Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21 and endorse his vice president turned that hostility into a torrent. Within hours, far-right forums were awash in scathing accusations aimed at nearly every aspect of Harris’ identity. Analysts are calling it a smear campaign led by the most intolerant and most threatening elements of Donald Trump’s MAGA world.
For example, former adviser to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka, told the right-wing British media outlet GB News that Harris was “a disaster whose only genitalia and skin color are different”.
Extremism watchdogs say the backlash offers a glimpse of what Ms Harris could face if she wins, fearing it could lead to a resurgence of the far-right, similar to what happened after the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, exacerbated by factors including social media and deep polarization in the country.
The attacks fit a pattern of research showing that female candidates, particularly women of color, face online harassment and intimidation while running for office at all levels, from school committee to the Oval Office. Analysts say intimidation campaigns increase the risk of real-world attacks from violent far-right elements — concerns that take on urgency as thousands of Black and brown women across the country vow to organize on the streets to encourage votes for Harris.
“She represents what it means to aspire to a multiracial democracy, a feminist democracy, and they don’t want that,” said Alexandria Onuoha, a researcher at Suffolk University in Boston who studies extremism that targets black women and girls. “It’s not just about the vice president anymore. This is the big leagues now. It’s going to get even more aggressive.”
Harris’s career is a mishmash of ideological extremism: the mixed-race daughter of immigrants who grew up to become California’s attorney general, then the U.S. senator and eventually the White House.
Neo-Nazis have attacked Harris’ Indian and Jamaican ancestry and hurled anti-Semitic slurs at her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff. Opponents have called her a “cop” because of her time as a prosecutor. QAnon-style conspiracy theorists have portrayed her as part of a deep state cabal and spread fake photos of Harris with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, Christian nationalists have painted her as a Jezebel, a biblical symbol of female wickedness. Lance Wallnow, a prominent pro-Trump Christian nationalist, responded to Harris’ rise by saying she “embodies the Jezebel spirit in a more sinister way than Hillary does.” [Clinton] She’s going to bring in the racial element and she’s young.”
Mainstream conservatives have also played racist and sexist dog whistles: Some Republican lawmakers have mispronounced “Kamala,” for example, and spread conspiracy theories about her rise. At MAGA rallies, T-shirts and bumper stickers mock Harris with slogans that suggest she engaged in sexual acts for political gain.
“This is the kind of thing that comes with being a woman of color on a campaign trail,” said a Harris campaign staffer who also worked on the 2020 primary, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitivity of the campaign. “It’s kind of a testament to the fact that the Republican Party itself has a race problem, and it’s pretty obvious.”
According to a Washington Post analysis, online discussion of Harris among prominent right-wing politicians and influencers increased nearly six times the usual amount during the first two days of her campaign. Topics of sex and race dominated the conversation, with dozens of right-wing influencers sharing vulgar sexual remarks about Harris on social media. The spread of a falsely debunked theory that Harris is unfit to be president on citizenship grounds soared after Biden endorsed her as his running mate.
“X and Telegram are basically random, and you see a ton of conspiracy theories on there,” said Freddy Cruz, a researcher and program manager at the Western States Center, an anti-extremism watchdog group. “It seems like a new conspiracy theory is born every hour.”
The campaign against Harris has borrowed heavily from an earlier campaign that targeted Obama, the nation’s first black president.
Another “birther fraud” conspiracy theory has gone viral online, with a photo of Harris’ purported birth certificate and a post refuting the argument that she is ineligible to run because her parents were foreign-born, despite Harris being legally eligible to run and having been born in Oakland, California, have been viewed millions of times.
Other commenters stoked racial divisions by claiming Harris isn’t really black and suggesting her Caribbean roots make her unrepresentative of black Americans — a tactic also used against Obama, whose father is Kenyan.
“They are very aggressive in latching onto unfounded accusations and continuing to repeat them,” Cruz said. “With Obama, it was about skin color and religion. We’ve seen a lot of attacks on Vice President Harris that are based on conspiracy theories that mix racism and sexism.”
