With President Biden‘s announcement on Sunday that he would no longer seek the Democratic party’s nomination in the 2024 election, Republicans found themselves facing the likelihood of running against his preferred replacement: Vice President Kamala Harris. And, while they freaked out a fair amount over the shakeup, right-wing influencers still managed to start attacking their new target with misinformation.
The falsehoods, faked images, and innuendos that Donald Trump loyalists are currently trying out against his potential new opponent tend toward the sexually lurid. His voting bloc is quite interested, for example, in footage and pictures of Harris with TV host Montel Williams at a Los Angeles charity event in 2001, when the two briefly dated. (Williams had just divorced his second wife, while Harris would marry her husband, Doug Emhoff, in 2014.) It’s a random bit of trivia that surfaces now and then, usually to Williams’ annoyance.
But MAGA propagandists have used the clips to suggest that Harris is only where she is now because of her relationships with famous and powerful men — and, bafflingly, that she has connections to Sean “Diddy” Combs. The hip-hop mogul has been sued by multiple women for sexual assault and is under investigation for sex trafficking (he’s repeatedly denied the allegations), yet there is no proof of any association between him and Harris (or Williams, for that matter).
One user on X (formerly Twitter) with nearly half a million followers posted a red carpet video and claimed that Harris had attended “Diddy parties in Los Angeles,” referring to the rapper and entrepreneur as “the music industry’s Jeffrey Epstein.” Combs, however, does not appear in the footage, nor did he organize the event in question, which was the Eighth Annual Race to Erase Multiple Sclerosis. (Williams was diagnosed with MS in 1999.) QAnon promoter Dom Lucre, once banned from Twitter for sharing graphic child sexual abuse material only to have his account quickly reinstated by site owner Elon Musk, pushed the same false Diddy claim based on the non-incriminating video, with the post racking up more than 150,000 likes.
In a since-deleted tweet that was filtered for hate speech, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went a step further, falsely alleged that Harris “was once an escort” and got her start by “giving blow jobs to successful, rich, black men.” Loomer drew attention to Harris’ relationship with California politician and future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in the Nineties; that decade, he appointed her to two state administrative boards. But Loomer went astray again by implying that Harris dated Williams at the same time as the second woman posing in the 2001 video with him. In fact, that’s Williams’ daughter, Ashley Williams.
Other attempts to smear Harris are just as easily debunked and even less subtle. One photo shared in pro-Trump circles on social media appears to show Harris posing with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It’s an edited version of a picture in which Harris stands next to Emhoff, her husband. (The altered version is at least several years old.) Lucre also disseminated images purporting to show Harris standing near convicted sex offender and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s annual spring ball in New York in 2012. Although Maxwell did attend this event, there is no evidence that Harris, then serving as Attorney General of California, was present. (Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of authentic photos and videos of Trump with Maxwell and Epstein).
The manipulated media weaponized against Harris also includes a deepfake video of the vice president delivering an apparently slurred, nonsensical speech in which she says, “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today.” The clip first emerged last year and was made using footage from remarks she delivered at her alma mater, Howard University. Needless to say, she did not utter what you hear in the deepfake — the audio was taken from a TikTok that parodied her speaking mannerisms.
Most insidiously, some conservatives are mounting an argument that recalls Trump’s “birther” attacks on Barack Obama as they seek to bar Harris from running for president at all. “Kamala Harris is not eligible to run for President,” a 2020 election denier tweeted on Sunday, in a post that has garnered 34,000 likes. “Neither of her parents were natural born American citizens when she was born.”
As fact-checkers have been pointing out ever since this falsehood gained traction when Biden selected Harris as his running mate in 2020, Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is therefore a natural born citizen as defined by the U.S. Constitution, regardless of the citizenship status of her mother and father, respectively born in India and Jamaica, at that time. Nevertheless, there have already been hints that right-wingers want to portray her as a foreigner: U.K. politician and Trump ally Nigel Farage, for example, called her a “Black African woman” in an interview.
If this opening barrage of sexism, racism, and fake ties to Diddy, Epstein, and Maxwell is any indication, Harris will be battling a formidable misinformation machine if she becomes the official candidate. Then again, any Democratic nominee hoping to defeat Trump would have to deal with absurd lines of attack. The difference is that, as a woman of color, she seems to have brought out especially ugly currents of hate in the part of the electorate that wants to restore Republicans to power. There’s no telling how much worse it might get.