Members of the U.S. Secret Service stand watch as Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during her first campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 23, 2024. The assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, the abrupt withdrawal of President Joe Biden from the race have added even more fuel to an active landscape of conspiracy theories about the 2024 campaign.

Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images/AFP

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Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images/AFP

President Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 election followed weeks of pressure from Democrats concerned about his age and ability to win and serve another four years. But conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and even some Republican politicians immediately cast Biden’s resignation from the campaign as evidence of something more sinister.

The flurry of unverified rumors, speculation, and conspiracy theories comes as people are reeling from an onslaught of high-stakes political upheaval, from the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on July 13 to Biden’s withdrawal from the race eight days later.

On the most extreme end, Charlie Kirk of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA and far-right activist Laura Loomer suggested, without evidence, that Biden may be dying or already dead.

Others, including billionaire hedge fund boss Bill Ackman, raised doubts over the president’s letter announcing his decision, baselessly suggesting his signature wasn’t really his.

Republican politicians including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado speculated about why Biden had not been seen in public since the announcement. On Tuesday, the president emerged from his beach house in Delaware where he had been isolating while recovering from Covid. He plans to address the nation on Wednesday.

“If this were a hostage situation, that letter would not qualify as proof of life,” Ackman posted on X on Sunday. (On Tuesday, Ackman shared a post with a video of Biden boarding Air Force One that read in part, “President Joe Biden seen in public for the first time in nearly a week, debunking conspiracy theories online.”)

Still others on the right framed Biden’s move as not his at all, but an anti-democratic coup orchestrated by shadowy forces including George Soros, a frequent target of conspiracy theories. In doing so, they cast doubt on the legitimacy of Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy — and, ultimately, on the election as a whole.

“The idea of selecting the Democrat[ic] Party’s nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works,” Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told the crowd at a rally in Ohio on Monday.

Harris is also being targeted with baseless claims and conspiracy theories, including the long-running falsehood that she’s not really an American citizen, despite the fact she was born in Oakland, Calif. These “birther” smears came up when she ran for president in 2020 and were amplified by Trump, who previously promoted similar false claims about former president Barack Obama.

After any breaking news event, people search for answers that may not be available right away. That information void is a ripe environment for the spread of incorrect and incomplete information, as well as for exploitation by those seeking to gain clout or financial reward by amplifying the wildest theories, said Melissa Ryan, CEO of consulting firm CARD Strategies, which tracks disinformation and extremism.

“The thing to understand is for folks who live in this cinematic universe, things are never what they seem. It’s always a false flag,” said Ryan.

When Biden called in to an event with Harris and campaign staff on Monday, some online commentators immediately began to speculate that it was not in fact Biden’s voice, but a deepfake created with artificial intelligence.

Some figures on the right had been pressing the narrative, without evidence, that Biden would be replaced on the Democratic ticket at the last minute since at least last fall. Much of that speculation claimed former first lady Michelle Obama or California Gov. Gavin Newsom would be the replacement nominee. Despite the discrepancy in the details, the reality of Biden stepping out has many of them feeling validated.

“It’s shocking how precisely right you can be, right down to the exact timing,” former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was among those who had long suggested Biden would drop out, posted on X on Sunday.

There is little downside to this kind of speculation, which can boost an influencer’s profile whether or not their claims pan out.

“The truth is, you know, sometimes things change. It doesn’t mean that, oh, the conspiracy theorists were right all along. It means everyone was working with the information they knew to be true,” Ryan said.

When speculation does line up with reality — even imperfectly — that creates opportunity to build trust and expand their audience.

“We’ve been seeing that in a lot of different contexts, whether it’s in politics or astrology even on the internet, of people trying to say like, ‘Oh, we knew that this was going to happen,’ and that assigns some sort of authority to your voice,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

“Like, ‘I had inside information or some sort of analytic ability to understand that this was going on. So, you know, you can trust me on this future information that I might help you process or make sense of’,” she said.

A campaign logo as offensive as it is false is circulating online: a “Harris 2024” in which the H is formed with the silhouette of a woman performing fellatio on a man. This is how explicit the sexist attacks have become just hours after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, making her the favorite to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. “Cumala,” “Kamalasutra”…The list of insulting nicknames that the most radical far right has come up with is endless, but there is something else: most of it is recycled material. As soon as Biden threw in the towel, the most MAGAesque members of the MAGA movement rushed to resurrect all the material with which they tried to sink Harris, without success, in the 2020 election. And one man fired the gun to start the race: Donald Trump.

”It’s really important at this historic moment that we label these narratives and lies as what they are: an attempt to undermine the public service of a powerful woman because of her gender, her background and her skin color,” said the anti-disinformation activist Nina Jankowicz of the American Sunlight Project, who conducted a study in 2021 on insults against politicians, in which Harris stood out as the most widely targeted. The pretext is usually the least important part of these operations of misinformation and dehumanization. But analyzing the most often-repeated falsehoods, that “she slept her way to the top” (which dates back to the 1990s), helps to understand the dynamics of these attacks and how, in general, they crystallize from the elites of political groups: the opinion leaders, the influencers with the biggest followings or, as is the case now, Trump himself.

