be the subject of them, but also consenting to it. And I think that it's that ironic distance between a lot of people are talking about you and making fun of you, and it's helpful to what you do, and it makes you more likable, but you're also not in control of it. And when you begin to exert control, you begin to lose what feels like the whole point of this, which is that you are being laughed at and laughed with, is my diagnosis.
DAN LE BATARD: Oh, but it's what you have to allow in the differences between the generations, though, because what Biden is to this generation is a fossilized artifact. Kamala is still old, but old, kind of cool, except by younger people who are the ones who make everything popular. But they make everything popular, right? They decide, young people. I know that the demo that everybody wants is the money between 35 and [00:29:00] 54, but on popularity, young people decide, and I don't get to decide for them. No one my age does. No one Kamala's age does. And so that she exists in this in-between, between where Trump and Biden are ancient, she's the cool parent or something closer to a parent I can relate to.
PABLO TORRE: Pessimism is simply, this has all happened in the course of a week. And there is going to be another thing that feels seismic that is going to put this so far in the rearview mirror that we will have probably forgotten if we ever learn what "brat" actually means.
DAN LE BATARD: If this knocks off an assassination attempt in ten days as the 'it's over' on the election that everyone likes to shout, if it can be that flimsy, I expect it to change again in the next four months.
Black Women Lead - Woke AF Daily - Air Date 7-24-24
DANIELLE MOODIE: I was in a place of dark despair and hopelessness and just believing that we're done. [00:30:00] And we're done as a country. We're done as a democracy. My work as a independent voice for social justice, equity, um, it's done. And then Sunday. And folks, it is only Wednesday and just a handful of days since Joe Biden announced that he was stepping aside, fully endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. In one day, one full day of her campaign on Monday, she sealed the deal, got all of the delegates that she needed, raised over 200 million dollars, 60% from small dollar donors, first time donors in the 2024 cycle. She has gotten endorsements from [00:31:00] everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Governor Whitmer to Newsom to Shapiro to the Congressional Black Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, HRC, GLAAD, the list goes on and on. Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of We Win With Black Women, started a movement with 44,000 Black women joining a Zoom call to raise over a million dollars in but a handful of hours from the announcement. The following day, Roland Martin, Bakari Sellers, Michael Blake, and others follow suit with a Black men for Kamala Harris call, with over 50,000 men and raising over a million dollars. Now, you have organizers like [00:32:00] Shannon Watts of Mom's Demand and Everytown, organizing White women on a call. You have AAPI folks organizing a call. You have Queer folks organizing a call. Why? Because Black women lead the way, which is what I have been saying since the beginning.
Folks: a change has come. I cannot express to you how important hope is. And it's one of those things that you know, but until you find yourself truly in the depths of despair, hanging on for dear life, and then all of a sudden the wind shifts and you go from fighting against the tide to having the wind at your back—folks, it is a new day. It is a new day. It is a new day. And [00:33:00] I, for the first time in a long time, believe we can win. Because I see on social media, I am hearing from organizers, from organizations, and folks are rolling up their sleeves. 50,000 people, over 50,000 people have signed up on the vice president's website to volunteer to start knocking on doors. Folks, the energy is palpable. And when people are saying, including myself, that this is not even reminiscent of 2008, because, mind you, Barack Obama, it was like a slow tide. Do you know what I'm saying? It was like a slow rolling tide. Like it was growing momentum [00:34:00] with each month, with each day. It was moving. It was moving. It was moving. This, what we are experiencing right now is like a fucking tsunami. It is happening so fast. It is happening so vigorous. Like, people have been desperate for hope.
And now I see that it isn't enough to just have a candidate who has had extraordinary accomplishments. The Biden administration has done a lot. They were handed a pile of shit from the prior godforsaken administration, and they made the absolute most of it with a hostile House of Representatives, a weaponized Supreme Court, they've plowed forward, resurrected a spiraling [00:35:00] economy, tried to provide debt relief to hard strapped students, lower drug costs, add more jobs as we were hemorrhaging them during COVID, an infrastructure bill that was bipartisan. That's just a few things off the top of my head that the administration has done.
But the hopefulness was missing from Joe Biden's campaign. The energy was missing because Joe Biden himself was not exuding that. And the media was wholeheartedly against him. So, for him to step aside and to pass the baton to his 59-year old vice president, and say, Go get 'em—and if you listen yesterday, [00:36:00] Joe Biden was on a call that Kamala was doing and she thought that he had left the call and he said, No, I'm watching you kid, and I love you—the stark contrast between the dystopia that Republicans want to offer Americans, to the light and the freedom that Kamala Harris wants to offer, could not be more apparent. She walked out in Milwaukee yesterday to "Freedom" by Beyonce. "Freedom, freedom, I can't lose". It is the energy, the spirit, the hopefulness that we needed, and to have been over, my God, these last few years, [00:37:00] being on air to try and convince people how consequential this election is, why it is important to support Joe Biden, how hard it has been to want to support him given everything that is happening in Gaza. A genocide. Right? I was losing faith. I had lost faith. And I can't do my work without it. I've been telling you all for years now, that I carry around, what?, my mustard seed of hope. And I said yesterday, it has blossomed. Because I see hope on the horizon. I believe that Americans are waking up. I believe that people are gathering, that they are breathing, that they are rolling up their sleeves, that they are digging in, and in [00:38:00] whatever community that they find themselves a part of, are organizing. Over a million people in a day donated to Kamala Harris for President. In a day.
Republicans right now are losing their fucking minds, coming up with whatever childish bullshit to say, Oh, they don't care about democracy because this isn't a Democratic process. Miss me with your fucking insurrection January 6th bullshit. Okay? Ain't nobody over here storming anybody's capital, right? We're getting on Zoom calls and raising money, you know, what civilized people do inside of a democracy They're coming out with their "Oh, DEI candidate" and, you know, "cat lady" and you're listening to JD Vance talk to Tucker Carlson and all I can look at is how [00:39:00] pathetic and angry and miserable these men are because there is nothing that is more terrifying to White supremacy and patriarchy than a strong, powerful Black woman and woman of color.
‘It is a train that is never late’- Trump, GOP escalate racist and predictable attacks - Dateline White House - Air Date 7-24-24
ERIN HAINES, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, THE 19TH: You're seeing Vice President Kamala Harris already starting to define herself. And how is she doing that? She's defining herself as somebody who is ready to make the case against a second Trump presidency, casting him as a criminal and a threat to our democracy. She's telling, she's owning her own story.
That is happening as Republicans are resorting to that kind of familiar playbook that John mentioned, where, and especially for former President Trump, who, attacks women by calling them dishonest, questioning their intelligence, commenting on their looks. In some of our latest reporting for the 19th, we're already talking about the racist and misogynist disinformation that's already targeting Harris, and we're just a few days into her campaign, right? It's a train that's never late.
During the primary, Trump called Nikki Haley, former [00:40:00] governor and UN Ambassador, a bird brain. Hillary Clinton was crooked, right? He's maligned Fannie Willis and Antish James, black women prosecutors like Pamela Harris, has tried to paint them as corrupt or incompetent and accusing them of being the racist. These are not new attacks. And these attacks, when Republicans make them, whether it's former President Trump or people on right wing media or, Republican politicians, it always says more about them than it does about the people that they are talking about.
And while it may be a dog whistle to some number of Republican voters that this has worked on over the years, maybe in previous races, it is also a signal. How many women, how many people of color have heard DEI or heard suggestions that maybe they didn't earn the job that they got, or they shouldn't be the place that they're in. That kind of language also galvanizes them.
So I'm sure that Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Adam Kinzinger are trying to discourage Republicans from using that kind of language. Because what it does is it actually energizes folks [00:41:00] for whom that kind of language sounds familiar to get out and vote to reject that kind of language, to reject those kinds of politics.
NICOLE WALLACE, HOST, DEADLINE: WHITE HOUSE, MSNBC: Yeah. And let me just follow on to John's thread about McCarthy's beef with it, 'cause it is distinct from Kinzinger, and Adam Kinzinger had endorsed President Biden. He's been on some of the calls since Vice President Kamala Harris became the defacto nominee. He's Inside the tent, inside the pro-democracy coalition, calling it out the way he sees it. McCarthy, I agree with John, is calling it out because he doesn't think it's politically effective.
Here's a Republican attack on Kamala, on Vice President Kamala Harris. This was sent out by the Republicans. This is the Vice President talking about breaking barriers.
KAMALA HARRIS: So here's the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side. There's breaking involved. And when you break things, you get cut. And you may bleed. [00:42:00] And it is worth it every time. Every time. And so too, especially the young people here, I say to you, when you walk in those rooms, being the only one that looks like you, the only one with your background -- you walk in those rooms, chin up, shoulders back. This is part of what's involved is that we have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won't. And then you need to kick that [bleep] door down.
