Kamala Harris Nasty Parasite Devouring Black Lives

NationalReview |  Democrats may not have gotten everything they wanted out of a series of recent televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that ostensibly concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. But as the party of the ‘resistance’ shifted its focus from alleged collusion between Moscow and Republicans to President Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, the hearings also produced a new heroine for the anti-Trump Left. 

Senator Kamala Harris emerged from confrontations with the three national intelligence chiefs and Attorney General Jeff Sessions with her reputation enhanced. Her manner of attack was praised and she was acclaimed as a victim of sexism on the part of her colleagues. Harris may lack the talent to fulfill her not-so-secret desire to emulate Barack Obama by parlaying a single unfinished term in the Senate into a successful presidential bid. But there’s no question that on the strength of these hearings, she can lay claim to a style that is the future of American politics: Her combination of incivility, bullying, and victimhood makes her the perfect reflection of our current moment. 

 Harris’s new celebrity stems from two incidents in which Republicans criticized her manner of questioning witnesses during an Intelligence Committee hearing. Her rapid-fire interrogation of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein prompted Senator John McCain and then committee chair Richard Burr to reproofs in which she was cautioned to allow the witnesses to answer her questions. Harris clearly tried to bully both Sessions and Rosenstein, cutting them off as they spoke and not giving them a chance to speak before she moved on to a new insinuation. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the mainstream media or the liberal Twittersphere. As the New York Times headline on the incidents put it: “Kamala Harris Is (Again) Interrupted While Pressing a Senate Witness.” 

The essence of the surge in support for Harris was not so much that she had scored points at the expense of either Rosenstein or Sessions as that she had been a victim of sexism if not racism. The headline of another, later Times article proclaimed that what had happened illustrated, “The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women.” The intervention of Senators McCain and Burr was said to betray male contempt for women. Others, noting Harris’ multi-racial heritage, characterized the senators’ pushback as a defense of white privilege against the heroic efforts of minorities to be heard.

 The exchanges turned Harris into a liberal star on Twitter, where an avalanche of support for her as a black women assailed by white men came crashing down in the days that followed. Sessions’s simpering confession that she was making him nervous was the icing on the cake; to her fans, it made her the newest “nasty woman,” a cause célèbre. Before the day was done, she was sending out a fundraising appeal to supporters that grandiloquently promised, “The women of the United States Senate will not be silenced when seeking the truth.”