We certainly anticipated some of the attacks. We knew that upon the announcement that Senator Kamala Harris would be the VP nominee, that we would hear that she was the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, we knew we’d hear that she was “angry,” “uppity,” “disrespectful,” all the words one is prepared to hear whenever a woman climbs to the highest pedestals of power, and we knew we’d hear dark whispers about her past. But given that Kamala Harris is a woman of color and an immigrant, we should have anticipated a return to how the whole Trump-MAGA thing started, with birtherism 2.0, newer, less shameless, more fact-free.

We don’t want you to have to link to the article and support this bullspit “journalism,” so we’ll pull a couple of sample arguments out to give you a taste. The link is in Kurt’s tweet.

It is beyond disgusting that @Newsweek has allowed its pages to be used as the opening shot of birtherism 2.0. I have been embarrassed by many things my former employer has done and become, but this is the first time I have seen racism appear in its pages. In the *office*, yes. https://t.co/YLQuWwuTeX

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) August 12, 2020

 Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a “natural born citizen”—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.

“Nonsense,” runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as “Pants on Fire” false, Snopes rated it simply “False,” and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it “False.” All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.

Correct. She was born in Oakland, she is a natural-born citizen of the United States, that is the end of the argument for all Americans not associated with the MAGA movement, which is “post-fact” America.

The author goes on to admit that it has been the official position of the US government that citizenship attaches at birth for decades, but then goes on to argue that this wasn’t the position when Harris was born:

Granted, our government’s view of the Constitution’s citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute “birth on the soil no matter the circumstances” view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris’ birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries …

Perfectly pureed racism. The MAGAs are now going birther again, showing the entire country what the MAGA head movement was always about. It has always been about racism, from its very inception in the birther movement and it continues today unabated. Now would be a good time to remind readers that in March the New York Times published an article stating that the US intelligence services anticipated that Putin would fan the flames of racial intolerance as a strategy for the 2020 race. It would seem that many have been ready to push that strategy enthusiastically.

They’re openly doing birtherism again https://t.co/EGG3DUn64P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2020

Birtherism, Harris-style, 2.0. We should have known.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom