A grizzled, 82-year-old man stood scowling across the street from WHYY’s studios. Inside, vice president Kamala Harris faced questions from three members of the National Association for Black Journalists. Outside, the bearded Floridian glowered from behind a marker-scrawled posterboard slab reading, “KAMALA LOVES HAMAS” — never mind that the vice president has condemned the militant group like clockwork when speaking on the crisis in the Middle East.
Robert Kunst was among the nation’s most prominent advocates for LGBTQ equality in the 1970s, as leader of a group of activists who took on a celebrity orange-juice pitchwoman named Anita Bryant in a Miami-Dade County scrap over a discrimination ordinance. Bryant won that round, but Kunst forced her to exhaust every ounce of that sweet, acidic goodwill in the process; by campaign’s end, he was a hero to many — and she was a pariah to nearly all.
Kunst has had a transformation since then. He left his Miami Beach home to protest Harris at an event in Wilkes-Barre, then scowled at President Joe Biden outside the White House until security asked him to leave. Kunst planned to attend a Wednesday night rally for former president Donald Trump on Long Island. Then, and only then, would he go back to Miami Beach and rest.
What could possibly drive someone that age to travel that much? Good question.
“I’m completely pissed off with the entire Democratic Party,” Kunst said. “I don’t know where they’re at anymore.”
NABJ members, national political reporters, the Temple Association of Black Journalists, and students from area schools like Lincoln, Cheyney, and Temple packed the front hallway of WHYY-FM as Harris sat for a grilling in a collaboration between Black journalists’ largest professional society and Philadelphia’s largest NPR affiliate.
Harris didn’t appear in person at the National Association for Black Journalists’ annual conference in Chicago in July. Former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the third straight cycle, did. Over a combative half-hour, Trump questioned Harris’ racial identity and castigated the NABJ for starting late due to, he claimed, “a sound issue.”
NABJ president Ken Lemon later said the event was delayed because Trump balked at the prospect of being fact-checked on the organization’s website as he spoke.
Those controversies had largely faded by the time Harris sat down in the concourse of WHYY’s Independence Mall-side studios. Two more stories had arisen to take their place: First, bizarre blood libel about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, found its way to the former president’s lips at last Tuesday’s debate, prompting a barrage of terroristic threats that shut down area schools six times in four business days.
Second, Florida sheriff’s deputies discovered and arrested what appeared to be another Trump assassin Sunday, during the would-be sniper’s thirteenth hour hiding in the underbrush adjacent to Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach.
The Harris event was far less acrimonious than Trump’s tilt at the convention in July. At one point, panelist Keith Gaynor of The Griot even asked about “joy” and the Republicans who thought it was a good idea to make fun of Harris’ patented laugh.
But the weren’t afraid to press the vice president: “Fresh Air” cohost Tonya Mosley questioned the usefulness of the vice president’s proposed ban on so-called “assault rifles,” seeing as though most firearm-related violence arrives via handgun. When the vice president dodged the question, Mosley asked again — and continued doing so until Harris confronted the gun conundrum directly.
POLITICO White House correspondent Eugene Daniels did the same when asking Harris how her approach to the Israel-Hamas war would differ from the current president, Joe Biden.
Asked her opinion on polls showing young Black men supporting Trump’s campaign at rates not seen since the mid-20th century, the vice president countered that her own race didn’t entitle her to anyone’s support.
“Because a Black candidate for president is sitting with the National Association of Black Journalists, there could be an inference that they’re just gonna be easy on her,” said Nkwa Asonye, an award-winning sportscaster who recently moved to Philadelphia from New Haven. “They were not. They followed up. They were very pointed with their questions about certain things.”
Asonye, of the view that the style of political coverage too often mirrors his neck of the newsroom, said the sit-down setting and longer space for answers offered a refreshing contrast.
“I mean, you can’t always get what you want out of it,” Asonye said. “But to hear her be in that space and have time with her answers? The more thorough someone’s answers can be, the better.”
Even in her few sit-down interviews, Harris has often searched for a path of least resistance. On the one hand, she often tries to buoy those excited by her progressive past after four years ofBiden’s tepid moderation. On the other, she often hedges, triangulates and reverses her prior stances, as an overture to swing voters who might blanche at the prospect of electing a California lefty to the highest office in the land.
One man certainly wasn’t impressed by the vice president’s high-wire act.
As it turned out, Kunst believed that Harris and Biden had grown cold towards Israel out of a zest for the Arab states’ oil. Pro-Palestinian groups, living on the same planet and presumably observing the same events as Kunst, often claim the opposite: That Biden and Harris refuse to issue more forceful condemnations of Israel because they fear losing financial support from pro-Israel figures and groups.
First question: Mr. Kunst’s hat, which featured a menorah and the phrase “Y’israel,” the country’s Ivrit name, was adorned with Trumpian symbolism. He held a Trump campaign sticker in his hand. The back of his poster even communicated pro-Trump messaging, though the former president questioned the faith of Jewish Democrats and accused them of “disloyalty” to him and to Israel.
Kunst sided with Trump: Even before Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, he noted, Israelis had taken to the streets en masse to protest prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Many in the nation believed their embattled premier had plunged the Holy Land into the clutches of far-right theocrats by welcoming them into a coalition government. Kunst believed their outcry left Israel open to attack.
“The left is as poisonous there as it is here,” Kunst said, even though said Left was protesting, among other things, the possibility that an Israeli theocracy could enact a ban on homosexuality.
Towards the end of the conversation, Harris addressed the latest slew of harrowing, Trump-related controversies: Yes, she’d called the former president after the latest attempt on his life — reiterating, she said, past condemnations of political violence. Yes, she was confident in the Secret Service, even after the second attempt on Trump’s life.
Then, Harris channeled her inner Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders.
“You can go back to Ohio,” Harris said to the panel. “There are a lot of people who aren’t feeling safe right now.”
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