Washington Post cultural experts are very concerned about Kamala

We have officially reached that late period in the presidential campaign when the national newspapers, once firmly left-leaning, are turning into partisan rags that coo and rave, this time about Vice President Kamala Harris. Consider the Washington Post’s July 31 “Style” column.

It all started with a large color photo of a Harris impersonator on TikTok named Alison Reese. The caption was “On Harris’ laughter, a symphony of feedback.” A caption under Reese and her rainbow flag read that Reese “says Harris’ laughter ‘seems more uninhibited. … Laughter really comes from that place of inner joy.”

Post editors Maura Judkis and Kara Voght claimed that Harris’s “exuberant laugh” had “the same rhythm as some great dance songs.” They brought together academic experts — including Kate Manne, who wrote an entire book about the exploitation of Hillary Clinton’s laughter in 2016 — to find misogyny in mocking Kamala’s laugh.

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“It’s taboo for women to talk too loudly, to laugh too loudly, to laugh too much,” said Kathleen Karlyn, a film and media studies scholar. “It’s predictable that when Kamala laughs, she’s asserting her power and her refusal to be silent or play by these old rules of femininity.”

Karlyn wrote a book called “The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter.”

Citing Harris’s viral comment about falling off a coconut tree, the Post’s reporters declare victory in the laughter war: “Conservatives seem to have lost control of the ‘Kamala Laughs’ narrative they tried to create. What they presented as embarrassment has been transformed into cocomentum.”

Behind this analysis is Post book critic Becca Rothfeld’s essay on the meme wars. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 to “a group of pathologically connected reactionaries known as the alt-right.” But fear not, Democrats! Rothfeld praised the Kamala coconut tree meme as “shared and reshared, in a fit of collective giddiness.”

Democratic factions have clashed over Biden, but “the meme euphoria around Harris has allowed a broad swath of the Democratic-leaning electorate to rally behind her without having to commit to everything she stands for.”

At the bottom left of the Style section’s home page, gender columnist Monica Hesse wrote: “Why ‘weird’ is the most effective insult Democrats have tried yet.” Hesse began by recalling a 1946 “Superman” comic strip in which he fought a xenophobic group similar to the KKK (think Trump). “It’s all about the power of word choice, rhetoric and peer pressure,” she said.

Hesse cited a stack of Democratic politicians showing off their “bizarre” insults — Tim Walz, Chris Murphy and Pete Buttigieg — and the pro-abortion feminist was particularly pleased with one line from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Being obsessed with repressing women is ridiculous.”

She loves how the word “weird” can scare Trump fans: “What if, instead of being admired or feared, they were being laughed at? What if, instead of being thugs, they were actually just kids in the corner eating glue off their hands?”

Just above Hesse’s column, on Page C-3, was a piece by Adela Suliman, who enthusiastically reported how “White Dudes for Harris” had raised $4 million. There was still talk of the campaign’s momentum. “The momentum is extraordinary,” Buttigieg said. “I’ve never felt this kind of conviction, this kind of enthusiasm,” actor Bradley Whitford said.

To suggest that the Washington Post is overflowing with gleeful partisan propaganda, aggressively seeking to keep Harris and the Democrats’ momentum going into November? That’s too mild. It’s this kind of journalistic bombast that explains why Donald Trump uses the term “fake news.” It looks like a newspaper but sounds like a cheerleader.

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