NICOLE WALLACE, HOST, DEADLINE: WHITE HOUSE, MSNBC: That's the attack on her.
MAYA WILEY, FORMER ASSISTANT US ATTORNEY: Look, the attack on all of us. And what she just spoke -- and I'm sitting here wanting to grab Eddie's hand, Erin, if I could grab your hand, if you were on the set, I'd grab your hand -- we have been cut. When she says that, we have lived that cut. We live that cut as students at Ivy League schools. [00:43:00] We live that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said, Where's the lawyer? when you're standing there behind the government table as an assistant United States attorney. We know that cut. I was the only black attorney in the civil division when I was there. The only one out of 50.
That, what she said, maps to what you just heard from Erin -- and the 19th has been doing excellent coverage on this. They have been telling us -- and I say "they" because I am talking about a certain group of people, a certain group of people who are victimized by fairness, who are victimized by competition from the competent, and who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise. So those of us who have had to be better than mediocre to get cut are so many. And when we saw what [00:44:00] happened -- look, they just attacked Kamala Harris for being in a Black sorority.
So I wore my Delta Sigma Theta colors. Joy Reid might wear hers later. The Divine Nine has 4 million black votes. When you saw that $81 million in 24 hours, that was over 44,000 Black women, many of them Divine Nine. The brothers got together the next night.
I'm just telling you, when Erin said galvanize, exactly right. Because John's point as a point about average voters is true. But see, their foghorn is what's reminding folks that we are not in the America yet that lives up to its ideals. We haven't been, but we made real progress. And when they are showing us who they are, when they calling us colored. Fox News is talking [00:45:00] about colored. Sebastian Gorka called her, a woman, a colored. That's language nobody uses anymore and it's not a dog whistle. It's saying we're going to go back to when you were in the back of the bus. And we're going to tell you that we're going to put government resources to ensuring that white men get protected.
Well, to the extent that there's a grievance, let me tell you what the only grievance is. Anybody who says that this country shouldn't be its better angels, and that we shouldn't recognize actual qualification in a woman of color, and that this -- they have come for our vote. Yes, and I'm wearing my shirt because we at the Leadership Conference have a campaign called "And Still I Vote" because they've also been doing everything in their power because of the browning of America to make it harder for us to vote intentionally.
So instead of trying to get our votes, which is exactly what should be happening here, instead, they're [00:46:00] trying to make white people afraid -- of us. That is what we fought a civil war over and had the second Reconstruction over. And this is what's at stake now. And when she says we won't go back, she's saying, keep on cutting because we comin'.
Final comments on the power of excitement
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Kate Abu explaining the new racial slur DEI. Bad Queers took a moment to bask in the new energy and excitement of the campaign. The Majority Report discussed the difference between Biden and Harris on Gaza. Pablo Torre Finds Out looked at the phenomenon of Kamala being embraced by youth meme culture. Woke AF Daily talked about the importance of hope and Dateline White House laid out the brutal campaign ahead that we need to be ready for.
And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production [00:47:00] crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. To support our work and have these bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes through our Patreon page if you prefer, or from right inside the Apple Podcast App. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I just wanted to reinforce something that has already been touched on today a little bit, which is the importance of enthusiasm. I already talked a bit about the enthusiasm shift from Biden to Harris in a previous episode, but there was more to say that I wish I had already said. A lot of it came up when I heard James Carville—he's a long time [00:48:00] democratic strategist and going way back to the Clinton years—he was on TV last week warning Democrats to sort of temper their excitement a bit, not entirely, but just a bit to recognize the reality of the tough campaign that lies ahead. And maybe there's not actually that much daylight between he and I, when you really get down to it, and he understands that people being excited is good. It's not that complicated. But just in how he's so quickly put on his "realism hat" and adopted a tone of like, "Okay, now just settle down a little bit." It reminded me of one of the starkest differences between the parties.
For a long time now the Republican party has had very little in the way of policies they actually believe in. There's the policy of "we hate immigrants." And then there's the "tax cuts are good by which we mean mostly for the rich." And then, if you dig a little deeper, there are a few other policies [00:49:00] that they'll push for that involve hating or erasing other people like with anti LGBTQ policies or banning Black history, that sort of thing. But still, these are anti policies.
They're policies that revolve around being against someone or something. I really don't have much that they're for. And this is perfectly in line with their campaign strategy, revolving around hate and fear. You know, in George Orwell's 1984 they had the daily "two minute hate" as part of their indoctrination. Today, we have the same thing in conservative media, but it's 24 hours a day.
There is no shortage of understanding who they're supposed to hate and fear enough to elect Republicans who promise to punish or erase those groups of people. That's their version of energy, excitement, passion for the project that ultimately gets them out to vote.
Democrats generally go in the other direction. They try to get support through the old fashioned method of [00:50:00] attempting to run government so that it delivers for people. Then seeing that the government delivered good things with Democrats in charge. People will vote to reelect Democrats. That's the idea. Anyway,
So Democrats tend to campaign on their vision of policies they want to enact and whatever accomplishments they have had that they can brag about. But there's always going to be an imbalance of energy and excitement because some people like me and you might get excited about policy accomplishments. Even I could admit that they're less exciting than those more visceral feelings— whether they be hate and fear or hope and exuberance. The problem Democrats have always had is with underestimating the importance of excitement. Mostly because they don't really know how to generate it on purpose. The way the GOP does know how to push the button for fear and hate to get that predictable response.
Because Democrats don't know how to create excitement, they're also not very [00:51:00] sure what to do with it once it arrives. So here's my one piece of advice: don't tell people to settle down. Policy promises and victories might be convincing to someone who's thinking about how to vote. But excitement is contagious and will bring people in out of sheer curiosity, whether they were thinking about voting or not. A friend recently described some of her extended friends, sending messages, asking "Okay, so like, are we excited about Kamala?" To which my friend responded, "Yes! Yes, we are! Now go and spread the word."
Similarly, I read an article recently about black men who had been leaning toward voting for Trump. Who were then responding to the excitement of the black women in their lives—you know, mother, sisters, partners—and were being pulled back over thinking, "Well, if they're this excited, there must be something to it."
And that is happening across the country, across all groups. Excitement breeds [00:52:00] excitement, excitement breeds interest. and interest brings people in, strengthens the campaign, and converts to actual electoral victories. That's what excitement does.
And it does it, whether it's fully founded on cold logical reasoning or not. There's work to be done. There's no doubt about that. There's always the possibility of high energy, high confidence campaigns can perversely suppress voter turnout when people think, "Well, I, you know, I don't need to vote. It's in the bag." But we haven't had a landslide election in decades. There's really no such thing anymore. And for every person who might not vote because they think, "Well, yeah, how could she lose?" there'll be 10 more people who become volunteers to get out the vote. Who will get people to the polls who never would have gotten there without the extra push, the extra energy the campaign will be able to muster—all derived from the extra [00:53:00] excitement that's being felt right now.
So, if you believe in the importance of Supreme Court reform, if you believe in the importance of fighting climate change, if you believe in the importance of democracy itself, and you're saying "Yeah, well, you know, Harris is okay, but she really doesn't warrant all this excitement."
Look. You might be right, but you are not right for saying that. Right now. And the reason people think to say that on the left is because we don't know what to do with excitement. We don't know how to handle it. We don't know how to generate it. And when it's here, we don't know how to manage it. And we think, ah, but it's really just about the cold, hard logic and think about what's going to be done and think about like, "Yeah, she'll get into office, but we'll still have to fight her on this or that."
Yeah. That's all true. But that's not what gets people out to vote? Fighting for what we really want. That's what happens between elections. Fighting for the [00:54:00] chance to fight for what we want, as opposed to desperately fighting to not lose ground—that's what elections determine. And there's nothing irrational about being excited about Harris' chances of winning and giving us that chance to fight for what we really want throughout her term in office.
MISOGYNOIR DEFINED
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we will face some of those cold, hard realities and the campaign coming up with Deeper Dives on three topics. Next up, Section A: "Misogynoir Defined," Section B: "Misogynoir In Action," and Section C: "The Talk of the Town."
Misogynoir by Dr. Moya Bailey #Jubilee21 - Black Feminist Future - Air Date 12-11-21
So what is misogynoir? Misogynoir is a term I coined in 2008 to describe and better explain what I was noticing around the representation of Black women and gender expansive people in the media. In particular, social media.
The representations of Black women and gender expansive people that I witnessed was limited and negative. It was anti Black, racist, [00:55:00] and sexist, and an outright hatred of Black women and girls. It was so rampant that I coined the term misogynoir to address it. I defined misogynoir as the anti Black racist misogyny that Black women and people read as Black women experience.
So how does misogynoir show up in our lives and broader society? Misogynoir shows up through negative images and stereotypes that have devastating real life impacts on Black women. For example, You might have heard the term, Welfare Queen. The Welfare Queen was a term and stereotype promoted by the Reagan administration in the 80s to disparage Black women seeking government assistance.
