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Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
I meannnnn trump has a $83mm defamation judgement against him and he’s currently claiming that Harris isn’t actually black.
Politics is dirty and Trump loves it in the mud.
I think there is a legit question of whether she is black. She is just as much black as she is white. If someone described Kamala as white, I think people would say you are crazy.
What does it mean to be black? Is it ethnicity and if so how much? Is it experience? Is it “she looks black”
The point is that while Kamala really SHOULD be vulnerable on that front, it's Just Not Done to question the blackness of a claimed-black politician, particularly if you're not black yourself.
Trump, characteristically, does not care what is Just Not Done. I doubt the pearl-clutching about it is going to hurt him, even if questioning her blackness isn't a winner either; by now that Trump does not obey (often progressive-defined) social conventions is pretty well baked in.
Harris has a greater claim to being black than Obama, since Obama grew up with his white mom and grandparents. That Harris is not acculturated to Black struggles because her Jamaican father was an academic who mixed with polite company instead of living the black experience is only mildly inconvenient for Harris.
Harris does not LOOK black. Her hair is flowing, she is so pale she doesn't even count as high yellow, and she talks like AOC instead of Cori Bush. Harris has little claim to the black experience even in California, and to her credit she is not running on her blackness the same way Obama did (maybe because Obama is a deft operator whose political presentation is unmatched since Bill Clinton).
Besides and lets be real here, is running on blackness a win condition? Harris is aware that the balancing game of democratic turnout and normie turnoff does not favor evoking MLK tier struggles, much less the poisoned Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan style polemics that Blacks actually paid attention to. Ibrahm Kendi has thankfully been relegated to the dirt where he belongs, so the dems at least do not need to listen to him as much as they had to during 2018-2021.
She grew up in Berkeley and Canada.
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Didn't her parents split up when she was young and she grew up with her indian mother?
Shit, really? I keep seeing paeans to Donald Harris plastered across Reddit, especially that black and white photo of him carrying Kamala as a baby. Guess I fell victim to the narrative shaping.
In which case then Kamala has the same case to black identity as Obama. Mother raising a child in the mothers culture with no input from the sperm donor. Any 'blackness' these miscegenated monocultures pretend at is a construction formed in university for social purposes.
Obama at least sported a fro and played basketball. Does Harris make a single pretense at black presentation?
this is from a bit over a year ago, kind of a weird thing where she went and bought some records. to me this comes across badly because why are you buying these basic albums only now?
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/vice-president-kamala-harris-vinyl-records-haul-1235325660/
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She went to high school at Westmount in Montreal -- I guess she might count as relatively 'black' (maybe even 'poor'!) in that crowd, but 'rootless intellectual' is probably a better description.
I think she's somewhat estranged with her dad actually? He issued her a public spanking for leaning into the stereotype of Jamaicans being heavy pot smokers, anyways.
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