You Can’t Spell Hatred Without “Red Hat” - Kamala Harris Edition

Kamala Harris declared her candidacy for President yesterday, and it certainly didn’t take but a nano-second before the haters were out on social media in full force. Since I'm writing about hateful MAGA stuff today, I'm throwing this post in because I can.

Mostly it was lefties playing on variations of “she’s a cop” or “she’s a corporate shill.” And then there were the folks who dragged up the long-since disproved saw about Harris using an affair with a married man (Willie Brown) to launch her political career.

But leave it to a conservative twit named Jacob Wohl to create a birther conspiracy about Senator Harris. Dude apparently hasn’t read the 14th Amendment. But that won’t stop the unhinged MAGAts from spreading the word.

https://twitter.com/JacobAWohl/status/1087736259517108224

Why I am writing about this?

https://twitter.com/pjrocks/status/1087743232706895872

Please don’t take this post as an endorsement of Kamala Harris. I might like to hear what the candidates have to say before I make up my mind.

CNN, which is almost always the first network to get played by right wing propaganda, didn’t disappoint.

In a now deleted tweet, talking head Chris Cuomo called for both sides “to get all the facts out there and resolve the issue... The longer there is no proof either way, the deeper the effect.”

Really?

Simon Maloy at Media Matters gets it right:

Cuomo’s tweet got slammed by Twitter users, so he backpedaled and angrily insisted that he was only demanding that Harris’ accusers back up their allegation. Even if you were to grant Cuomo this explanation, he still presumed that there could be anything more to this story than a famously disreputable troll hurling racist nonsense at a Democratic presidential candidate. After absorbing enough criticism, Cuomo deleted the tweet, explaining: “The tweet was meant to put onus on accuser. Not Harris. That is the lesson of birtherism.”

That is not the lesson of birtherism. The Obama-era birthers never came anywhere close to proving their accusation, and it didn’t matter one bit. The only thing they cared about was getting people to treat their obvious bullshit with a modicum of seriousness. The country’s most famous birther was challenged repeatedly to back up his outlandish allegations about President Barack Obama; he never did, but flogging the racist conspiracy theory made him a hero to the political movement that eventually elected him president.

The larger problem here is that there are influential figures in the press who bafflingly, incomprehensibly still don’t understand that there is a right-wing propaganda machine that exists solely to extrude disinformation in the hope that it will filter up through the media. Cuomo likely believes his treatment of this new-wave birtherism is high-minded and fair; it never occurs to him that he’s giving the trolls exactly what they want.

While I’m at it… MAGA History

...via the Hill Reporter

To honor Martin Luther King, the Colorado State Senate introduced a bill to commemorate his birthday. The bill was also meant to celebrate the career of,  “Wilma Webb, who championed the bill that made MLK Day a Colorado holiday.”

One lawmaker, however, was left offended by the measure. Lori Saine, a Republican from Firestone, went on a rambling narrative about the lynching of conservatives.

Saine claimed, “We have come a long way on that arc since the Reconstruction, since whites and blacks alike were in nearly equal numbers lynched for the crime of being Republican.”

Finally...Via Newsweek

A historian slammed Vice President Mike Pence on Monday for comparing President Donald Trump to celebrated civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. 

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, appeared on CNN Monday to discuss the vice president's recent attempt to align Trump's efforts amid the partial government shutdown with King's historic work for civil rights. Zelizer said Trump's policies are staunchly opposed to what King represented. 

“Look, the policies of this administration, from the border wall to voting rights restrictions, are antithetical to absolutely everything Martin Luther King fought for,” Zelizer explained. “Having Vice President Pence invoke Martin Luther King for this deal [regarding border security], or anything else, really flies in the face of his memory.”