The Welfare Queen was depicted as a Black single mother committed to taking down the government through her use of her power. of social services. The welfare queen stereotype successfully convinced the American public that Black women [00:56:00] were the primary users of welfare, hence a burden to society, even though then and now, white people are the primary beneficiaries of welfare.
Public policies to this day, like public housing, education, and healthcare, just to name a few, are created with misogynoir baked into the plans. Another example of misogynoir is the use of drag by black male comedians to portray stereotypes about black women. Tyler Perry's Medea, Flip Wilson's character Geraldine, Shanaynay by Martin Lawrence, and most recently, T.
T. by Blame it on Quay are examples. of this phenomenon. These different characters, while funny to many, are very problematic. Why? They inform ideas that we have about Black women, especially dark skinned Black women. These [00:57:00] characters suggest that dark skinned Black women are unattractive, loud, and Also, these characters have a disproportionate impact on Black trans women, because they imply that Black trans women are not real women, but only men playing drag.
It is a stereotype that leads to deadly consequences for Black trans women. Michaudinois shows up everywhere, in our lives, our families, communities, and communities. and broader society. So we must all commit to defeating it. But how do we do that? We do so by tapping into Black feminisms, by uplifting whole and healthy representations of Black women, girls, and gender expansive folks, and by interrupting moments in our lives where we see misogynoir showing up.
It requires the transformation of all of us. That we be different and transform our hatred of [00:58:00] black women, girls, and gender expansive people into respect, resources, and power. Black Feminism can show us how.
Digital Misogynoir - The Anti-Dystopians - Air Date 9-8-23
Black women have been raising the alarm on digital misogynoir for decades, highlighting how dangerous it is, both to people who experience it online and also because of the ways it motivates offline kind of white supremacist violence. But despite that, the majority of online safety research and policy continues to ignore it.
And it's difficult to find research that focuses not just on race and gender, but the intersections of them. and as a result of that, there is this dynamic where people, um, who experience misogynoir, so black women have to continue to retell their stories and often those stories aren't taken seriously.
So we wanted to create research that documents the prevalence of misogynoir online maps the nature of it. And and that's what the [00:59:00] report does fantastic. So you, you talked a little bit. I know about in the introduction to glitch. So I wondered if, in this report, and kind of in research more in general why is it really important to center race and gender while thinking about online harms and intersectionality kind of more broadly.
Yeah, definitely. I think just in, in case people aren't aware intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how multiple social identities. So things like race, gender, sexual orientation, uh, disability. Will intersect at the level of individual experiences and then reflect these broader interlocking systems of privilege at a macro level.
And it's, it's been introduced and discussed as far back as the 19th century by people like Anna Julia Cooper, but it was popularized in the 70s by American scholar, Professor Kimberly [01:00:00] Crenshaw. and it's incredibly important because if you look at online abuse and online safety through this kind of one size fits all lens, treating everybody as if their experiences are important, you miss a lot of how differently impacted people are and how abuse that is specifically targeted at an identity that's also marginalized by like broader systems in society is going to be more harmful and is going to just be different than abuse that's like generic.
And the responses likewise need to be different and need to take that into account. So, I wonder, so for this report maybe we could talk a little bit about the details. So what exactly, what, what exact platforms where the report looking at more broadly you know, specifically Twitter or Reddit, which is the ones we think about, or just the online overall, and then maybe about what were the harms that were documented and kind of the impact of the existence of this toxicity for black [01:01:00] women and how they, you know, You know, how is it how is it affecting black women and participating in online forums?
How does this lead kind of to online or real world air quotes violence or even kind of the radicalization of of white supremacists. Yeah, thank you for for asking that. So in the research, we analyzed the prevalence of the nature of hate against black women across five different social media platforms.
So three of those were mainstream platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, now called X, and then two smaller high harm platforms. GAB and 4chan. So for those who don't know, those are platforms. They're high end platforms that are known as havens for alt right and white supremacist sort of discussions.
So, we worked with the support of an AI company called TextGain and, and looked at the prevalence of and [01:02:00] misogynoir generally across these platforms. So we looked at almost a million posts, that were in conversation about women on these platforms and found that misogynoir and misogynoiristic misogyny more generally were very prevalent across all five of these platforms.
So both those mainstream platforms and also these high harm smaller platforms we found that 20 percent of the content that we were looking at was highly toxic which amounts to over, uh, a thousand highly toxic posts a day, so that was sort of one of our key findings. And the other sort of two that I'll highlight as well were about the hateful tropes, which Julia mentioned earlier.
So hateful tropes continue to be used to silence and harm Black women, so that's where we see the online and offline sort of effects of this sort of harmful content and this abuse. Uh, what we also found on the kind of flip side of that is that social media is used by and for black women to challenge abuse and to build community.[01:03:00]
So that's something that we saw particularly when looking, at content based on, you know, black women, but we didn't find in a more sort of broader kind of data set looking at white women, for example, or women in general. And then the third finding as well that we found was that misogynoir underpins hateful narratives like white supremacy, antisemitism, and great replacement theories.
We found that on the mainstream kind of social media platforms, so Instagram Twitter, and Facebook, we were looking more at the sort of dehumanizing language and, stereotyping, body shaming, the over sexualization of black women. And in contrast on the alternative platforms, we were seeing more white supremacy and anti Semitic themes.
in terms of, of what Julia was mentioning earlier, with harmful tropes used to silence and we've seen the dehumanizing language and stereotyping long critiqued within black feminist [01:04:00] scholarship. So, black feminist theorists like Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, Bell Hooks, and Dr. Melissa Harris Perry have shown these tropes or these controlling images as an attempt to delimit the potential ways of being a black woman in the world.
And then again, with, um, Dr. Maya Bailey, who we centre, uh, a lot in this, in this research. She brings out, uh, certain stereotypes that she talks about in, in her book, Misogynoir Transformed which looks at black women's digital resilience, which, again, we see mirrors in the findings of our research.
So, for example, the prevalence of the angry black woman, the, promiscuous, highly sexualized stereotype of the, the, uh, Jezebel the fatphobia that comes through the sort of mammy trope. And, in terms of what we saw as the most prevalent trope, it was, was this sort of angry black woman and often this angry fat black woman.
So you have this extremely harmful and often fat [01:05:00] phobic trope which often leads to both the dismissal and tone policing of black women's voices in public discourse, whether that's online or offline. Yeah. I mean, so one of the things you discuss going kind of back to that intersectionality part is , how these identities intersect and talking about black women, but not only just that, but also queer black women as well, and how this relates to the tropes that you were just talking about.
So I wonder if you could discuss more about How, like, the myths of white womanhood and, like, kind of the fat phobia and ableism as well and conforming to this, like, white cis het woman image is motivated or reflected in a lot of the online toxicity towards black women online and kind of how this manifests.
Yeah, absolutely. So, as Hilary said, we draw a lot on Dr. Moira Bailey's book, Misogynoir Transformed, uh, which is really excellent and I would recommend. And one thing that she does, which I think is really interesting, is she [01:06:00] challenges her readers to think of black women first when you see the word woman, and to think of queer and trans women first when you read the term black woman.
That's a call that we kind of adopt and repeat in the report as well. And I think what that does is really interesting because it subverts the dominant way of tending to equate womanhood with white womanhood. So this is something we saw in the data in the sense that a lot of times when people just say women, they're not thinking actively and not centering black women.
Black women were more, more, much more likely to be discussed in terms of their race in the data set than white women were. and I think a lot of racist and sexist abuse will sort of draw on an implicit understanding of white womanhood as a default and specifically kind of white, cis, uh, middle class womanhood.
And so when people deviate from that, they receive slurs [01:07:00] and they receive toxicity and all sorts of different kinds of abuse. this is something that Valencia Adarqua Fari has written about where Black women experience very specific beauty standards, which are often based on Eurocentric, Eurocentric beauty norms.
And if you don't fit within that standard, you're denied femininity and you're just denied respect. So a lot of the abuse that we saw was fat phobic. It would rely on tropes of, of black women as masculine and that's, I think also particularly harmful for black trans women, which are denied their femininity and their womanhood in this way.
MISOGYNOIR IN ACTION
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: "Misogynoir In Action."
“Original Hawk Tuah Girl”- Right-Wing's Disgusting Attacks On Kamala Harris Are Going To Backfire - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 7-25-24
So, have you guys been seeing that the Republicans are, can't help themselves, and are attacking her as a childless cat lady because she hasn't, doesn't have biological children? Uh, they're such freaks. I don't believe you, Amber. I refuse to believe such a thing. I love, I love how much freaks they are, which is great [01:08:00] because, I mean, it's her election to lose then.
That's the other thing, like, Trump is such a terrible candidate, like, it's, it's crazy that Democratic Party was almost able to field two people he was going to beat. But like any Democrat would have, uh, would have beaten him besides the two that they had picked. That's really why Biden got out. Because everyone's like, wait, it wasn't just how bad Biden was at the debate.
