Meena Harris, the controversial niece of Vice President Kamala Harris, rushed to judgment on Monday when she tweeted that the suspect in the Colorado grocery store shooting was among the "violent white men" who pose "the greatest terrorist threat to our country."
After the suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was reported to be a Syrian-born, Muslim incel who thought Donald Trump was a racist, Harris deleted the tweet and offered the following explanation:
I deleted a previous tweet about the suspect in the Boulder shooting. I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by white men.
— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) March 23, 2021
Because Twitter is a paragon of productive discourse, the replies to Harris's tweet were a mixture of angry critics calling her a racist, angry supporters insisting that she had done nothing wrong, and angry race experts explaining that the suspect was actually a "White Arab."
In any event, Harris's rush to judgment was in keeping with a proud family tradition. Here is what then-senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) tweeted in 2019 after the alleged "attack" on the now-disgraced actor Jussie Smollett:
.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery.
This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 29, 2019
Unlike her niece, Kamala did not delete her rush to judgment or offer an explanation as more facts about the case became known to the public. It is now widely believed that Smollett paid two men to commit a fake hate crime. The vice president was not alone in her rush to believe that "an attempted modern day lynching" had occurred on the streets of Chicago.
Smollett was eventually charged with disorderly conduct and filing a false police report, but those charges were mysteriously dropped after Michelle Obama's former chief of staff reached out to Cook County state's attorney Kim Foxx (D.). A subsequent special investigation into Foxx's handling of the Smollett case found "substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures."