Someone Shot Into Kamala Harris’ Arizona Campaign Office
Sometime after midnight, early in the hours of Monday morning, someone shot into Kamala Harris’ campaign office in Tempe, Arizona. This is ahead of her planned visit to the state this Friday where she plans to visit the border with Mexico. The office is also used by the state Democratic party and its candidates running for the House and Senate.
Like a lot of the political violence against Democratic politicians, you won’t hear much about this in the news. The mainstream media is failing us.
And don’t think for a second, that just because they shot through glass windows and doors, this isn’t political violence or an attack on democracy. I’m from Mississippi where the ghosts from racial violence of the past, and memories of assassinated leaders like Medgar Evers, or James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and Emmett Till still haunt us. We live in the shadow. Before they were murdered for their civic and political beliefs, men like Martin Luther King Jr. faced death threats and the bombing of their own homes. Hopefully, we’ve all seen the images of crosses burning in the front yards of those who the KKK, and other white supremacists, wanted to intimidate or run off. Sometimes, they made good on these threats. My grandmother’s family lost land in Yazoo, Mississippi, when it was set on fire, after her older sister pulled a white man who was bothering her off a horse. This sister was basically her mother, raising my grandmother after her own mother died in childbirth (giving birth to my grandmother and her twin brother who did not survive). My grandmother recalled this story often, and the subsequent fire that followed. She recalled proudly how her sister would not be intimidated by this man or any white man. How she was woken up in the middle of the night and barely escaped the fire. How her family thought the smoke had gotten to her even though she escaped the flames.
So, yes, I was visibly shaken when it popped up across my phone’s screen that Harris’ campaign office had been shot into. I immediately saw this as some type of threat or warning.
I know I’ve written before that when President Obama was elected in 2008, I had an older relative, who’d lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era, who sincerely believed Obama was going to be assassinated. He would say emphatically — I’m telling you…they are not going to let him make it to inauguration. Then, it was, simply, they’re going to kill him. I was younger back then, and this was 2008, so I didn’t really understand his apprehension or his fear.
Now, I understand, his belief wasn’t that far-fetched. The Trump administration made this clear. Civil rights are negotiable.
This wasn’t the first time someone shot into the office. Just last Monday, someone else did.
As reported by Axios —
Tempe police said in an emailed statement Tuesday this is the second time criminal damage occurred at the office and that the front windows were shot with what appeared to be a BB or pellet gun just after midnight on Sept. 16.
Sgt. Ryan Cook, Tempe Police spokesperson, according to the same article, did say “this raises concerns about the safety of those who work in that building, as well as those nearby.” However, according to Arizona’s Family, “the case is currently being investigated as a property crime because no one was in the office at the time of the shooting.”
This incident being referred to as a “property crime” doesn’t sit right with me.
I’m not here to stoke fear. I am here to point out that we are living in a dangerous America. These are dangerous times.
The first shots with a BB or pellet gun were fired into Harris’ office only afters after a second person, a Republican, tried to shoot former president, Donald Trump at a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The next day, Trump’s pick for vice president, JD Vance, stated, as reported by Reuters, “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months.”
Make no mistake about it. Vance knew what he was doing. He was inviting, and lowkey inciting, violence against Harris. We’re not dumb. In fact, Elon Musk had made similar remarks on X that he subsequently deleted after the second assassination attempt on Trump. Musk tweeted —
And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala
JD Vance is deplorable. After Vance’s remarks, White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called out the danger in Vance’s words.
She said, per Reuters —
When you make comments like that, all it does is … opens an opportunity for people to listen to you and potentially take you very seriously, and so it’s dangerous to have that type of rhetoric out there…
Little of what’s happened lately in American politics is good. The country is, for a fact, regressing.
Donald Trump will make America a country where political violence is the norm when people don’t get their way. He already attempted a coup.
It’s time for this country to move on from its history of racial and political violence, and from Trump.
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I was already saying the FBI should be all up in Musk's business when he made the comment. He should be held responsible for both attacks as if he fired the guns.
Thank you for this. I had not heard about it, but I (and everybody else) should have. It is horrible that this has not been reported and condemned by mainstream media.