It was also like, this guy, we're going to let this guy lap us? It's like getting, like I said, like getting lapped by a pinto. Right, exactly. And like they saw Bob Casey's up by double digits. You know, the, the Senate candidates that are in swing states are up by double digits. And Biden's double digits.
down by seven. Like, it's just insane. Um, well, I guess double digits, I guess. I'm staring in a race. Okay. All right. But thank God that national nightmare is over. This is what something I found funny. So this is a Katie Rogers in the New York times. She got a quote from Doug Emhoff's ex wife because, uh, they've been saying she's not a real mom.
This is like a sign [01:09:00] of like, Like, as a children of, uh, child of divorced parents myself, this is, I can't believe with my eyes, uh, This is what the ex wife of, uh, Doug, uh, Emhoff, uh, Kamala Harris husband had to say about her. These are baseless attacks for over 10 years since Cole and Ella were teenagers.
Kamala has been a co parent with Doug and I. She's a loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it. Now, It's interesting too, because she used to date, what's his name? Not Monty Williams, who I always, it's Montel. Montel Williams.
Montel Williams. Monty Williams is the coach. Um. Not the former, uh, Detroit Pistons coach. Not, not Monty Williams, Montel Williams. And he was like. Gotta clear your ram out, all this sports knowledge. I know, I know. You're probably the only one who would make that mistake. Everyone else would be like, Oh yeah, Montel Williams, the talk show host from the 90s.
And also not to be confused with Montel Jordan who [01:10:00] sang, uh, This is how we do it. Yeah, I was thinking Montel Jordan as well. Another layer to it. Montel Williams was tweeting, like, in defense of Kamala too, her ex, and, you know, people, they're spreading this, uh, the Willie, uh, God, what was his last name?
Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. Willie Brown. So they did date, but it wasn't an affair. I think he was separated from his wife for years when they dated, and he came to her defense saying it's not an affair, we were dating after I was separated for quite a while. I don't know. Have we ever seen such vocal exes of a presidential candidate come out?
And show support for them like that. She must like actually Close out relationships quite healthfully and same with her. I like the republicans taking this line of attack Exactly trump with stormy daniels. We're going to talk about affairs alleged affairs with the with but it's just a way for them to Be misogynist and say she slept her way to the top but like you want to go down that road Let's bring up eugene [01:11:00] carroll.
Let's bring up Uh, Stormy Daniels. The settlement language or some of the testimony from Ivana Trump that was ultimately, you know, not admitted where she claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her before they got divorced, like, there's just a mine of, you know, Material. Of material from Trump, and obviously, you know, other luminaries, Rudy Giuliani leaving his wife who was sick, via press conference, Newt Gingrich, same deal, almost same exact deal.
Right. Um, And also just notably, William, William Brown's like 90 years old, like he really doesn't need to be making like statements to that effect, like good for him for being, being a chiller, even that. You know, the right wing conspiracy theorist though is gonna look at this and go, Oh, she's like Hillary Clinton.
What does she have on them? How is she blackmailing them? I mean, but the obvious thing is like, they don't view it. Like if a guy does it, obviously it's cool. It's fine. It's manly. If a woman, uh, does something of similar stature, she's a sly. That's just how they view things. I mean, you had one Fox guy go on Fox business and call [01:12:00] her the original hawk to a girl.
I could not believe that shit. They're losing their minds, yeah. Yeah, that's what he calls it. On air, on Fox Business. The guy, his whole gimmick is that he runs a fatherhood podcast. How do we Alright, let's let Brandon, we'll give you a chance to weigh in after we play this. Cause this is, uh, uh, Bender is unfortunately speaking truth.
Yeah, and then there's the DEI press secretary telling you that the DEI vice president is the future of the party here. And so the future looks kind of dim for the Democrats here, but this is no shocker either. Kamala Harris. She's the original hock to a girl. That's the way she got where she is. And uh, the party's going downhill if it's in her hands.
That was tough. That was, that was, that was harsh. Yeah. And then there's the DEI press secretary telling That's, uh, one way to put it. That's, uh, So, Fox Business contributor Alec Lace is his name. Never heard of him. Um, Ben [01:13:00] Shapiro was just like, He runs a, he runs a popular podcast called First Class Fatherhood.
Uh, like how to raise your kids as a good father. He's got four kids, apparently. Um, Yeah, I mean, gimme a break. Gimme a break. Those guys had Google. I hope he doesn't have any daughters. I hope out of his four kids. I mean, hopefully he, I mean his sons too, really. But man, imagine being a, uh, one of his kids.
And, uh, hearing this later on in life, what a, what an embarrassment, I'm sure. Uh, masculinity bloggers had, uh, the hak to, uh, uh, Google Arts set for the Hak Tua girl. Yeah, no, I mean, this is what happens when the, you know, the Republicans primary base is like divorced, divorced men in their fifties, 18 year olds who consume too much Andrew Tate and like bloggers, man bloggers, yeah, yeah.
Like, there's so many things wrong with this first, like. And I guess totally superficially, Kamala doesn't really have that kind of energy. Like she does not really have the kind of, you know, [01:14:00] sensual harlot energy that they're trying to project onto her. If you view every woman that way, she's very professional.
You don't see her as a siren calling you into the rocks, Brandon? No, I mean She's not Nancy Pelosi, I mean Yeah, right. She's no Dianne Feinstein. Sorry, sorry, I gotta, you know, I had to, you know, show my love for Pelosi. Uh, I mean These kinds of attacks are just gonna alienate. them from every other type of voter, but divorced dads who buy cyber drugs.
This is like, this is a totally like Elon Musk, uh, targeted ad. Uh, I'm surprised they didn't call her like a mulatris or something, something equally, just completely out of the blue and archaic and, uh, inflammatory. But yeah, I, I mean, they're floundering. I don't understand what they expected to happen when Biden did so poorly at the debate.
You would think they would have had talking points already ready for like, okay, when he drops out and it's Kamala, what are you going to say about her? Like the, [01:15:00] the whole, like there was no primary, she didn't win any votes thing. That's a good line of attack. That's fine. That's, that's, you know, true. Uh, and you could even go harder on that, this stuff about how she's like, you know, a loose woman, she doesn't have kids. Like everyone in America is divorced. Everyone has step to that blended family point, right? Like that is just So that is so relatable to 50 plus percent of people like who have, you know, divorced parents or have, uh, half siblings. That's a big part of America now.
Fox's Kamala Problem - Mother Jones - Air Date 7-12-24
Kamala Harris was Hillary Clinton in blackface tonight. As the, um, affirmative action vice president. But I would say that she probably gets more favorable treatment because of her race and gender. On paper, Kamala Harris is innocent. Everything the right hates. She's an intelligent black woman, second in line to the presidency.
Harris has an accomplished career as a senator and a D. A., she's earned multiple degrees, and maybe worst of all, she has no biological children. By all logic, right wing media should be painting Harris the same way they painted [01:16:00] Hillary Clinton, But worse, because you know, she's black. But outlets like Fox and Newsmax went a completely different direction.
For the last four years, instead of telling their audience that Kamala is some evil political sorceress, that she wants to ruin America with gay immigrants and trans windmills, they've been saying this. She kind of comes off a little Meghan Markle y. She is a really shallow, Uneducated and uneducatable person.
She's like a biracial werewolf. Like a vacuous, incompetent female vice president. They just can't sell one of Montel Williams hoes to the country. According to right wing media, vice president Kamala Harris is a joke. She's a punchline. She's a hoe. She's a DEI hire. That's one of those phrases where even if you don't know what DEI stands for, you know, it's racist.
And none of this is great. It's condescending and degrading and racist and sexist. But that happens to any woman the right hates. But after years of watching right wing media as a job, I've found they sort women [01:17:00] into two categories. Women conservatives don't want to sleep with, because obviously that's her life purpose.
And women conservatives desperately want to sleep with, but never will. One of those is irredeemable in their eyes, and I'll let you guess which one. Now, each of these categories has their own subsections. In the former, you've got your frigid bitches, your ugly lesbians, your woke nags. Villainization is the name of the game, and Hillary Clinton is the poster child for everything that idea stands for.
She's old and stale. She's an over educated bitch who'll castrate you if you let her. I heard she drinks baby blood and started ISIS. Honestly, at this point, I don't know. We should probably execute her. I never said she should be assassinated. What I said be, she should go in front of the firing squad for treason.
To anyone watching right wing media, Hillary Clinton is the antithesis of everything good and moral in the world. And you know she's dangerous. Because you don't get hard when you look at her pantsuits. When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my [01:18:00] legs. I cross my legs every time she talks. Do you really cross your legs when Hillary Clinton talks?