On July 4, when the possibility that Harris might replace a weakened Biden was already being raised, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that the vice president had run a very bad campaign in the past, and added: “But that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.” He was alluding to an old rumor, fueled during the 2020 campaign, that Harris began her career in the 1990s thanks solely to her sexual relations with Brown, then mayor of San Francisco; the rumor claimed they were having an affair while he was still married. A Reuters investigation debunked the hoax: Brown had been separated from his wife for 13 years and his relationship with Harris was perfectly public until they ended it in 1995.

But Trump knew what he was doing. One of the most classic (and most reliable) sexist stereotypes involving politics was back on the table: women do well by sexually conquering men. From that seed planted by the former Republican president, who has uttered all kinds of atrocities about Harris, the insults grew in tone, and even more so after Sunday’s announcement that Biden was withdrawing from the race, an analysis by Wired magazine shows. Manipulated images of Harris in the White House in sexually suggestive attitudes have started to circulate online, while right-wing influencers revel in this degrading narrative.

““She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket. […] She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men,” the far-right activist Matt Walsh posted for 12 million users of the X network to see. One of Trump’s most toxic fans, Milo Yiannopoulos, has dedicated a string of tweets to “Cumala,” whom he asks how many abortions she has undergone because of her “sordid sexual history.”

Race, background, DEI

Harris is not the first woman to be accused of getting to her position through sex, nor will she be the first presidential candidate whose eligibility is questioned because of her background. It happened to Barack Obama, whom Trump himself accused of not being an American, but from Kenya. With Kamala, the racist falsehood is repeated and it is falsely said that her parents, from India and Jamaica, were not residents of the United States when she was born and did not have legal status. Who was one of the first people to spread this hoax in 2020? Again, Donald Trump.

For online trolls, Harris is not Black enough nor Indian enough to be considered the first Black Asian-American vice president. In fact, for some, she is not even a woman: one of the falsehoods that has haunted her for a long time is that she is a trans person. In 2020, they claimed that Harris could not have risen to a position of power without secretly being a man. They falsely claimed that she had been a man named ‘Kamal Aroush’ before the transition” Jankowicz explains.

Harris is also the perfect target for one of Republicans’ latest obsessions: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. “It’s a great example of DEI. We’re talking about a person who … has a skin color, but skin color does not … denote merit, does not denote competency, and she is a very incompetent person,” said Republican Congressman Burgess Owens. A Fox talk show host, Charles Gasparino, wrote an article in the New York Post titled: “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”

Jankowicz is clear about the reason for all this: users who interact with the denigrating narrative against Harris are more likely to engage in other harassment and misinformation campaigns. This expert notes that misinformation and gender-based abuse, occurring on both sides of the political spectrum, undermine women’s participation in public life. Sexist and anti-feminist misinformation has been strong since the assassination attempt on Trump: the attack has been held up as proof that women should not be part of security forces.

The queen of memes

The efforts to attack Kamala Harris on social media has an added explanation: she is the queen of memes. Her extroverted nature, her loud laughter and her unexpected remarks are the perfect fishing grounds for a generation that turns everything into memes. Perhaps it is not all ideological, the analysts concede: it is simply entertaining to young people. An anecdote Harris told about her mother talking about “falling out of a coconut tree” has been generating endless memes and remixes for a few days now.

Harris also has her own highly motivated army of followers on social media who call themselves the K-Hive and are capable of not only defending her, but also generating punishment campaigns against her rivals. They have already launched a counterattack, resurfacing a 2020 ad that said of her: “She Prosecuted Sex Predators. He Is One.” In any case, there is no doubt that the vice president generates engagement (clicks, comments and visibility), which has always been one of the strengths of her Republican rival. Now, Trump is the old man and Harris has new generations of voters watching her videos with a smile.

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The announcement that Vice President Kamala Harris will seek the Democratic nomination for president is inspiring a wave of false claims about her eligibility and her background. Some first emerged years ago, while others only surfaced after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his bid for a second term.

Here’s a look at the facts.

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CLAIM: Harris is not an American citizen and therefore cannot serve as commander in chief.

THE FACTS: Completely false. Harris is a natural born U.S. citizen. She was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to a copy of her birth certificate, obtained by The Associated Press.

Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.

Under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, anyone born on U.S. soil is considered a natural born U.S. citizen and eligible to serve as either the vice president or president.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” reads the amendment.

There is no question or legitimate debate about whether a citizen like Harris is eligible to serve as president or vice president, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.

“So many legal questions are really nuanced — this isn’t one of those situations,” Levinson told the AP on Monday.

Still, social media posts making the debunked assertion that Harris cannot serve as president went viral soon after Biden announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the race and would back Harris for president.

“Kamala Harris is not eligible to run for President,” read one post on X that was liked more than 34,000 times. “Neither of her parents were natural born American citizens when she was born.”