Extremism researchers warn that online and verbal attacks could influence local unrest, pointing out that right-wing unrest over President Obama’s election has reinvigorated an anti-government militia movement that had been largely dormant since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by far-right extremist Timothy McVeigh.
“When President Obama left office, we would have expected some dip because enthusiasm typically wanes when a Republican returns to power,” said Amy Cooter, a militia expert at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. “We didn’t see that because Trump legitimized the fears of militias and people on the right.”
Cooter said far-right militant groups remain active and organize prominently on social platforms such as Facebook. That changed after a pro-Trump mob led by extremist groups stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The double whammy of social media platforms cracking down on extremist accounts and a sweeping Department of Justice investigation that has resulted in more than 1,000 convictions so far has forced many militant groups to go underground or hide in encrypted apps.
One exception is the white power movement, a sect of the far-right that has resurged at a time when others have dispersed or faded from view, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group. White supremacist groups have held spontaneous demonstrations around the country, often carrying swastika flags and handing out fliers with messages like “diversity means less white people.”
Recent scenes include Nashville, where white supremacist protesters have spread propaganda and disrupted city council meetings this month. Photos show a man wearing a T-shirt that read “white supremacy” giving a Nazi salute. In Michigan, local news outlets reported that about a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell this month. People were also photographed chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump!” on a nearby freeway overpass.
Analysts said they couldn’t predict whether these groups would step up their efforts against Harris, but said the idea of Trump running against a Black and South Asian woman would provide a common rallying point for different factions with different goals and tactics.
“The reason is simple: she’s a black woman in a position of power, and they’re afraid,” said Onuoha, the Suffolk University researcher. “They believe that any woman of color in a position of power is trying to take something from them.”
Last month, Christian nationalist pastor Clay Nash told worshippers in Boise, Idaho, about a dream he had overlooking the Democratic National Convention, which, for some reason, was being held on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
Nash said the spirit of Jezebel “shot him right through the brain” in a dream, and boasted that a friend, knowing his long-range shooting skills, recommended him as the right person for the job.
“How many of you know that a shot to the brain is fatal,” Nash asked in a video of his remarks. “I think we’re trying to disable Jezebel.”
Such visions and prophecies are central to the independent charismatic wing of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a subset of Nash’s Christian nationalism, which scholars describe as a rapidly growing anti-democratic movement that preaches that far-right Christians should control all aspects of government and society.
A report released last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extremism watchdog group called the NAR “a new and powerful Christian supremacist movement that seeks to transform the culture and politics of the United States and countries around the world into a calamitous authoritarian one.”
Some NAR leaders have pushed back against describing their goals as violent, arguing that their focus on “spiritual warfare” is metaphorical, not literal — a stance that analysts say gives them plausible deniability if radicalized followers attack.
Consider the example of Nash’s fantasy of killing Jezebel: The pastor never says in his sermon that the demon in his vision was a representative of Harris.
But among Christian nationalists, the vice president has repeatedly been branded a racist “Jezebel,” a description that “is used as a stereotype and a control over black women and black female sexuality,” said Callie Gaspard Hodgwood, a sociologist at Tulane University whose doctoral research focused on Christian nationalism.
Nash was asked by The Washington Post to comment on the vision and whether he still has violent dreams about being shot to death at political events in light of the assassination attempt on President Trump. He responded in one email with the sentence, “I have never said or preached anything like this at any time.” The full video of the sermon remains on the Clay Nash Ministries YouTube channel.
Gaspard-Hogewood said her biggest concern is that with just weeks to go until Harris is formally nominated at the Democratic National Convention, extremist or volatile supporters will rethink the vision Nash expressed and interpret it as a prophecy that must come true.
Gaspard Hogwood said the dehumanizing portrayal of Harris as an evil, power-hungry demon resonated with pro-Trump Christian voters who have embraced a spiritual warfare narrative.
“Portraying her in this way is both satire and a warning,” she said.
