Astroturfing and the Dud That Was Kamala Harris's "Brat Summer" Campaign

Plus, the white women who pledged fealty to a candidate they hoped offered personal redemption, and why they should have known better

Sometimes, in the course of human events, articles don’t run. Such was the case last summer, after I wrote about Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee and the white women who, in a series of Zooms, appeared hyperbolic with relief as they pledged fealty to Madame Vice-President. I recall listening to NPR on the drive to Chicago to cover the DNC and wondering what all the crying was about, and whether it was authentic.

Last week, journalist and friend Lee Fang uncovered some of the reasons behind the supposed euphoria. We previously knew that $1.2 billion had been spent to get Harris elected, but Fang drilled down into the dark money behind the campaigns.

“As it turns out,” he wrote, “the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters.”

Exclusive: Democrats' Dark Money Fund for TikTok Influencers

My podcast partner and I had Fang on last week to talk about the forces trying to make Kamala cool, conservative influencers paid to boost Coca-Cola, and journalists who side-step inconvenient truths. You can tee that up here.

I was not surprised to learn about the chicanery behind the push to get Harris into office. She was not a popular vice-president; her messaging was mushy, and on a personal level, I trusted her not at all, and not only because of what she did to New Times founders Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, who, after the case Harris started took everything away from the septuagenarian, committed suicide.

I more recently did not trust her because she lied and kept lying about Joe Biden’s fitness to run for office.

Either that, or she’s dumb as a brick, or - pet theory - she and the Democratic machine knew months before Biden publicly tanked in the debate that she would be the nominee and delayed the announcement in order to run out the clock, narrow the time for oppo research, etc. etc.

That you can put lipstick on the proverbial pig but the citizenry still won’t want to kiss it was borne out by Harris’s abysmal showing in the election. I mean…

But I was not surprised by what Lee uncovered for another reason, namely that back in summer 2024, I did not see the white women’s rending of breasts as being about support for Harris as much as about personal redemption. As a group, white women had been through a rough couple of years, and here was Harris providing, maybe, “a perfect do-ever for some best intentions gone horribly wrong, resulting in white women becoming punching bags and laughingstocks and saddling them the apparently permanent sobriquet ‘Karen,’” as I wrote in the piece that did not run, and included below.

I have no idea what level of authentic support any segment of the population had for Harris. As Americans we seem locked in a doom-loop of voting against people, and I cannot recall the last time I voted with enthusiasm for anyone. For this I am also grateful, for the spidey-sense that warns us away from the inauthentic and the mercenary, from forces who say, “Just push this button and you’re the good person.”

In the twelve days since President Biden gave his endorsement to Vice-President Kamala Harris, the nation has been treated to a wedding cake’s worth of media frosting for the presumptive Democratic nominee. Among the first at the dessert table were “White Women for Kamala," which hosted a July 25th Zoom that drew more than 100,000 callers and raised more than $1.8 million. A subsequent “White Women: Answer the Call” saw twice as many attendees and brought in $11 million.

Such freneticism can be attributed to our "don't change the channel!" political season. There is also some propulsive guilt among the "I'm With Her" crowd, over their not getting Hillary Clinton over the finish line in 2016.

I'm not sure either are behind the outpouring of love and cash white women are giving Harris, so much as that she is providing a perfect do-ever for some best intentions gone horribly wrong, resulting in white women becoming punching bags and laughingstocks and saddling them the apparently permanent sobriquet "Karen."

But 2024, the passions of the Zoom told us, was going to be different. White women were going to do what they know how to do: band together, raise money, make noise, enact change. Only this time they were going to do it better, they were going to both hustle harder and appear humbler, and in the process, as memoirist and host of the "We Can Do Hard Things" podcast Glennon Doyle told the Zoom assemblage, "save the goddamn world."

No pressure!

But yes pressure, because not only would a Harris presidency be, as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg put it last Friday, “cosmic justice for the monumental insult of the 2016 election," it might help wipe from the memory banks the communal humiliation of 2020, when white women supported Black Lives Matter but apparently in the wrong ways, and instead of being seen as good allies, were told to shut up and stay in their lane. The public roiling could not have been fun, and one would not have faulted them for not getting back in the ring.

But they had, because that's what white women do, or what white American women as we see them as an aggregate do, they make lists and drive carpool and remember birthdays; they hold everything together and protect their families, which during the pandemic meant enforcing school closures and masks on toddlers. This effort too blew up in their faces, earning them a reputation as a bunch of neurotic scolds, the collective force behind a lockdown that caused personal suffering that would take years to recover from, if ever.

The do-over opportunity, when Harris strode onto a stage owned mere hours earlier by two geriatric white men, must have seemed near-providential, and white women did not need know anything about her policy positions, or not beyond that she was pro-choice, to see how many boxes she ticked. At 59, she was relatively youthful. She was the mixed-race child of immigrants from two different countries. She had pretty hair. And Harris was a woman, the first, with their help, to clear the final hurdle to the Oval Office.

And so, with disposable income and a readiness if not a duty to carpet-bomb everyone on their contact lists, white women sprang into action, there were calls to make and targets to hit, redemption was in the air and the time for wound-licking was over, or mostly over.

“For my shaky sisters," Glennon Doyle told her fellow white women Zoomers. "Mistakes will be made, and feelings will be hurt, and I will say out loud that I feel afraid of that… We can let people be angry with us and disapprove of us and mock us even, and not take our ball and go home."

And then the part about saving the world.

It must be heady stuff; being told humanity's survival is in your hands. It can also, one imagines, seem like another item on a never-ending punch list, one that, as the prime driver of American consumerism, tells white women it is their responsibility to do all the things, to have fragrant laundry and low cholesterol; to be thinner and less depressed. If we cringe as women on the Zoom tearfully nod when told to "put on their listening ears," we are missing its value-add proposition, its alternative to the Botox and Ozempic and boxes of wine-mom wine that do not provide a lasting lift, which can come to feel futile, which tells white women they are not good enough and leaves holes in their hearts.

Harris's victory, white women want to believe, rests on them. Maybe it does. But she also offers a way to fill the hole, a hole their presumptively privileged position in America has not only not filled, but which seems to get bigger the harder they try to do what society asks them to do.

Maybe supporting Harris is not just a way to save the world but a way to save themselves, a mission that supersedes the under-appreciated overtaxing daily grind ("Make your own sloppy Joes, kids! Mom's got bigger things to do"). Maybe it's not so much about their putting Harris in the White House as about Harris getting them out of their real and existential houses, the same liberation our mothers and grandmothers sought, now as close as a Zoom link and a credit card.

And if they are successful - which recent polling is telling them they are - maybe this time they'll see their worthiness reflected back at them in the eyes of their loved ones and by the culture at large.

Or they could be in for another hard landing. Harris is a politician, neither a panacea for the nation's problems nor for white women's problems specifically. She cannot salvage the collective reputational hits they've taken. Still, as of today, she is the vehicle that might drive them out of the ditch.

And so for the coming weeks or season, white women will savor the sweet taste of both an impending Harris victory and their own salvation, semi-secure in the knowledge that they will succeed this time doing exactly the same things they did last time.