What Speaks Louder than Hating the Sounds of Women Laughing?

The Trump campaign is gearing up to mock Kamala Harris's laughter

July 24: Earth’s hottest day since Jesus rode dinosaurs … GOP urges woke campaign … The sound of one veep laughing … Menendez resigns …

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Earth Has Hottest Day Ever

The planet Earth was hotter on Monday than it’s ever been in the 125,000 years that God tricked humans into thinking existed when He created the universe 6,000 years ago.

Monday’s record shattered a record last set…the day before. And previously just last year.

The Earth averaged 62.87° degrees on Monday, which may not sound like a lot, but that includes half a planet worth of winter, which still counts as winter even though it’s happening adorably in the southern hemisphere. It was 0.06° warmer than Sunday, according to the Copernicus climate-change agency in Europe, which God tricked Americans into thinking existed when he created America 6,000 years ago.

Scientists have been able to estimate global temperatures as far back as the last ice age using science. Here’s what global temperatures have looked like in the last 20,024 years of Earth’s 6,000 years, and no that black-to-red vertical bar on the right isn’t an axis, it’s the line.

Last year was the warmest on record since humans began using the sun’s energy to assist in growing food things on purpose. At the time, the sun was an ally, providing light and heat in return for commensurate human sacrifice.

Now, with the sun turned enemy thanks to the help of its rich human collaborators, the first six months of this year are already on track to beat last year’s record heat and casualties. In fact, unless humans cease firing machines powered by fossil fuels, former U.N. climate negotiator Christina Figueres said, “We all scorch and fry.”

Woke Republicans Urge Woke Campaign Against Woke Presidential Candidate

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) yesterday urged his pale male caucus to use less racism and sexism against Vice President Kamala Harris. Johnson’s request came just days after they lost ageism and despite historic Republican enjoyment of racist and sexist campaigning.

If elected, Harris would be the first woman to serve as president, the first Black woman to serve as president, the first person of South Asian descent to serve as president, the first person of Caribbean descent to serve as president, the second woman to get more votes than Donald Trump, the third Democrat to get more votes than Trump, and the first person under the age of 70 to become president since 2008.

“This has nothing to do with race,” Johnson reportedly said at a closed-door meeting that was almost exclusively white. “It has to do with the competence of the person running for president,” Johnson added, implying that a Black woman who’s earned and performed the jobs of vice president, senator, and prosecutor is not competent.

Harris alone has more experience just in federal government than Trump and Sen. JD™ Vance (R-OH) have in any form of government combined.

Recent attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” should stop, according to one Republican House member granted anonymity to not be racist or sexist.

“We have everything going our way and you just can’t handle that?” the unnamed woke member told Politico. “We’ll give you a cheat sheet if you don’t know what else to talk about.”

And that’s literally what Republicans did. Both House and Senate GOPers handed out cheat sheets about Harris for their members. Because apparently the GOP’s ostensibly competent, non-diversity-hire members of Congress need actual crib notes to know what to say about a woman who became a U.S. senator in 2017. Now that’s competence!

And while the cheat sheets do not include overt racism and sexism, one of them explicitly recommends going after that time-tested stand-in for overt sexism: The Laughter of Women.

What Speaks Louder Than Hating the Sounds of Women Laughing?

Vice Pres. Kamala Harris laughing in Milwaukee, WI, yesterday, because life is good. (Screengrab / RNC video.)

Vice President Kamala Harris gave her first campaign speech as a 2024 presidential candidate yesterday in Wisconsin.

A GOP Twitter account — controlled by the Donald Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee that’s controlled by the Trump campaign — posted a five-second video of Harris looking out at the crowd, saying “Good afternoon, Wisconsin,” and laughing. That was it.

The Tweet said only, “Kamala Harris brought her cackle to Milwaukee: ‘Good afternoon, Wisconsin! Ha ha ha ha!’"

