John Scalzi posted his thoughts on the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris yesterday. Most importantly, he's up for it: she was his #1 pick in 2020.
At point four in his post, he lists what he calls her "disadvantages," but which we all recognize as the disadvantage of her existing in our country:
Bluntly, she’s a black woman running for president in a racist and sexist country where straight white men freaked out so hard at the Obama presidency, and the possibility of Hilary Clinton back in the White House, that the majority of them voted en masse for a felonious grifter in 2016, and then did it again in 2020. Do not kid yourself that the majority of them will do anything but in 2024, either. The question is how many of the straight white women they will take with them when they do.
(You may or may not think this is a reductive observation, but if you do, I suspect you may be a straight white person who decided not to vote for Clinton “because of her emails,” or because she was “unlikeable,” or whatever, i.e., you were looking for any reason not to vote for the candidate who was actually qualified for the job, in order to vote for the unfathomably shitty person the other side hauled up out of the incompetent depths, who had no platform besides his own cretinous id and still does not. It’s 2024, I’m done pretending that sexism and racism, implicit or explicit, aren’t huge fucking motivators for the white-people vote here in the US. You can rationalize it however you like; I understand it’s important for one’s self-image to do that. I’m not inclined to buy into the rationalizations any more.)
The current iteration of the GOP has been mask-off racist and sexist for some time, and Donald Trump sets the tone for the party on this score. Be expecting the whole array of nonsense from them, from dog whistles to flat out racist and sexist shit, said out loud, and also all over the former Twitter by Trump’s pet fascists and/or Russian bots. I guarantee you it will be nothing Kamala Harris has not heard before, but you might see a couple of new ones. The GOP outsourced their policy making to The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, which is already deeply unpopular, probably because it’s terrible for anyone who is not already a billionaire cryptofascist with a cross fetish. The GOP can’t go after Harris on policy grounds, and Trump doesn’t do policy anyway. So expect endless variations of she’s an uppity black woman for the next several months.
Laugh at the people who say Harris is unqualified, or who try to slut-shame her, or who posit that she can't run because her parents were immigrants. Their candidates are far less qualified (one proven as such while in office for one term!), their presidential candidate is a rapist, and their hatred of the 14th Amendment is grounded in racism.
They deserve nothing more than our derision.
As Mehdi Hasan said on Twitter,
Multiple European and South American democracies have elected female leaders. The idea that America ‘isn’t ready for a woman president’ is dumb and is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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