I hesitated to write this because it’s just so damn ugly. I certainly don’t want to. But these are the deplorables that our supposed “president” has 100% committed to, so we can’t pretend they don’t exist, or that their words aren’t being circulated.
Obviously, as a strong Black and South Indian woman, the deplorables are driven to a frothy rage by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris. They are spawning a growing list of sexist and racist slurs. Their current favorite? “Joe and the Hoe.” Here was Amazon a few days ago, before they cleaned house of this garbage:
Lest you think this was an effort from the deplorable fringes of the putrid conservative movement, it wasn’t. As the New York Daily Newsreported, “Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh used his radio show’s massive reach to push stories about vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a ‘hoe’ and a ‘mattress.’” The conservative opinion magazine, The American Spectator (no link, fuck them), wrote: “It is no secret but public knowledge that Kamala Harris slept her way up into California political life by being a very public escort and mattress for California Democrat Kingmaker Willie Brown.”
The reality is that she was briefly romantic with Brown, who had been separated from his wife for 10 years. Who gives a shit? Are conservatives really going to try and talk about sex and infidelity given who their president is? The guy who cheated on his wife, who was at home with a baby, with a porn star, then bribed the porn star to keep quiet about it? The guy who bragged about grabbing women’s pussies without consent? The guy with multiple wives, all of whom he’s mistreated?
Of course, hypocritical misogyny is just part of the conservative anti-Harris playbook. There was the Republican mayor in Virginia who said that Democratic nominee Joe Biden “just announced Aunt Jemima.” A Trump national delegate leapt to the mayor’s defense:
“This is what I do because our Bible is at the ballot box against socialism, which is vile evil, which goes along with identity politics, which is nothing but racist thinking from within itself,” he continued, then added “When you subdivide and categorize citizens by the color of their skin it is racist. And to assume that everyone who would see that post would think it’s racist is racist within itself.” [Emphasis mine.]
And if you go deep into the fever swamps of the right, like 4chan or conservative Facebook groups, “Camel Kamala” is fast becoming a favorite. Not sure why, though. It’s clearly intended to be a racist slur, but are they confusing Indians with Arabs, or are they confusing camels with elephants (the actual animal sometimes used for transportation in India)? Either way, they are dumb as rocks. Racism and stupidity do, indeed, go hand in hand.
As ugly as all of this is, what truly stands out is how little they actually have in their efforts to tar both Biden and Harris. Sleepy Joe? Camel Kamala? Those slurs may be stupid or ugly, but what they aren’t is effective.