Over the weekend, Fox aired a montage of Harris laughing. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that the Trump campaign will try to brand her as “Cackling Kamala,” because (a) they just love alliteration and/or (b) they’re still looking for a third ‘k’-sound word to finish the acronym.

On Monday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo of talking points on Harris, so that their U.S. senators would know what to say about the person who’s been vice president for more than three years. 

In the “Weird” category, the memo cited her “habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.” It linked to an earlier Fox montage of Harris laughs.

And there’s something to this. Something illegitimate, but not necessarily ineffective. Full disclosure: Four years ago, I, too, found Harris’s laugh off-putting. I have no good excuse.

Then I saw the new Wisconsin clip, in the context of GOP mockery. And her laugh was kind of…profoundly delightful?

I don’t do stanning. I don’t do hero worship or political love fests. We’re all fucked up meat blobs trying to connect the best we can with other meat blobs. 

But Harris’s laugh, especially as the target of disdain, hit me. After eight years of Trump barraging us to hate immigrant others, Democrat others, each other, Harris’s laugh struck me as more than a break in the clouds, but a reminder that we can choose to live in light.

Yes, I know what I sound like. Shut up.

This is not because she’s perfect in policy, which she’s not, or a master tactician, which we’ll see. It was just…a woman of color and of power, laughing not at a joke, not at someone else, not at something funny at all. But out of joy. To be there. With people. Connecting with Wisconsin blobs of meat cheese.

It feels like an emotional state of being that for a long time we’ve denied ourselves — maybe on both sides of our not-actually-a-spectrum political spectrum. The woman’s running for president, she’s bearing every burden all of us are — Gaza, immigrants, LGBTQ+, voting rights, climate change. She’s also bearing the burden of being in a position where her actions matter on those things, knowing that U.S. policy is horrifically wrong on most of those things — Gaza, immigrants, LGBTQ+, voting rights, climate change.

And there she was, laughing like a kid happy to see her friends. How fucking radical that feels.

Especially in a time that feels unhappy, when we know others are suffering, laughter is a permission slip to feel unmediated joy. We don’t need her permission, of course, but if she can, what’s stopping us? Laugh, Newsfuckers! Choose joy, Newsfuckers!

Something else is going on here, too. If you listen closely to most clips, you should be able to do two things. One, you ought to be able to identify why she’s laughing. It’s actually not the out-of-nowhere mystery the right has implied. 

Maybe it’s because she hesitated or stumbled before speaking, and laughed at herself. Or laughed after a beat because in that silence she was clearly contemplating the absurdity of the question posed to her.

The second thing you might notice is what other people are doing. In almost every clip that Fox chose to air, you can hear the reaction of the people around Harris. Mostly, they’re applauding or laughing, too. In other words, they, too, heard or thought of or experienced the same thing that inspired her laughter.

Which means she’s not weird. She’s human. She’s just doing that while being a woman. And that’s what they find weird.

I’m Sorry, Whose Laugh Is Weird Now?

While we’re talking about allegedly weird laughter and non sequiturs, The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted found Sen. JD™ Vance (R-OH) laughing, too. Only, unlike Harris, without much of his own audience laughing with him.

Here’s his “joke”: “[Democrats] say it’s racist to do anything. I had a diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re probably gonna call that racist, too.” 

First of all, he’s sure they’ll probably call it racist? So he’s 100% positive there’s at least a 50% chance?

TFN nitpickery aside, Mountain Dew actually does have cultural signifiance: Historic, marketing-confirmed ties to Appalachia.

But Vance was clearly apparently joking. But did the audience laugh with him, as Harris’s does? Ye…kinda? And then, as if they’d just given him some resounding affirmation, he laughed again and said, “I love you guys.”

Former GOP advisor Mark McKinnon reviewed Vance’s Mountain Dew ad as “really, really cringe.” McKinnon knife-twisted that “it testifies to what we’re hearing more and more of, which is that Trump campaign’s really having second thoughts about JD[™] Vance.”