Oh, every time. But no matter what, the coverage usually plays out in one of two ways. Either overt sexualization, or a more subtle touch. Rather than constantly attacking her looks, the right will attack everything else about her. But you know they still would, because they don't constantly complain about her unfuckability.
The conversation is focused around condescension. She's more of a bimbo we can point and laugh at, rather than Hitler's successor. It's the stuff that makes men feel really big and cool. Camilla Harris has now become the jive speaking spokesperson So now we come back to the idea of a Kamala candidacy.
When Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, the stage had already been set. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and every right wing figure you can think of had spent over two decades making her into a supervillain. Hillary Clinton already had so much baggage that it had bled into normal discourse. In contrast, Fox News has had four years to focus on Kamala Harris.[01:19:00]
And the most sinister thing they've come up with is that she's a DEI vice president. Once again, even with no context, it just sounds like a racist dog whistle. Her candidacy would bring outrage. There is no doubt about that. Black women suffer a disproportionate amount of attacks from the right. There she is, acting all gangster.
But when it comes to the influence of right wing media on a Kamala candidacy so far, their only narratives that have truly penetrated the mainstream are her laugh and her ditzyness. She just wants to flaunt it. She just wants to flaunt it. And I think she wants to flirt a little bit. She's more ineffective than evil.
Total diva. Like many vice presidents, Kamala Harris has been a convenient drop off for the more complicated issues that the Biden administration doesn't want the president to be saddled with, at least publicly. This ranges from the border to abortion, and she's definitely been attacked on both of those fronts.
But for the last four years, Kamala has managed to stay clean from those major tabloid scandals that Fox salivates over. Even the latest right wing attacks on Harris have fallen short of their usual frothy barrage of woman hating. It's [01:20:00] very easy to make, say, a DEI higher, but it's almost impossible to do a DEI fire.
Ooh, yeah. You know? They're shallow, which is great if you want to condescend to powerful women, I guess. But if you want to truly influence the mainstream, influence those people who didn't like Trump but also didn't like Hillary, or maybe this time around aren't impressed with Biden, ditzy and cackling don't sound that bad.
I mean, if you're a center right baby boomer who's worried about losing their social security or military benefits to Project 2025, Kamala Harris may as well be the lesser of two evils. And that's something Hillary Clinton could never manage. Because the right strong point. is their long game. It's how Roe got overturned.
It's why we have to worry about Project 2025 in the first place. But when it comes to Kamala Harris, it feels like right wing media has been remarkably short sighted. By not hitting her seriously over the last four years, the national electorate isn't primed to turn against her with Pavlovian ease. They don't have a trigger phrase like Benghazi or a sticky nickname like Crooked Hillary.
Right now, there are already moves [01:21:00] being made to attack Harris if she's the nominee, but so much of this messaging is pushed by the right wing media. Those two parties are clearly not on the same page. At least, not yet. The whole cackling idiot narrative is the one that's stuck, but pundits are definitely going to go back
and look at their old lines of attack, sharpening their focus on her sex life or her woke policies or something new altogether. But they've got a lot of ground to make up. Even as Harris's importance in this race skyrockets, Fox is still struggling to villainize her properly.
Vivek Ramaswamy's Bold Prediction Blows Up In His Face - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-28-24
We anticipated this about a comma Harris that there was just going to be a difficulty in running against her. There was going to be a difficulty in running against any Democrat with only three or four months in which to build narrative. But in particular, in terms of, of Harris is going to be even more difficult because the Republican party and it's sort of media apparatus.
And by that, I mean, almost the Republican party, the, the, the, there's not a lot, a huge [01:22:00] daylight between, you know, there's a reason why like three of their senators have podcasts that are almost indistinguishable from, you know, Ben Shapiro's. Fox news is really, is literally like, you know, Sean Hannity is Trump's advisor.
I mean, there's, there's, there's not a lot of daylight here. And they're inclination is to call her a DEI candidate. I mean, they had to be when you're a leader of the House has to go to fellow lawmakers and say, guys, don't be overtly racist or misogynist. You know, you have a problem because they don't ever want to be saying that they don't ever want that reported that they had to say that, but they had to because not saying it would have been even more problematic for them.
And even Vivek Ramaswamy who himself is a person of color has to sort of like figure out like how do [01:23:00] I criticize her without raising this and it's sort of like, well, maybe I can just, keep talking about other black people maybe and that will scare here is a Vivek Ramaswamy on Hannity.
Spittin bars? Last night. Well, have some fun. See you on the trail. But guess who's gonna replace Kamala Harris? They don't know what to do here! So, look, I say this as somebody who, a year ago, predicted Joe was not gonna be the nominee. I'm gonna predict that Kamala Harris is not gonna be the nominee either.
And the reason is if they get one shot, they're gonna take their absolute best shot that they can. Who is it? That's totally not Kamala Harris. Who's that? This, Well, look, I think, I think there's a lot of open possibilities. I would not write off the possibility that it ends up being Michelle Obama. She checks off the same identity politic boxes, and it's going to be somebody who's maybe above the fray that doesn't create the same kind of infighting that could debilitate their party.
So Barack is The reality, Sean, though, is [01:24:00] The Brock is the is is literally leading the charge, trying to keep his, you know, keeping plausible deniability and then his own wife takes over. What do you call that? I think it's I think you call it realism, Sean. The reality is they're gonna take their best shot.
They waited till after the RNC convention. That timing is optimal for them because it gets closer and closer to the eventual election. They're going to drag this out. I predict through the Democratic nomination convention at the DNC in late August. I think Michelle Obama is not off the table. I don't think so.
What Democratic Party infighting is he talking about? I think it's honestly like they're just trying to pretend like there's a lot more dissent than I mean, no one No one could have predicted. I mean Into your credit you said there was going to be a lot of enthusiasm people are going to be so excited But I mean even still No one was going to predict a hundred [01:25:00] million dollars in, uh, you know, 36 hours or whatever it was, no one was going to predict zoom calls with 150, 000 people, 40, 000 people, 30, 000 people, nobody's going to, I mean, because zoom kept crashing.
Yes, because of the enthusiasm. And we should also say that if Michelle Obama does become the nominee at the convention this, uh, latest piece of news would have been a masterstroke because, of course, this is what's called lulling them to sleep. This is what you have to do when you're running a shadow campaign, right?
A shadow campaign for Kamala. even have the audio? Might even be worthwhile. Well, At least here we have the endorsement, office of Barack and Michelle Obama. This week we got to catch up with a friend, blah, blah, blah. We couldn't be more excited for her or more thrilled to endorse Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
And right after Biden [01:26:00] withdrew the polling from CBS showed that 79 percent said Kamala Harris should be the nominee, 21 percent said someone else. And that was July 21st through 22nd. So snap polls were now July 26th, so this was a 48 maximum hours after Biden had dropped out already nearly 80 percent of the party had wants her to be the nominee.
So they're just wish casting because they want to be able to say she's a man again or something like that. Well, I think, I think. Although they'll try that with Harris. They'll try that with Harris. They're, you know. And so, you know, their whole world view, or I should say their perspective that they've been telling their audience.
For years that, um, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama have been Marion netting. Joe Biden, Joe Biden's not in been the president. that's really been Barack Obama behind the whole thing. That [01:27:00] storyline just played out. It just finished. They failed. We don't need to play the video phone call I mean, it's sort of cringy to be honest.
Yeah, that's sort of that was my only opposition. It's it's kind of it's kind of We're not trying to dampen enthusiasm for kamala harris here, right? I mean, look. Barack Obama for many of us was a disappointment. and/or more in across the board. It is a different Democratic Party today.
But candidates are still going to if if there's a the West wing story line that they can do or character arc or that type of dialogue they're going to engage in it because it appeals to certain groups of people but. Vivek has been making this prediction about Michelle Obama for like a few months at this point So this is how he's trying to build up his podcast audience. He's not going to diverge until the the die is cast.
Matt Walsh is FREAKING OUT over Kamala Harris running for president -The Serf Times - Air Date 7-29-24
He's mad about everything getting too racist. You already have pledged democratic convention delegates have endorsed They're not racist enough. Kamala Harris who said Monday in her first campaign remarks [01:28:00] As a presidential candidate that she knows how to take on Republican Donald Trump.
Um, She, uh, Harris has been quickly consolidating support around her day old bid for the Democratic nomination for president. With seemingly all of her major potential rivals rallying around her less than 24 hours after Joe Biden announced he was bowing out. Okay, so Harris has locked up a majority of the delegates.
She has all the donors. She has all the endorsements. Um, All of her potential challengers have kissed the ring. So she's the nominee. You know, barring some unforeseen event, which you certainly can't bar, as we, as we have learned. But barring that, she's the nominee. You may remember all the way back to yesterday when Harris was claiming that she would do everything she could to earn the nomination.
Well, turns out that process took about 12 hours. When she said that she'd fight for the nomination, she meant that she would wait 12 hours and then announce herself the presumptive nominee. And now after a long campaign of half a day, uh, she's, she has it all sewed up the whole thing's a farce. Of course, it was a coordination from the very beginning.
