Kamala Harris running for president has reignited the right's disgusting birther crusade

Written by John Whitehouse

Published

Kamala Harris

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

It’s 2024, so everyone reading this knows exactly what the deal is with birthers. We know that the Constitution requires anyone running for president to be a “natural born Citizen,” and that Vice President Kamala Harris, having been born in Oakland, California, surely qualifies.

Birtherism must be understood not as a wild conspiracy theory about where Kamala Harris and Barack Obama were born, but rather as a slur against their status as Americans. There are no good-faith legal questions about whether or not Kamala Harris is a natural born citizen, just like there were no good-faith questions about where Barack Obama’s mother gave birth to him. We all know the deal. MAGA pundits are pushing birtherism against Harris now — like they did to Obama before her — in order to signal to their audience that people like Harris and Obama are somehow less American. Regardless of your politics, these claims deserve nothing more than absolute contempt.

The biggest name currently spreading this is Trump associate Tom Fitton. You may remember that Fitton, the Judicial Watch president who is not a lawyer, reportedly advised former President Donald Trump to keep secretive government documents that the former president had stored on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. (Ironically, in 2009 — years before Trump picked up birtherism and used it to help take over GOP politics — Fitton was one of the few right-wing voices who spoke dismissively about birtherism against Obama, saying he had not “seen any credible evidence Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the presidency.”)

Tom Fitton @TomFitton Is Kamala Harris ineligible to be President under the U.S. Constitution's "Citizenship Clause"?

Via @TomFitton

Fitton links to an August 14, 2020, piece by John Eastman in Newsweek. Eastman is the intellectual architect of Trump’s attempt to remain in office despite losing the election, which culminated in January 6. (A judge has since ruled that Eastman should be disbarred for his actions.) We addressed this at the time when then-Trump campaign official Jenna Ellis reposted Fitton’s identical tweet.

The following note is on the top of the Eastman column that Fitton now links to:

Editor's note, 8/14: This op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia. We apologize. The essay, by John Eastman, was intended to explore a minority legal argument about the definition of who is a "natural-born citizen" in the United States. But to many readers, the essay inevitably conveyed the ugly message that Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color and the child of immigrants, was somehow not truly American.

The op-ed was never intended to spark or to take part in the racist lie of Birtherism, the conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing Barack Obama, but we should have recognized the potential, even probability, that that could happen. Readers hold us accountable for all that we publish, as they should; we hold ourselves accountable, too. We entirely failed to anticipate the ways in which the essay would be interpreted, distorted and weaponized.

As we said in our earlier note, this essay was an attempt to examine a legal argument about the difference between "natural born" and "naturalized," the latter being ineligible to hold the office of president. In the days since the op-ed was published, we saw that it was being shared in forums and social networks notorious for disinformation, conspiracy theories and racist hatred. All of us at Newsweek are horrified that this op-ed gave rise to a wave of vile Birtherism directed at Senator Harris. Many readers have demanded that we retract the essay, but we believe in being transparent and are therefore allowing it to remain online, with this note attached.

None of this has stopped other MAGA figures online from pushing this ridiculous, bigoted argument now that Harris is poised to be at the top of the Democratic ticket. And yes, free speech gives them the right to spread this bigoted bullshit. 

As the late, great Simon Maloy wrote in 2019:

The Obama-era birthers never came anywhere close to proving their accusation, and it didn’t matter one bit. The only thing they cared about was getting people to treat their obvious bullshit with a modicum of seriousness. The country’s most famous birther was challenged repeatedly to back up his outlandish allegations about President Barack Obama; he never did, but flogging the racist conspiracy theory made him a hero to the political movement that eventually elected him president.