Which, y’know, who gives a shit? Maybe abortion policy is a tadpole more important? Or hostility to no-fault divorce?

But if we are going to enshrine Laugh Quality as a political metric, then we should be looking at Vance, too. Or even… :::cue ominous music::: … the rarely-seen-in-the-wild laughter of Trump himself.

In my Ahabian quest to find Trump ever laughing, the first two instances I found barely qualify as recognizable human laughs — they’re something closer to primate grunts.

And when does Trump laugh? Not at the joy of life and human connection. Not even at attempted jokes about anti-wokeness. The first two instances of laugh-adjacency I found were in response to denigrating a woman and threatening violence against immigrants.

Here he is laughing when an audience member suggests a canine-sounding noise was Hillary Clinton. And he laughed when he asked what to do about undocumented immigrants and a supporter said, “Shoot them.”

That’s a weird laugh.

UNEARTHED VANCE PUNCHLINE Back in 2021, Vance tried to get a laugh shitting on women and cat owners, as well as infertile people and those who choose not to have children because his party’s trickle-down politics disincentivized people from sending sperm trickling up to make babies.

Speaking with Fox during his Senate campaign, Vance called Democrats “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Like no one who chose to have kids is miserable at their choices! (Don’t tell me you never thought it, parents. It’s just us Newsfuckers here.)

Vance was specifically referring to Harris, who became the stepmother of two kids when she married in 2014. Vance was also referring to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who not only is not a lady but had just a month before announced that he and his husband had adopted infant twins. And Vance was also referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who why the fuck is Vance talking about any of them and their personal shit?

It’s almost like he’s miserable with the Trump choices he’s made and wants to make others miserable, too.

Crime Watch

MENENDEZ Convicted criminal and admitted haver of gold bars Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is resigning from the Senate, effective next month, presumably because he’s still got a few votes to sell cast. In case his resignation looks like a gesture of unalloyed¹ nobility, it may also forestall his possible expulsion or a censure recommendation by the Ethics Committee, which typically only takes such action after someone else has done the dirty work of making ethical lapses absolutely clear and undeniable.

NETANYAHU Accused criminal Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu will address Congress today at the invitation of the law-and-order party. (Okay, Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went along with it; way to ruin a good line, people!)

Politico notes the lack of Washington interest in the man who will face charges of corruption at home once he’s done committing war crimes in Gaza which have led to charges of war crimes in Gaza. The Dad Joke headline writer dubbed him “Netanya-Who?” Because that sounds kinda like his name.

Some members of Congress won’t be there today, what with war crimes. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is a pass. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) said she’ll skip it, and gave her seats to family members of Hamas hostages.

Netanyahu will meet on Friday with fellow criminal Donald Trump at his Florida hideout. Pres. Joe Biden will meet with Netanyahu tomorrow. It’s not clear when Vice President Kamala Harris will.

But both Democratic meetings should go swimmingly. Harris might even laugh about it!

TCB

BUTTIGIEG Harris hasn’t chosen her running mate yet. A Politico reporter tried to float the idea that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was being floated. So yesterday I scoured the me archives for the biggest stories I broke about Buttigieg during the year I covered him, uncovering some of the biggest secrets of his mayoral tenure that neither local media nor the national media were able to discover and no I’m not humble bragging I’m bragging.

This does not, for the record, mean I do not like or am telling you not to like Buttigieg. Politics isn’t picking heroes to worship, it’s picking those most likely to do the job well. Everyone’s fucked up, so the reason I’m reviving this stuff is so that everyone can weigh everyone’s fuckups against everyone else’s in the veep-stakes.

THE TRUMP RIFLE I promised you details about it, and so far I haven’t come through. I’m not trying to suggest it’s a bombshell piece or anything, I just went a little long today so I’m holding it for a day when I’m running a little short. Forgive me!

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Go get ‘em, kids. And make sure to laugh today!

1. Subtle gold joke!