Paul Waldman: “On conservative television, where white identity politics forms the foundation of each night’s offerings, Harris’s ethnicity was the inevitable topic of the moment. The hosts struggled to find just the right way to criticize her, with each program offering a slightly different and inevitably awkward take on the subject. It was almost as though they had to talk about Harris’s race but couldn’t quite figure out how to turn it into an attack on her without sounding, you know, racist.”

“That very fact appeared to put Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s biggest star, on edge. Carlson got visibly angry at a Democratic guest who suggested that he might pronounce Harris’s first name properly. ‘So it begins, you’re not allowed to criticize KaMAla Harris, or KAmala Harris, or whatever,’ Carlson said. ‘I love the idea that she’s immune from criticism!’ Of course, no one suggested anything of the sort, but the reaction is incredibly revealing. Conservatives constantly complain about how ‘political correctness’ leaves them constrained and silenced, forbidden to say what they really think and speak their truth — and in particular, that if they do so they’ll be called racist. Carlson was enraged about something that hadn’t actually happened, but that he seemed sure was imminent. So the mere suggestion that he pronounce Harris’s first name correctly made him shout that he was being censored by the thought police. We’re going to hear a lot of that in the days to come. The Republican Party — whose best idea to deal with its deficit among minority voters is promoting the sad candidacy of Kanye West to divert a few Black votes from Biden — is only becoming more insular and resentful. They feel any celebration of Harris’s historic candidacy as an attack on their own identity — yet more evidence that societal change and increasing American diversity is in truth a story of their victimization.”