Republicans Are Going for Jeremiah Wright 2.0 Against Harris

Dr. Amos Brown in his pulpit. Photo: Romain Fonsegrives/AFP/Getty Images

It’s no secret Republicans are seeking to take the batteries out of Kamala Harris’s surge in support and enthusiasm by depicting her as a “radical leftist” posing as a mainstream Democratic politician. Conservative media are doing their part with revelations of Harris’s allegedly extremist background in the notoriously liberal bastion of Northern California. And this week, the Washington Free Beacon has entered the fray with an attack on Harris’s longtime pastor, Dr. Amos Brown of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco:

Harris and Brown, the longtime pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, have known each other for nearly a quarter century, and the two have remained close throughout her vice presidency. In July of 2023, Harris posted a picture of the two to the vice president’s Instagram account and described Brown as “an inspiration to me always.”

Less well known, however, is Brown’s history of radical, anti-American remarks that have elicited blowback even from San Francisco Democrats, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

To the Free Beacon’s conservative readership, of course, Pelosi is a devil figure associated with every kind of leftist peril. So finding an occasion when Harris’s pastor managed to scandalize even her was pure gold:

At a memorial service for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks held just six days after al Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, Brown used the occasion to point the finger at the United States in remarks that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “set a lot of people’s teeth on edge” and “left politicians stunned.”

“America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Brown asked the audience. “Ohhhh — America, what did you do?” …

Pelosi used her time on the dais to push back against Brown. “With all due respect to some of the sentiments that were earlier expressed — some of which I agree with — make no mistake … the act of terrorism on Sept. 11 put those people outside the order of civilized behavior, and we will not take responsibility for that,” she said at the time.

If this tale of a Black preacher associated with a Black politician making controversial remarks about America’s wickedness sounds familiar, that’s because it carries a direct echo of the 2008 brouhaha over Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s Chicago pastor. Wright went much further than Brown after 9/11, famously saying on the subsequent Sunday:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.

It was a 2003 sermon in which he recommended Black Americans say “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America,” however, that made Wright a potential millstone for Obama’s candidacy. His inflammatory utterances hit the political world like a hurricane in the spring of 2008 when Obama was locked in a close primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Obama eventually distanced himself decisively from Wright, who reciprocated with angry recriminations.

Brown hasn’t provided the kind of dream sound bite for conservatives that Wright served up. Aside from the 9/11 memorial event, the most the Free Beacon could find was Brown’s attendance at a 2001 anti-racism conference in South Africa, where a resolution passed equating Zionism and racism, and his support for slavery reparations on a study commission created by Gavin Newsom. Harris, whose husband is Jewish and who very recently called her support for Israel’s national security “ironclad,” isn’t terribly vulnerable to accusations of antisemitism. And she can easily disclaim support for cash reparations as nearly every major California Democrat (including Newsom) has done when the topic gained attention this year.

The question now is whether conservatives and their Republican allies choose to go full Wright on Brown and demand that Harris formally break with her pastor. He is in significant ways a harder figure to demonize than Wright was. Brown’s ministry was formed in the crucible of Jim Crow Mississippi. He was quite literally a student of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was especially close to another civil-rights martyr, Medgar Evers. At the age of 83, he remains president of the NAACP’s San Francisco chapter.

As a follow-up to the Free Beacon article, Fox News unearthed examples of Brown defending Wright (and Obama). If this too sounds familiar, you may remember the efforts of Georgia Republican senator Kelly Loeffler to tie her opponent, the Reverend Raphael Warnock to Wright in her unsuccessful 2020 reelection bid. Warnock patiently explained that his (and for that matter, many of Wright’s) critics misunderstand the heritage and mission of the Black church, which in the best tradition of the Hebrew prophets, constantly challenged its own country to live up to its religious and civic ideals. Listeners to such sermons — whether it’s Obama, Harris, or the white Christians called to account for their own sins — are asked to spiritually reflect on such challenges, not endorse the particulars.

In the end, the Wright scandal didn’t cause Obama enduring political damage, and Warnock is now in the U.S. Senate. It’s unlikely that turning Brown into another scary Black preacher will stop Harris, either.