Just when it seemed that Vice President Kamala Harris could not make herself more absurd, she rose to the occasion.
In a post Tuesday on the social media platform X, Harris incurred ridicule after sharing a 35-second video of a meeting in her office with cast members from the Netflix reality show “Queer Eye,” including the bearded Jonathan Van Ness, who showed up wearing a dress.
Ian Miles Cheong, a conservative Malaysian journalist with more than 1 million followers on X, spoke for millions more when he described the Harris video as “so embarrassing.”
In fact, the entire scene felt like a parody of Democrats’ notorious proclivity for pandering to alleged victims of oppression.
Four seconds into the nauseating video there came a knock at the vice president’s office door. In an obviously scripted moment, Harris answered to find Van Ness and three other cast members waiting outside.
“Can we talk?” the bearded man said in an effeminate voice. Hand and facial gestures helped perpetuate his grotesque caricature of what he perceives as femininity.
A montage of Harris hugging Van Ness and the other cast members ensued. One man made a joke about resisting the urge to open furniture drawers. “It’s in our DNA,” he said.
Harris, who aggressively prosecuted marijuana-related offenses and sent people to jail in large numbers while serving as a California district attorney, proceeded to show the men a photograph of her at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, scene of the legendary 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights, which the vice president perhaps regarded as evidence of her civil rights credentials.
In an accompanying post, Harris celebrated what she described as the “hard-fought progress the LGBTQI+ community has made in the past 20 years.”
The cast of @QueerEye joined me at the White House to discuss the hard-fought progress the LGBTQI+ community has made in the past 20 years.
Thank you for a meaningful conversation, for giving my office your stamp of approval, and for being fabulous. pic.twitter.com/L3pzaYpo1W
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 18, 2024
Social media users found little reason to celebrate the appalling video.
So embarrassing.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 19, 2024
We’re the laughing stock of planet Earth
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) June 19, 2024
I’m glad you’re focused on what most Americans are truly concerned about.
— Don’t Tread on Memes (@donttreadmemes) June 19, 2024
This is gross. Stop trying to turn everything gay. We need masculine men and feminine women, not these weak and gay things.
— Valentina Gomez (@ValentinaForSOS) June 18, 2024
The problem with Harris’ video is not that it is repellent, for that is a matter of taste, but that the entire spectacle — all of it — is a lie.
For one thing, the “Queer Eye” show itself refutes the whole notion of “hard-fought progress” in the last 20 years. After all, the show’s predecessor, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” ran on television from 2003 to 2007, and mobs of pitchfork-wielding bigots never materialized.
Is Kamala Harris the worst vice president of the 21st century?
In other words, Americans who struggled with same-sex attraction or gender confusion 20 years ago did not face widespread hatred.
Furthermore, Americans who favor genuine decency have no wish to persecute men in dresses. Those decency-loving Americans simply prefer that everyone keep their sexual fetishes private rather than parading them around as if they constitute a civil rights issue or the whole of a person’s identity.
Seeing a man in a dress does not empower heterosexual men to commit violence against him. But it also does not require anyone to assent to the dress-wearing man’s civil rights-related claims. Nor does it require anyone to refer to the man in the dress as a woman, which he clearly is not.
Harris wants you to believe these and other lies.
Some social media users, at least, have grown tired of the charade.
