Do you know how they’re going to come at you?

First, this is the tweet I’ve been waiting for all my life, or really five years, but it feels like a hundred:

The GOP standard smear operating procedure is to hit on one or two pseudo-scandals and hammer them home endlessly, until clouds and shadows appear, or at least until there are enough meta-stories about how while this isn’t really a scandal the fact that people think it’s a scandal makes it a valid issue because the views of the Common Clay of the New West must not be dismissed out of hand by people who are really into sopressata and mid-century modern etc. So we had Swift boaters and the whitey tape, and the long form birth certificate and Hunter Biden’s laptop, and of course the Platonic Ideal of the genre, EMAILZ.

Right now the scream machine is in overdrive, looking for a scandal that does not exist, so it will be necessary to invent one (h/t Voltaire).

Candidates:

(1) The DEI candidate. Of course they tried this with Obama back when you said “affirmative action” instead of DEI, but Harris seems like a very poor target for this. Unlike Obama, who did have a fairly thin political resume in 2008 for a major party presidential candidate, Harris has held high profile elective office for 20 years now, creating a long track record of accomplishments, after a successful career as a line prosecutor, prior to become San Francisco’s DA. I mean they’re still going to go with this because throwing some racism into the Republican meme machine is like tossing a bowl of Colombian into a Led Zeppelin afterparty in 1973, but as a line of attack I would say it’s pretty weak sauce.

(2) She has a weird laugh. “Weird” here just means hey look it’s a woman! Since misogyny is an even stronger force in this context than racism (h/t Karen), the sheer absurdity and pettiness of this kind of thing doesn’t preclude from becoming something Fox News will mention 1,743 times in the next 100 days.

(3) She’s Not a Real Mom. A feminist colleague of mine who may wish to remain anonymous pointed out to me recently in a related context that, in the standard patriarchal model, all women are either wives/mothers or whores, and Harris does not have any biological children. For the last ten years she’s been the stepmother of two children, who were 20 and 15 at the time she married Doug Emhoff, and she apparently has a great relationship with them, but she’s not a Real Mom as these things are calibrated in fundie land. This kind of thing is pure red meat for the loathsome Trumplandia base, but in a post-Dobbs/look out for Griswold next environment it seems like an incredibly risky thing to emphasize. If the scream machine does it anyway it will be largely out of some combination of desperation and it just can’t help itself.

(4) Closely related: She’s a slut who slept her way toward the top. The basis for this is that Harris dated Willie Brown for about a year around 1994-95, when he was at the end of his 15-year term as speaker of the California house, and was running for mayor of San Francisco. Brown appointed her to a couple of commissions at the time, and it’s an unfortunate detail for propagandistic purposes that he was still legally married, although by that point he had been separated from his wife for 12 or 13 years. Thus to call his relationship with Harris an extra-marital affair is an abuse of the term, since the relationship was out in the open and Brown had long been married in only a purely formal legal sense. An even thinner reed upon which to construct a slut shaming narrative is that Harris dated Montel Williams for a few months in 2001, after Williams was divorced. This again will be an extremely tricky line of attack, given that in recent centuries the idea that it’s OK for women to have sex even if they’re not married has become widely accepted outside of fundamentalist religious circles, and the GOP knows that Dobbs etc. has been blowing up in its face. But, as with the case of the childless Career Woman line of attack, it’s going to be very hard for the right wing in general, and Vestal Virgin Donald Trump in particular, to resist going there, although in Trump’s case I expect it will largely come in the form of the sort of sleazy innuendo he loves to slime people with.

(5) She’s not really a Christian, because she was raised as a Muslim, specifically the Hindu type of Muslim, where they have thousands and thousand of gods, rather than the theologically approved three-in-one combo package. Again, we’re in dangerous territory here, but if the GOP gets desperate enough in the fall I don’t doubt they’ll start trying to hammer this one in some way or another.

In any case oceans of slime are going to be flowing very soon, to the extent they aren’t already, and a key question will be: How much will the mainstream/elite media launder this stuff, by doing meta-stories about the “controversy” that has arisen about the existence of these stories, with the discussion in respectable venues being not about the stories themselves (heaven forfend!), but about the stories about the stories, in good postmodern Zizek fashion.

But we know all this is on the way, because that’s how the right wing works, and it works that way because they’ve been rewarded for it, over and over again.