Um, nobody of any note on Democrat side had the balls to say anything about it or challenge [01:29:00] it or in any way, you know, no one was going to throw their hat in the ring. But I suppose the good news now is that Republicans know that it's going to be Harris. They can play the game. They can game plan now accordingly.
And, uh, And boy have they ever. Especially the pundit class. I have just seen a outpouring of the weirdest and grossest shit. Just fucking fast and furious. So much of it happening so rapidly that like they actually had to have people step out. Like, you know, GOP fucking head executives coming forward and being like, Can y'all just tone down the racism?
It's, uh, it's pretty aggressive. Maybe the sexism too, a little bit. Yeah, obviously. I mean, I don't think they've realized that, like, you know. Vice President Harris emits mom energy and that mom energy is what a lot of people are tapping into for the whole mama law and the memes and all that kind of stuff like that.
Uh, it's really bizarre to try and take that and then turn it into, yeah, but she fucked and sucked her way to the top and that's why she [01:30:00] doesn't have kids and blah, blah, blah. And Laura Loomer being like, yeah, her uterus is broken and polluted and stuff like that. I was like, I mean, fucking, just keep going, you weird freaks.
Just, just keep going sicko mode. Just, again, unbelievably alienating, you know? Not, not just to half the population, uh, that you were denigrating, while you speak like that, but also, uh, to, you know, men who are, who are, Also disgusted by this who are also reviled by this constant dehumanization of women and wanting to police and control their bodies and remove their autonomy and all that kind of shit.
Like there's enough people who are just reviled by that very concept alone, that the fact that you are all lean into it, uh, I think will be disastrous for them. I think it's going to take a smart game plan to beat her. Like I said, the overconfidence on the right right now is, is very concerning We can make all the jokes about Harris that we want, and I've made plenty of them.
I'll continue to make them because it's fun to mock her. She deserves it. But it is going to be a challenge. And if you think that Trump is just going to [01:31:00] stroll easily into the White House now, then see, he's doing this a couple of days later, by the way, what happened initially was a bit of a panic mode and like Trump is still in that panic mode.
He's still tweeting about Joe Biden and being like, when is Joe Biden going to wake up and realize that like he has to actually run as the vice president and shit like that, because the playbook was pretty simple going forward. Joe Biden's way too old to be a presidential candidate. Uh, he is, uh, clearly, uh, in, uh, the middle of a cognitive decline.
And at this point, uh, you know, it's a disgrace that they're even trying to, uh, say that this man can maintain and continue to be the president for the next couple months, let alone for the next four years. Then when he drops out, the entire playbook is thrown out, and it's like, well, what do we have on Kamala Harris?
The cop stuff isn't gonna work because we're definitely not gonna be able to go to the left of her on crime. That one won't do it all good with our base. We could do the usual, just you know, birtherism, she [01:32:00] isn't a real American because she's not white, but people are a little more savvy to just the, you know, fucking outright racism of all of that.
Uh, we could go the sexist route, I guess we'll try that out. We'll play in that arena at first and You know what? Fuck it. Racism too. Racism and sexism. We'll just start smashing those buttons and see. And then it's like, okay, all right, y'all, y'all went a little too aggressive. Let's dial that back. It's not looking as exciting as it was before.
There seems to be this enormous groundswell right now, not only breaking historical U. S. fundraising records, I believe it was like 60 percent of people who donated the day of that historic day were new to the First time donos. So that's like, uh oh, that's, whoa, there's something else going on here. If you look at TikTok, it's like, well, it's somehow just complete, uh, I don't know, uh, Don over?
Donald over? Does that work? Don over? But either way, TikTok, it's cooked in terms of like, they are just outwardly pouring out all memes , and I know it doesn't really make sense [01:33:00] to the right, but like that, they've lost that. So what route do we go now? What's the next strategy? And I think you're delusional.
It's going to be, it's going to be a fight no matter what, and it could be a very difficult fight if the Democrats are smart enough to play this right, because they have a chance to rebrand Harris as she moves into the spotlight. This is, and there's been moments like this now on both sides where you have this.
Uh, historic thing that happens, and if you play it right, you can use it as a reset button and Kamala Harris more than anyone in politics needs a reset button. So this is a time to set the narrative for both Republicans and Democrats. There's a it's it's the whole race has changed, and so there's gonna be a new narrative.
Um, and and one side or the other is going to decide what the narrative is. That's the way it goes. And whoever sets it successfully will probably win. There are some concerning indications that the Democrats are concocting what might be, uh, an effective strategy. [01:34:00] So I'll play this one moment from Harris's address.
They're scared, you know? You can really feel how everything changed. The wind's completely transformed. Cause like, up until the RNC, especially after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, They were full confidence mode. Jack Bezeby aka Nwoken is too, right? Just straight up like replying to, you know, liberal, uh, pundits and stuff like, Your time is coming, get ready for the wall, kind of stuff like that.
Like, you could tell they had this in as a Sherlock. This, this was a done deal. There's, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Uh, yeah, I mean, J. D. Vance is a risky pick, but whatever. We have, uh, confidence in our fearless leader. I'm sure he won't lead us astray and pick some couch fucking weirdo. Let's get him out there and let's, uh, let's start this whole process.
And then after that week, it was only right wingers and far righters who actually really cared about the assassination attempt. Everyone else was kind of like, eh, on to the next thing. Uh, and now the fact that Joe Biden has stepped down. Completely taken all of the oxygen out of the room in terms of all their ability to really, you know, [01:35:00] maintain and push the narrative.
Now, the, the, again, the media has done what the media does, which is it follows the story, and the story now is of course this movement of hope. Of change. Kamala. Mamala. What's going on here? What are all these kids with coconut tree emojis in their names and why are they posting all these memes? And I don't quite understand.
What is this? Skibidi? Coconut tree? Well, uh, yeah. Sure. I mean, whatever, whatever it takes, right? At this point? Rest, we're campaign staff yesterday. Here's a line and you're going to hear this line 70, 000 times, so, you know, get used to it. But, uh, between now and November, you're going to hear it over and over and over again.
Especially because we know one thing we know about Kamala Harris is that is that when she stumbles on a line that she likes She will, even if nobody else likes it, but this is the strategy. You're going to do the same thing that the RNC did. Do you know that the RNC strategists are the ones that created the entire coconut tree pilled revolutions shit.
Like they were the ones that first put that clip out there. And [01:36:00] even before anyone even had like a hint that maybe Kamala Harris could change course and, and really change, uh, you know, us electoral history here and perhaps be way better than her predecessor before any of that kind of stuff came along.
I remember seeing that clip and just sharing it with friends and being like, You know, I hate Cop Mala, but I gotta admit, this clip's funny. Like, I don't know what she's on, what beautiful cocktail's taking place here, but I really hope that she shares it with, like, the world, you know? Just, just one of those things, because like, just like, not only is she having a great time, this seems like, you know, a post, uh, brunch mimosa moment.
Uh, it's, it's kind of endearing. I'm no fan of hers, but it is certainly endearing to hear her talking about, You think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context in which you live and all that came before you and you're like
Who talks like this? And who talks like this that is also very pleasant, who talks like this, right? Like, I can see someone who's just like, [01:37:00] deeply, deeply obsessed with philosophy to be sitting there and then being like, Did you know that you exist in the context of all in which you live and that which came before you?
And I'd be like, yeah, sure, um, I guess. I do want the fries with the burger though. Uh, but in this case, it's like, ah, well that's a slightly humanizing moment, right? And that slightly humanizing moment has been turned into an entire movement, an entire meme factory, and now they're doing the same thing.
TALK OF THE TOWN
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: "The Talk of the Town."
What's Kamala Harris REAL Political Record? - The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini) - Air Date 7-6-24
San Francisco has a reputation for being like a, tech dystopia nightmare, but don't forget people outside of San Francisco that were also corrupt, but we're corrupt in a stupid way.
Kamala Harris got elected as district attorney in 2003 in the wake of a corruption scandal called Fajita gate. I love that. Some cops had a fist fight. Some off duty cops had a fist fight over a bag of take out fajitas outside of a bar in the Marina District, which is one of the lamest, most bougie, [01:38:00] posh neighborhoods in town.
Yeah, they spent way too much on those fajitas. and then there was a cover up of the fight, and it was in that area. Somehow out of that scandal, we get Kamala Harris as DA. Locally, she was known as super smart, but like not a progressive reformer in terms of like issues around truancy of students You know, supporting locking of young people.
She was not sympathetic to the city's sanctuary policy and supported coordinating with immigration agencies around people who are undocumented, who got caught up law enforcement situations. But as she rose, she like, like they do sort of, you know, move to the main line of the Democratic Party and stayed with it, which, fortunately has for the most part, moved to the left over, over.
