Mother Jones illustration; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP
In Michigan, a key swing state, Republicans are mounting multiple smears against Vice President Kamala Harris. Most notably, they’re falsely accusing her of not caring about antisemitism, being soft on terrorism, and planning to confiscate guns and arrest gun-owners, if she becomes president.
These accusations are being hurled in a medium that often is off the national political radar screen and that frequently escapes fact-checking and rebuttal: mailers. In presidential contests, these pieces of campaign literature delivered by the US Postal Service are usually targeted to specific groups of voters and mainly deployed in swing states. Voters elsewhere can collect their mail without being barraged by this crap. With less scrutiny applied to these assaults, political operators often feel more empowered to resort to lies and extremist rhetoric within these communications.
A Michigander—who happens to be Jewish—sent me several mailers received by his household. The first, sent out by the RJC Victory Fund, a super PAC associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, depicts Harris laughing at the threats of “antisemitism at home” and at “terrorism abroad.” It declares she “does nothing” when there are “attacks on the Jewish people.” It adds that she appeases “antisemitic protestors” and is “weak” and “incompetent” when it comes to protecting Israel. The message: She is bad for Jews.
These are misleading and insulting attacks. They are also absurd. Harris has been part of an administration that has supported the Israeli government, as it has conducted extensive and brutal warfare in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in response to the horrific Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The Biden-Harris White House has also not publicly objected to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration last year created the first-ever US National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. One of the leaders of this initiative is Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, who is Jewish. To suggest that Harris doesn’t care about antisemitism is silly and defamatory. Yet that’s the claim these Republican Jews are making. They are weaponizing antisemitism against the spouse of a Jew who is a leader in the fight against antisemitism.
The RJC Victory Fund did not respond to an email inquiring whether it is fair to characterize Harris as unconcerned about antisemitism given that her husband is a leader of a Biden-Harris administration program to counter antisemitism.
The Michigan Republican Party—which last year came under the control of MAGA extremists—waged a similar attack to portray Harris as trouble for Jews. A mailer it zapped out suggests that in response to October 7—during which 1,200 people “including Americans” were murdered, raped, and kidnapped—Harris said, “We must have to courage to object when they use that term—radical Islamic terrorism—which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror.”
Harris, however, did not say that regarding October 7. It was a remark she made during an Eid-al-Fitr service at the Islamic Center of Southern California in 2016, as she called for opposing Islamophobia. She was criticizing the use of a phrase that demeans an entire religion. Following the October 7 attack, Harris did not hesitate to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” and declared “terrorists will not be permitted to continue to threaten Israel.” The mailer does not mention that.
On the backside of this mailer, the Michigan Republicans assert that Donald Trump has been “outspoken against anti-Semitism,” though he famously supped with notorious antisemites (rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes) and has made statements criticized as antisemitic. Last month, he said that American Jews would be to blame if he loses the 2024 election. The American Jewish Committee fiercely responded: “Setting up anyone to say ‘we lost because of the Jews’ is outrageous and dangerous. Thousands of years of history have shown that scapegoating Jews can lead to antisemitic hate and violence.” Trump has also refused to acknowledge antisemitism on the right and within the Republican Party.
A separate mailer produced by the Michigan Republicans screams in all-caps that Harris will “EMBOLDEN ANTI-SEMITES.” What’s the proof of this? The mailer quotes a newspaper story that reported that Harris rebuked Israel regarding the “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”—as if expressing concern for the Palestinian civilians killed and injured during the ongoing war is antisemitic.
The Michigan GOP also sent out a mailer repeating one of the right’s big lies: Harris is coming for your guns—all of them. This mailer proclaims, “Own a gun? Kamala Harris will take them or arrest you.”
On the flip side, the mailer spells out this case: She promised to “enact gun confiscation” through a buy-back program, favors using “lists of gun owners to send police door-to-door to seize firearms,” and has argued a “total handgun ban is constitutional.” There are even footnotes that cite articles to substantiate the accusations.
But the citations do not support these broad allegations.
During the 2020 campaign, Harris said it was a “good idea” to revive the assault weapon ban and supported a “buy-back ” program for these weapons. (She did not advocate the confiscation of all guns.) In 2019, she noted that when she was California attorney general she permitted police to “knock on the doors of people” on a list maintained by the state of prohibited gun owners and people considered a danger to themselves or others. “We sent law enforcement out to take those guns,” she said, “because we have to deal with this on all levels.” (In this instance, Harris targeted only a small set of gun owners and did not authorize cops to seize firearms willy-nilly.) And in 2008, as San Francisco district attorney, she signed on to an amicus brief filed in a key Supreme Court case that supported the Washington, DC, ban on handguns. (The Supreme Court would overturn this law.) A libertarian law professor a dozen years later wrote, “Harris’s view in that case was that the Second Amendment doesn’t preclude total bans on handgun possession.” The stance he described—slightly different than the one presented by the mailer—was a mainstream position and supported by four of the nine justices. It was not a sign that Harris endorses a national ban on handguns or intends to arrest all gun owners.
No doubt, other mailers are flying around in Michigan and other swing states that cast ridiculous lies at Harris. This is an effective way to vilify a candidate. There is little opportunity for fact-checking, and it’s unlikely the target will spend the money for a counter-mailer that reaches the same recipients. It’s a wide-open avenue for peddling swill and disinformation. In this case, the Michigan Republicans and the Jewish Republican Coalition Victory Fund can falsely portray Harris as an enemy of Jews (though she’s married to one) and a gun-grabber (though she says she owns a Glock) and expect few, if any, consequences for disseminating their junk mail.
