New Terry Mattingly mug 4/18/2024
On election night in 2016, an event offering pain as well as triumph, Kamala Harris dug into a big bag of salty snack-food consolation.
“It was incredibly bittersweet. When I took the stage for my acceptance speech – to represent California in the Senate – I tore up my notes. I just said, ‘We will fight,’ ” said Vice President Harris in a fundraising letter for her White House campaign.
“Then I went home, and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. … Two things are true eight years later: I still love Doritos and we still have not stopped fighting.”
Thus, in her campaign against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump – whose 2016 victory angered her – the Harris team has used Doritos as a symbol of the feisty, combative side of her personality.
Thus, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently made waves with a social-media clip in which she placed a Dorito on the tongue of podcaster Liz Plank, a popular online “influencer” and MSNBC contributor.
Many Catholics cried “foul,” since Plank was kneeling and appeared to be imitating the posture of a believer receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. After the video went viral, defenders of Whitmer and Plank said they were merely offering their take on a TikTok meme in which someone feeds food to a friend, and then awkwardly stares into the camera.
It didn’t help that the full version of the video – produced for Plank’s “feministabulous” Instagram page – also focused on debates about abortion rights. In the past, Plank has called faith-based crisis-pregnancy centers “fake clinics.”
The president of the Michigan Catholic Conference was not amused.
“The skit goes further than the viral online trend that inspired it, specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist, in which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present,” said Paul A. Long in a press statement. “It is not just distasteful or ‘strange;’ it is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices.”
Even if insulting the Catholic faithful wasn’t the goal of the video, Long said it’s time for “those in public office, their handlers, and strategists to return a level of respect, civility, and appreciation for those who have found peace and fulfillment in life by worshiping God and serving their neighbor.”
As a Democrat who leads a swing state crucial to the Harris campaign, Whitmer released a statement that she “would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith” and that the video has “been construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that.”
On Instagram, Plank simply said: “this is the trend weirdos chill out.”
In a political age in which digital images are crucial, this was a case in which an online “meme,” a bite-sized piece of online humor, evolved into what social scientists now call a “condensation symbol” – events, images and phrases that ignite emotional reactions linked to the core values of citizens.
The problem was that the “size of the chip, the adoring upward glance of the Dorito recipient, and the positioning of the two women” turned the Whitmer-Plank video into a powerful symbol linked to some of America’s most bitter divisions, noted political columnist Ed Kilgore, writing for the Intelligencer.
“This video was circulated to untold millions of people who … probably couldn’t distinguish a meme from a matzo ball,” he added. “The fact that Whitmer is wearing a Harris-Walz hat during this strange pantomime, and that Plank is a founder of the group Hotties for Harris, is an incredible gift to the reactionaries who claim Democrats are a bunch of Satan-adjacent baby-killing libertine smart-asses who would close down the churches.”
Conservative Catholic writer Donald R. McClarey was just as blunt. In a commentary for The American Catholic, he called the video “naked anti-Catholic bigotry,” as well as “political lunacy” during a tight White House race.
“Whitmer joined the Episcopalian Church in 2020. She knew precisely what she was doing in mocking the Eucharist,” he added. “The cynic in me wonders if she is now deliberately trying to blow the election for Kamala in order to clear her own path in 2028.”
Terry Mattingly is senior fellow on communications and culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media. Send comments to [email protected].
