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Kamala Harris Minus Her Makeup
Reflections on mendacious memes shared by morons and mountebanks
No, this is not actually a portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris sans foundation, blush, lipstick, and clothes.
The reason I teased it as such is that multiple people with whom I am friends on Facebook have posted fake images almost as glaring as this one in an attempt to smear the woman who could very well be our next President.
One such “friend,” someone I knew in high school, has posted four or five memes purporting to depict Harris palling around with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in jail.
One of these appears to show Harris in a bikini the the arms of a bare-chested Epstein. It’s photo-shopped or AI, her head imposed on another woman’s body. Fact-checking reveals that Harris and her husband did meet Epstein a social event in California but that they never hit the beach together, let alone snuggled up like Baywatch bunnies.
Another trick photo shows Harris and a pretty, young woman on either side of talk-show host Montel Williams. A caption suggests she was Williams’ “side chick,” insinuating that she was promiscuous. The photo is real, but Williams has gone to great lengths to clarify, that the younger woman is his daughter, Ashley.
Yet another meme purports to show Harris and Epstein posing together at a party. Fact-checking, once again, reveals that it’s a real photo in which Epstein’s head has been grafted onto the body of Harris’s husband, lawyer Douglas Emhoff.
I’m not reproducing any of the fakes here because 1) I don’t want to dignify them, and 2) I don’t want them to spread any more than they already have.
And while I could reasonably observe that it’s risky on the part of MAGA trolls to be reminding us of Epstein — with whom their man Donald really did party, as did Bill Clinton and other notoriously libertine celebrities — that’s not really my point.
This is:
Everybody’s welcome to express their political opinions on social media. If you don’t like Harris or Biden’s policies or history — or Trump’s or JD Vance’s — by all means say so, preferably in your own words.
Sharing derogatory memes that you haven’t checked out for accuracy, on the other hand, is lazy and stupid.
Continuing to do so after it’s been brought to your attention that a meme is certifiably false, well, that outs you as, at best, a poor excuse for a citizen of the greatest country in the world and, at worst, a disgraceful putz.