Well, one of the interesting things she did is she was endorsed by the police union when she was a DA, and then declined to seek the death penalty for a cop killer. Which is great. I mean, that's like a low, low bar in my opinion. I mean, we're leftists, that's a low bar, but still she [01:39:00] lost the endorsement of the police union because that, and they were incensed and that was a whole thing.
As also attorney general of California, she went after banks for their unfair mortgage practices, predatory practices, went after for profit universities, oil companies like Chevron and BP for illegal practices and environmental damage. Under her tutelage and her terms, California was the first state to adopt body cam policies in 2015.
She launched implicit bias trainings. And then also had like a database for, people who died while in custody She pushed for a moratorium on the death penalty later while she was in the Senate. So it's interesting. And this, I, I'm curious about your thoughts on it. Cause the whole like Kamal is a cop.
Kamal is a prosecutor. I understand that. And that's very true. And generally we don't like prosecutors. But. I do think that compared to a lot of folks, her familiarity with the justice system and the ways it does and does not work for most Americans, and particularly, obviously, black and brown [01:40:00] Americans, poor Americans, that I think could be a positive, like that could be a plus for her, right?
Considering what we've seen, which is, politicians who just say, you know, rattle off. Yeah, fund the police, fund the police. And I'm not saying she won't denounce, defund the police. That seems to be sort of like a barrier to entry of the Democratic Party if you're going to be in leadership. But I do think she has more intimate knowledge of that.
And so where Joe Biden has done fuck all around criminal justice reform, I could look to Kamala to actually do something much more broad sweeping, much more impactful. I mean, I know body cams and taking a database and, you know, implicit bias training, that's all like mealy mouth lib shit, but that was years ago in the state.
And so I, I actually think that would be helpful for her in the future, but I'm curious on your thoughts. You know, we can hold the contradictions, we can recognize that like, at the moment we have a, a better hope to have a united front to stop fascism and you know, clear eyed that the fucking job [01:41:00] of the president of the United States is to be a competent manager of a capitalist war machine.
Um, and I don't expect. the president of the United States to not be that. So I want to get the best version of that that I can get. And it's not like I'm not mad about the ways that they're not, but I also reckon, you know, it's like you know, California is a like Republicans are boxed out, boxed out of state politics.
and, you know, Republicans can't get above 35 percent of any statewide race. And yet we're still having, huge, huge challenges getting any kind of like, sort of squad type political challenger through the Democratic Party within California. So it's like, if we can't get a true, like, uh, Ilhan Omar type elected to Congress, from Oakland or, actually, actually, we may, we may be able to, we may be about to, because Latifah Simon is as close as it gets.
She's, she's probably. And [01:42:00] Latif is fantastic. But we can't get like in San Francisco right now, everyone, you know, people like people are running for mayor with different versions of pro cop politics in San Francisco. So it's like, it's disappointing that our politics are what they are, but I'm not going to be mad at the president when, we, we can't.
We can't, you know, contend for power at even at the most basic local levels.
Kamala Harris's Party, Divided Over Israel - Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast - Air Date 7-29-24
we're a week into this new race, Joan, how's that going? How is she motivating these, these specific, uh, groups of voters? Well, you know, Matt, I think she's been doing it for quite a long time. I, you know, I, I think that her, uh, trajectory really changed with the Dobbs decision. When she went, um, you know, she was the administration's Top surrogate on reproductive rights and, uh, really took to the campaign trail, uh, for the midterms, uh, really gets a lot of credit, [01:43:00] including from Joe Biden, as well as, you know, reproductive justice groups for, for leading the charge and for making sure that that midterm, uh, was not, there was no red wave.
Uh, it was an amazingly good midterm for the Democrats. So I think, I think a lot of it started there. Uh, and I think even before, uh, before my piece came out, I think Christopher wrote a piece showing while her overall poll numbers were lagging, you know, she was seeing a rising popularity among black voters, for instance, um, paradoxically or not, black voters had always favored Biden over Harris and that, and that had changed.
Um, she gets a larger share of, she's, she's, you know, the race is tied and it was always Practically tied with Biden, but he was doing worse in the swing states, but anyway, she's getting a larger share of the women's vote than Joe Biden was, uh, in, in the polls I've seen in the last few days, um, as [01:44:00] well as younger voters.
So, you know, all that was starting even before. Joe Biden stumbled and I obviously wasn't prescient, but, uh, I just saw that she was out on the campaign trail a lot. And I was really fascinated by exactly what she was doing, not just the repro justice. Stuff, but gun violence, you know, she, she's, she heads the white house office of gun violence prevention.
Um, you know, she's on the road touting the Biden Harris economic opportunity agenda, specifically talking to black voters, um, you know, in, in swing states, uh, she was already doing all of that. And then. Joe Biden had his disastrous, uh, debate performance. So, uh, you know, I was, I was very lucky to be basically writing that piece as, as he melted down.
So, right, right. Sort of transitioned us to this new moment, that piece. What about you, Christopher? You're, you're out in California [01:45:00] for Politico. Obviously you've been following, uh, the vice president for some time. Are you. surprised by how she's been received over the last week, this apparent bump in the polls, these specific voter groups that might be warming to her in a new kind of way.
Um, what, what's your sense over the last week or so? I'm not surprised. And the main reason for that, as Joan said, is it's very hard as, as vice president to kind of turn around older. Narratives about you. And I think, um, you'd talk to friends, you talk to people in the party, you talk to people who basically people who don't pay very close attention and they say, well, you know, I, I like the vice president, but I just don't see a lot of her.
And part of that is basically they're, they're, they're just not watching and vice presidents don't get covered in the way that, uh, in anywhere close to the way that presidents do. And she was, she was out there like three to four. Days a week. She was doing tons of [01:46:00] travel for the last couple of years. I mean, really the whole vice presidency.
And so a lot of that was just, it just took a while for, for some of that to set in and for people to, um, to notice her. And then obviously once you're, once you're the nominee, she was always the. By far the best positioned, um, Democrat to, to take over in an event like this. I mean, there, there really weren't many others who could do it, especially on such a short timeline.
And so, um, a lot of this is, is just people kind of seeing. Um, things come into fruition that have basically been happening, um, for months and months, um, maybe even years. And, uh, if you go back, I guess I'll remind folks that some of these communities that she's spent the most time campaigning to, um, those were folks that she was focused on even before, uh, Biden picked her.
Um, it was, it was sort of this, this summer of Floyd and there, there was a lot of unrest out there. [01:47:00] Um, The media she was doing during that veep steak, she was very much focused on, on, um, voters of color on young people. And so this has been, um, this has been a long time project. What about those older narratives on Harris, Chris Christopher, you mentioned vice presidents that aren't out there a lot.
So we don't. Here thing. So, you know, my memories of her in terms of the, the, the media chatter, the Twitter chatter, uh, was that she's at least from the left, the criticisms from love that she's a cop. And this is what we heard about her when she ran for president in 2020 called her a cop. Um, based on her background as a California attorney general, San Francisco district attorney is, is that, uh, as, as that criticism cropped up, uh, over the last week, this, this, uh, idea that she's a cop and that's a bad thing.
And, you know, if so, does that criticism still have the same sting to it that it might've in 2020? And is, is it even accurate based [01:48:00] on her record in California, Christopher?
There's a lot there to unpack. I mean, a lot of the criticism she's getting right now, and that's really starting up in earnest from the Trump campaign and from Republicans is basically that she was this very liberal, uh, DA and very liberal AG and trying to sort of lump her in with this sort of new class, new generation of progressive prosecutors.
Um, that's, A pretty inaccurate picture. Um, she was basically sort of ahead of her time in terms of re entry programs. Um, in terms of trying to sort of, uh, you know, she, she would always say she wrote this early book called smart on crime, so not to be tough on crime or soft on crime, but to be smart on crime.
And it was kind of her philosophy on, on approaching this and, um, you know, giving people a second chance. Um, and that. That was really kind of missed in the Democratic primary in 2020. Um, and now you look at [01:49:00] these criticisms from Trump and Republicans. They're basically trying to lump her in these, um, far, far more progressive, uh, DAs that have emerged really since her time.
Um, and she doesn't quite fit in, in any way really in that, um, category either. And so, it's, it's a difficult thing to sort of pin down. But I think you already saw around the selection, we wrote a lot. When she was picked as the vice president, some of the, some of the loudest voices at the time who were critical of her record, who thought that she was on the left, who thought that she's, um, uh, sort of.
Uh, too aggressive, too far right as a prosecutor had already dialed some of that back. Um, and, you know, we're really sort of coming to grips with her record even when she was chosen. And so the public is sort of catching up with that conversation now. One of the more critical things about this race, this presidential race might be Be how Kamala Harris handles the [01:50:00] continuing violence in Israel and Gaza, and now Lebanon.
