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We Traced The Smears Against Kamala Harris To Birthers And Neo-Nazis


A New Racist Campaign Against Kamala Harris Is Taking Shape


Not long after Sen. Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden’s record on race during part two of the first Democratic debate last night, a barrage of tweets questioned her race and US citizenship. While these claims erupted into national prominence last night, in part due to a quote-tweet from Donald Trump Jr., falsehoods about her have long been simmering in fringe conspiracy and neo-Nazi circles.

Just as Barack Obama’s US citizenship and background became a full-fledged conspiracy theory — promoted at the time by Donald Trump — Harris has also been targeted with disinformation questioning her race and legitimacy as a US citizen. Obama birther conspiracy theorists and prominent neo-Nazis, including Andrew Anglin, have questioned her eligibility to run for president, and she’s been labeled an “anchor baby.”

In fact, Harris was born in Oakland to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, and is eligible to run for president.

“Seeing the tweets declaring that Kamala isn’t black enough because her parents are from Jamaica and India, I had an immediate flashback to the 2008 campaign,” Shauna Daly, who led the fight against online smears on the Obama campaign, told BuzzFeed News. That campaign faced an early wave of rumors about Obama’s race and religion, which later coalesced into false claims about the president’s birthplace, whose most famous champion was Donald Trump.

The senator’s campaign didn’t comment on the claims after being contacted by BuzzFeed News. However, Harris herself is alert to the pattern and made a connection between claims made about her and Obama birtherism in a February radio interview later broadcast on CNN.

“This is the same thing they did to Barack, this is not new to us,” she said. Harris said “powerful voices trying to sow hate and division among us. And so we need to recognize when we’re being played.”

Last night’s tweets, some of which were amplified by bots and in one case by Trump Jr., gave a new level of exposure to earlier claims propagated by fringe websites and discredited figures such as Jacob Wohl and the virulent neo-Nazi Anglin.

As documented by social media researcher Caroline Orr, Harris’s presence in the debate led to an onslaught of tweets that claimed she isn’t black, was not born in the United States, and was raised in Canada. (Harris went to high school in Canada, but otherwise lived in the US.)