This week in stupid

• Former Daily Wire host Candace Owens claimed “modern satanists” convinced people evolution is real.
• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk: “Cryptocurrency and Christians … are two threats to the new world order.”
• Fox News’ Sean Hannity said his “interest in the Olympic Games is pretty much zero” because of “their trans opening.”
• Fox’s Jesse Watters: Kamala Harris is “not African American, technically, because she has a Jamaican dad.”

This week in scary

• Charlie Kirk: “Kamala Harris seeks to kidnap your child via the trans agenda.”
• Sean Hannity called Social Security “a bad Ponzi scheme.”

Excuse me?

• The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan went on a bizarre sexist rant: “Women cannot take care of themselves.”
• Fox’s Laura Ingraham said a Supreme Court ethics code would be unfair to conservative justices.
• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said Harris sounds “a little bit more jive.”
• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said Kamala Harris has a “new urban accent.”
• Lara Trump: “It’s terrifying to go in New York as an adult.”

This week in Project 2025

For Media Matters’ complete coverage of Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.

• At least four organizations involved in Project 2025 have spent years arguing against birthright citizenship — a cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy that is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
• Project 2025 contributor Stephen Moore: “We want people to keep working” into their 70s.
• Far-right figures laud Project 2025, calling it “the best personnel database.”
• Project 2025 leader and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Trump’s goal is “very connected to the aims of Project 2025” and JD Vance is “a great friend of mine and Heritage.”
• Project 2025 partner Kristan Hawkins called for abortion bans without any exceptions for rape.

MAGA figures are suddenly afraid that Trump will lose and are pointing fingers at each other over who is to blame

MAGA figures are suddenly afraid that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will lose the election and are looking for someone to blame.

This week, Project 2025 Director Paul Dans suddenly stepped down and the Trump campaign, in a memo signed by senior advisers, claimed they would welcome Project 2025’s demise. The extreme policies of Project 2025 have proved to be very unpopular with the American people, and this unpopularity seemingly led the Trump campaign to force Dans to resign.

But the situation was already a tinderbox since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democrats' likely presidential nominee since Trump’s campaign was reportedly designed to face Biden instead of Harris. Inside the MAGA bubble, recriminations and blame are growing as Trump’s electoral position apparently grows weaker. Some figures are tightening their fealty to Project 2025 while others are trying to manufacture more distance between it and the Trump campaign.

As Media Matters’ John Whitehouse notes: “This is all quite reminiscent of 2016, when frequent turmoil roiled the Trump campaign, and he on a few occasions switched who was in charge, eventually settling on Steve Bannon less than 90 days before the election. Whatever solution Trump lands on this time will have to be different: Bannon is currently in federal prison.”

JD Vance has repeatedly disparaged people who “don’t have kids”

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is facing a weeklong firestorm after video of a 2021 Fox News interview resurfaced in which Vance smeared Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country. Vance has responded to the backlash by claiming that Democrats took him out of context. Media Matters and other outlets, however, have uncovered numerous occasions in which he offered similar attacks on people who don’t have biological children.

We have compiled a list of 13 more times Vance disparaged people who “don’t have kids.” Here are a few examples:

• In a November 2020 interview, Vance said childless American leaders are “more sociopathic” than those with children, and they make the country “less mentally stable.”
• In a July 2021 interview, Vance said Harris is part of a “childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.”
• In an August 2021 interview, Vance said Democrats are the party that “doesn’t have kids,” so they are “dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children.”

Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris’ ethnicity - right-wing media have spent years doing the same

On Wednesday, Donald Trump appeared before the National Association of Black Journalists and questioned Kamala Harris’ ethnicity, saying: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

I’m not going to waste your time detailing why Trump’s claim is false. An important thing to note here, though, is that right-wing media have long railed over Harris’ ethnicity, suggesting that she might not really be Black, a smear previously aimed at former President Barack Obama.

• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “Kamala Harris, though she is now presenting herself as, you know, Malcolm X. … She’s half-Indian and then half-Afro-Caribbean, so she really doesn’t have any link to the African American culture whatsoever.”
• “Stop the Steal” leader Ali Alexander: “Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are seen as these Black people, and neither one of them is Black.”
• Rush Limbaugh: “Explain to me how Kamala Harris is an African American? Her father's Jamaican and her mother is Indian. How does that equal African American? Same thing with Barack Obama.”

After Trump’s disastrous appearance at the NABJ, Fox News flew into damage control mode. Fox anchor Harris Faulkner, who co-moderated the panel interviewing Trump, went on Fox and said, “What I loved about what you couldn’t see today was how much of that audience was enjoying the moment of hearing from a candidate that they might not always agree with.” Other Fox personalities, including Tyrus and Jesse Watters, also came to Trump’s defense.

Since the comments, many of Trump’s right-wing media propagandists were delighted by the comments and continued this deranged attack against Harris.

As we told you last week, right-wing media are resurrecting their old birther smear, this time aimed at Harris. As the election season continues, we can expect this racist conspiracy theory to only gain steam across conservative media.

In case you missed it 

• Paul Dans, architect and head of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, has resigned from his position at Heritage, but there is no evidence to suggest Project 2025’s policy and staffing efforts will be impeded.
• In a forthcoming book, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts rails against birth control, IVF, abortion, childlessness, and dog parks. Roberts is the architect of the Heritage-led initiative Project 2025.
• Online right-wing personalities are threatening a boycott of the Paris Olympics after the opening ceremony featured drag queens and right-wingers implied two boxers were trans.
• Islamophobe Laura Loomer helped JD Vance raise funds while he appeared on her show.
• Prompted by a right-wing radio host, JD Vance linked Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision allowing slavery.
• Kamala Harris is facing a barrage of misogynistic and racist attacks on TikTok.
• Only 8% of cable news coverage of anti-trans legislation featured a trans or gender-nonconforming guest in the first half of 2024.
• Fox Business host Stuart Varney seemingly embraced recent warnings from senior Republicans about sexist and racist attacks against Kamala Harris, calling out GOP nominee Donald Trump for repeatedly calling Harris “dumb.” But Varney had no problem with guests on his program using that insult and others against Harris in the past month.
• Fox has again downplayed the consequences of an extreme abortion ban in the wake of Roe v Wade’s reversal, this time barely acknowledging Iowa’s new abortion law as it came into effect on Monday.
• Fox figures resorted to pearl-clutching and wild analogies after the Zoom fundraiser “White Dudes for Harris” went viral.
• National TV news coverage of devastating Western U.S. and Canadian wildfires rarely connected them to climate change.
• Right-wing media are distorting a clip of Harris speaking to college students to dismiss young people’s concerns about climate change and take misogynistic digs at Harris for not having biological children.