TRUMP SHOULD HOPE THAT KAMALA HARRIS DOESN”T BECOME THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE

…Senator Harris takes on the other 20+ Democratic candidates

Our Senator, Kamala Harris has risen to 2^nd place in some polls

It was probably expected, but it was totally disgusting just the same, when President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted an alt-right commentator named Ali Alexander, stating, “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

In sharing that message to his millions of followers, Trump Jr. tweeted: “Is this true? Wow.”

He then probably found out it wasn’t true, so he deleted the message.  That way he could say that it was “Just a mistake”.

Sorry Don, “That dog don’t hunt!”

Kamala Harris has said for years that she's 'proud of being black', but she doesn't call herself an African-American because she's half Jamaican and half East Indian.  She instead refers to herself just as “an American”.  No one that I have heard from has ever heard Kamala refer to herself as being descended from black slaves.  But you can bet if Kamala starts moving up in the polls, that untruth will probably be thrown at her by the GOP as they threw the Benghazi issue continually at Hillary.

“This stuff is really vile and everyone should speak out against it,” Lily Adams, Harris’s spokeswoman, wrote on Twitter.

But what was immediately a positive response was that a number of the Democratic candidates, competing with Ms. Harris, many of them immediately went after the president son’s comments.

• Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a presidential candidate, called the attacks “racist and vile.”

• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote: “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this and we stand united against this type of vile behavior.”

• “This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama,” Ms. Adams, said in an email to The Washington Post. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”

• Other Democratic primary opponents reacted to Trump Jr.’s comment.  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted: “Donald Trump Jr. is a racist too. Shocker.”

• South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg wrote: “The presidential competitive field is stronger because Kamala Harris has been powerfully voicing her Black American experience. Her first-generation story embodies the American dream. It’s long past time to end these racist, birther-style attacks.”

• “The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted shortly after. “We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it’s within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, was one of only two black candidates in a field of two dozen candidates, she had a history-making moment on the debate stage Thursday night when she challenged former vice president Joe Biden over racial issues.  This was what brought on the attacks against Senator Harris.

But as the positive reaction to her debate performance poured in, so did the racist attacks on social media, where some accused the California Democrat of not being black enough.  Others suggested she was not really an American as did Donald Trump in his “birther” attacks on President Obama.

On Twitter, some comments suggested Harris was unfairly portraying herself as African American, which she hasn’t done, since she is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.

But by Saturday, Harris’s campaign spokeswoman had retweeted nearly a dozen comments and articles defending the Senator, and a number of Harris’s 2020 Democratic challengers forcefully condemned the attacks on social media.

Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist who studies the spread of disinformation online, noted on Twitter a surge of related anti-Harris tweets that were posted within minutes of each other in the middle of the debate.  “Efforts to attack Kamala Harris’ race have been around for a while, but a huge volume of tweets pushing this manufactured narrative appeared right after Kamala pointed out that she was the only Black woman onstage.”

At Thursday’s debate, Harris had told Biden that his past stance against federally-mandating busing black students to white schools was personally hurtful because she had benefited from that educational opportunity as a little girl.  Afterward, some people on social media falsely claimed that Harris couldn’t lay claim to the afflictions of African Americans, which she really didn’t do.

At a recent campaign event sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Harris spoke about growing up and realizing that people treated her mother with less respect, only because of the color of her skin.

“I remember people looking down at my mother, assuming she was somebody’s housekeeper and treating her like she was a substandard person,” Harris said. “She was a housekeeper, as she kept our house, and she happened to also be a breast cancer researcher. There was an assumption that this woman had no power and should be given no power.”

“I realize now that I made a decision at a young age,” she said, “that I’m not going to let anybody do that to anybody else.”

No one knows how far Senator Harris will go in her presidential campaign.  But she has shown that she could probably stand up to a bully like Trump, and he should be concerned if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

Copyright G. Ater 2019