False assertions about Harris’ eligibility began circulating in 2019 when she launched her bid for the presidency. They got a boost, thanks in part to then-President Donald Trump, when Biden selected her as his running mate.

“I heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” the Republican said of Harris in 2019.

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CLAIM: Harris is not Black.

THE FACTS: This is false. Harris is Black and Indian. Her father, Donald Harris, is a Black man who was born in Jamaica. Shyamala Gopalan, her mother, was born in southern India. Harris has spoken publicly for many years, including in her 2019 autobiography, about how she identifies with the heritage of both her parents.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, social media users are making erroneous claims about Harris’ race.

“Just a reminder that Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris isn’t black,” reads one X post that had received approximately 42,000 likes and 20,400 shares as of Monday. “She Indian American. She pretends to be black as part of the delusional, Democrat DEI quota.”

But Harris is both Black and Indian. Indeed, she is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. This fact is highlighted in her biography on WhiteHouse.gov and she has spoken about her ethnicity on many occasions.

Harris wrote in her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” that she identifies with the heritage of both her mother and father.

“My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots,” she wrote. “Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture.”

In the next paragraph, she adds, “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters.” Harris again refers to herself as a “black woman” in the book’s next chapter.

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CLAIM: Harris got her start by having an affair with a married man, California politician Willie Brown.

THE FACTS: This is missing some important context. Brown was separated from his wife during the relationship, which was not a secret.

Brown, 90, is a former mayor of San Francisco who was serving as speaker of the California State Assembly in the 1990s when he and Harris were in a relationship. Brown had separated from his wife in 1982.

“Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago,” Brown wrote in 2020 in the San Francisco Chronicle under the article title, “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”

He wrote that he supported Harris’ first race to be San Francisco district attorney — just as he has supported a long list of other California politicians, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Harris, 59, was state attorney general from 2011-2017 and served in the Senate from 2017 until 2021, when she became vice president. She has been married to Doug Emhoff since 2014.

Harris’ critics have used the past relationship to question her qualifications, as Fox News personality Tomi Lahren did when she wrote on social media in 2019: “Kamala did you fight for ideals or did you sleep your way to the top with Willie Brown.” Lahren later apologized for the comment.

Trump and some of his supporters have also highlighted the nearly three-decade old relationship in recent attacks on Harris.

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CLAIM: An Inside Edition clip of television host Montel Williams holding hands with Harris and another woman is proof that Harris was his “side piece.”

THE FACTS: The clip shows Montel with Harris and his daughter, Ashley Williams. Harris and Williams, a former marine who hosted “The Montel Williams Show” for more than a decade, dated briefly in the early 2000s.

In the clip, taken from a 2019 Inside Edition segment, Williams can be seen posing for photographs and holding hands with both women as they arrive at the 2001 Eighth Annual Race to Erase MS in Los Angeles.

But social media users are misrepresenting the clip, using it as alleged evidence that Harris was Montel’s “side piece” — a term used to describe a person, typically a woman, who has a sexual relationship with a man in a monogamous relationship.

Williams addressed the false claims in an X post on Monday, writing in reference to the Inside Edition clip, “as most of you know, that is my daughter to my right.” Getty Images photos from the Los Angeles gala identify the women as Harris and Ashley Williams.

In 2019, Williams described his relationship with Harris in a post on X, then known as Twitter.

“@KamalaHarris and I briefly dated about 20 years ago when we were both single,” he wrote in an X post at the time. “So what? I have great respect for Sen. Harris. I have to wonder if the same stories about her dating history would have been written if she were a male candidate?”

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CLAIM: Harris promised to inflict the “vengeance of a nation” on Trump supporters.

THE FACTS: A fabricated quote attributed to Harris is spreading online five years after it first surfaced.

In the quote, Harris supposedly promises that if Trump is defeated in 2020, Trump supporters will be targeted by the federal government: “Once Trump’s gone and we have regained our rightful place in the White House, look out if you supported him and endorsed his actions, because we’ll be coming for you next. You will feel the vengeance of a nation.”

The quote was shared again on social media this week. One post on X containing an image of the quote was shared more than 22,000 times as of Monday afternoon.

The remarks didn’t come from Harris, but from a satirical article published online in August 2019. Shortly after, Trump supporters like musician Ted Nugent reposted the comments without noting they were fake.

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CLAIM: A video shows Harris saying in a speech: “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today, so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.”

THE FACTS: Harris never said this. Footage from a 2023 rally on reproductive rights at Howard University, her alma mater, was altered to make it seem as though she did.

In the days after Harris headlined the Washington rally, Republicans mocked a real clip of her speech, with one critic dubbing her remarks a “word salad,” the AP reported at the time.

Harris says in the clip: “So I think it’s very important — as you have heard from so many incredible leaders — for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights nonprofit whose president also spoke at the rally, livestreamed the original footage. It shows Harris making the “moment in time” remark, but not the “today is today” comment.

The White House’s transcript of Harris’ remarks also does not include the statement from the altered video. Harris’ appearance at the event came the same day that Biden announced their reelection bid.

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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.