Ah, that situation is shifting every day politically and her remarks and her actions are being analyzed to see if there's any space between her and president Biden. So last Wednesday, uh, prime minister. Benjamin who made a trip to DC dress Congress. The vice president skipped that address and we'll play a clip Uh, for speaking to reporters in just a second, but Christopher, how was that move seen?
And how just in general, did she handle that situation? BBs in town, Republicans, uh, are invited him and, uh, all of this, uh, is going on meanwhile over in Israel and Gaza. How did her skipping the address and then handling it out? And then what she said afterwards, how was that received? And how do you think she, she handled it?
Yeah, I think, um, this [01:51:00] is an, an example, I think, for, for months now that we've watched and, and certainly we've watched a lot closer in terms of how she will handle these major issues and how she might handle them, um, Maybe even in the margins differently than Biden has, um, what her approach might be. Uh, I would not expect her on the vast majority of policy, uh, to stake out much of a different, uh, position than Biden on the whole, but there is a difference in the nuance.
And I think her kind of handling or even, even sort of the, the approach and the body language and the way she, she, she looked at Yahoo. Yeah. Um, uh, in addressing him, um, in this gaggle with reporters, I think was, you know, parsed almost to ridiculous levels. Um, and so, uh, folks are looking at that. I mean, this is something that, uh, Donald Trump has taken [01:52:00] numerous shots at in his last couple rallies.
Um, he's, uh, said several things that are, uh, certainly not true that she, uh, you know, doesn't care about that. Uh, Jewish people, that she's, you know, a poet, anti Israel, all these, these sorts of things that, um, that are not true, and at the same time, as you, as you mentioned, she's gotten a lot of pressure, a lot of, uh, focus, um, from, um, from the other side here, and so, um, there has not been a great deal of distance, I guess there's, there's one sort of Uh, anecdote in the, in the longer, uh, view here of this story where, uh, she had a speech and came out and said, um, there should be, uh, a ceasefire.
And there was sort of a, a few second pause. And then she came in and, and sort of gave the, uh, conditions, which are pretty much in line with the, the administration's at that point. Um, and so it's, you know, we have to see where this goes, but I think, [01:53:00] um, you know, I think so far there hasn't been a lot of daylight, um, but, but people know, um, that she's, she's, she's conveyed her concerns, certainly for civilians, um, there, and she's tried to sort of, at least around the margins, rhetorically, uh, maybe is seen as, um, as, as showing, uh, more concern there.
Trump is Toast - The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich - Air Date 7-27-24
Kamala has been endorsed by who, who this week? Everybody. Yeah, everybody. Everybody. Olivia Rodrigo, who's a pop star. Teachers, teachers.
I mean, it runs the gamut. Well, all the politicians finally came around, the Democratic politicians. Uh, I was worried a little bit. But, you know, the big hero, it turns out, of the week is none other than Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi is the person who made the deal. I mean, she is the quintessential, talented, backroom, not in a negative way, I'm using the backroom in a positive way, politician.
She is. She's the whisperer. [01:54:00] She got Joe Biden to agree to step down. She got the Democrats to agree to endorse Kamala Harris. She, uh, she really is a champion. And President Biden's speech on, whenever it was, Wednesday night, what'd you think of it? I thought it was exactly what he needed to do. It was only 11 minutes.
So I was kind of, it was, it made me sad because here's a man who, Uh, has to, and had, has had to face his limits, his limitations, his decline, uh, and the fact that he just can't do the job anymore. And so Well, he can do the job currently. He just can't go on again. Well, he can do it, and he will finish his term, and he certainly has enough, uh, in his kind of memory bank and his, and his capacity to finish the term, but he could not do it Do another term of office.
I think that's the main Takeaway, and I thought he was gracious. Mm hmm. He was [01:55:00] gracious last Uh, last Sunday, uh, when he bowed out, uh, he's been extraordinary. When he called into the campaign headquarters, uh, that's really when it got to me. When he, when Kamala Harris was there in the campaign headquarters in Delaware talking to people, uh, giving them a pep talk and he calls in and he has COVID and he says, you know, that's the way to go and, uh, calls her kid.
Yep. Um, I mean, I, I was touched. It was very touching. He was on speakerphone and she was there. You know, reacting to him and very authentic and there was love, the word love was used multiple times. Well, I think they are not scared of using that word and I think it's genuine. Um, now how about Donald Trump and J.
D. Vance? Speaking of genuine. A lot of love between them. Yeah, it's been so fascinating. So that pick, do you think, I mean, we've heard a little bit this week. Was that, was J. D., I mean, was J. D. Vance the right pick? The answer is no, but was it the right pick for them for the reasons they think? No, I don't think so.
Yeah, it's interesting. I think they thought they were going to get, well, number one, [01:56:00] young, a young person. Yes, they got somebody who's half the age of, literally, exactly half the age of Donald Trump. Uh, they also wanted to get somebody who would be reinforcing the base, the message to the base. And that seems like what he does.
I don't see any new people heading their way because of him. No, he's not attracting anybody who's not already MAGA. He is sort of MAGA plus, MAGA on steroids. Uh, and that is a problem for them. I mean, how are they going to attract women? Hopefully they don't. The entire, you know, as we talked about before, at the entire Republican convention was a kind of macho, MAGA, man, you know, tough, wrestling, brr, hulk.
Uh, well, um, It's, uh, it, it turns out that with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, uh, this is a mistake because of, how many more voters are there in America who are women than men? Three million. Three million, uh, and I think they're going to be out in great force. Oh, I think so, too. [01:57:00] And suburban women matter in swing states.
And this is going to be big. Yeah, so J. D. Vance, you know, he would, it made sense, it made sense, I think, in their mindset where they thought they were going to trounce Biden. But this is interesting to watch. Whoopsie. Well, it's very, it's particularly interesting because Kamala Harris in her first week, the themes that she has been using, I am a prosecutor, she says, and I.
I'm used to dealing with people who have abused women and have broken the law and are, you know, felons and have cheated. I know his type. I know his type. She keeps saying. And this is, but this is really ingenious. And then she can move on to, she hasn't yet, but she can move on to women's rights over their bodies.
Uh, she has, it, it gives her a really strong platform, uh, in which she has a great deal of credibility. And J. D. Vance, all these quotes he's been saying that are coming out [01:58:00] that are truly horrific that say things like, you know, childless cat women out there. He called her a childless cat lady. Yeah. I mean, what kind of, this is, the Republicans, I mean, these two Republicans, Trump and Vance, let's call them Trump Republicans, they are digging a hole for themselves in terms of fear and anger, uh, and fear and anger will take you some way.
But as long as Kamala Harris and whoever she picks for Vice President are on the side of hope and joy and it's morning in America and, you know, we can do it and we're going to look for the future, uh, that's a winning formula. But it's so disparaging and it's so misogynistic. Uh, the, the Trump, Trump fans.
is, yes, it's misogynistic and it is also, part of it is, uh, is also isolationist, uh, in terms of foreign policy, uh, it's, uh, it's a, it's a kind of [01:59:00] xenophobic, uh, anti foreign, uh, I don't think it's, it's certainly not the future of America. Uh, and it's certainly not uplifting. Mm mm. And this anti people without children who haven't given birth to children.
This is echoed in Project 2025, by the way, which talks about men and women who have families as being Well, Vance has not given birth, I don't think. No. And Trump has not given birth. No, I think As far as I know A lot of the presidents that we've had, turns out, have not given birth. I don't think a single president we've had has given birth.
I don't think Well, let me think. Let me think. But so Washington Madison? Monroe? Monroe may have, no. No. Keep going. Dolly Madison? No. No. She's a stepmother, but I mean it is just so disparaging and they are leaning into this and it's disgusting to watch. This is the family, this is the evangelical right.
That's it. This is the whole notion that there is a right way to have a family. Yep. And if you don't do it the right way, then you are somehow sinning. Oh yeah. Yep, yep. Well, here [02:00:00] again. An aberrant. Well, this is again, this looks back. This is, this is America in the 1920s, 1930s. This is not modern America.
It's certainly not the future of America. No. And I don't think a lot of Americans want this. I don't think so either. But let's hope they do. See it see it for what it is and show up and vote accordingly. I think they will now again Let's go back to the notion. This is a hundred days starting tomorrow until the election.
Yeah These days these weeks that we are in now are critical in terms of Kamala Harris and her vice president defining themselves defining the Democratic Party, defining the future for America, uh, inviting people to join them even if they are independents. And as we know, there are more independents than there are Republicans or Democrats.
Uh, and so, uh, what they've got to do, and I think they are off to a wonderful start doing it, is painting the future of America in, uh, color. In a way that people say, yes, I [02:01:00] want that.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Black Feminist Future. The Anti Dystopians, The Majority Report, Mother Jones, The Serf Times, The Situation Room, the Brian Lehrer show and the Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening.
Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet. Ken, Brian, Ben and Andrew for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting.
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