A viral video of Vice President Kamala Harris claims she slurred and repeated her words during a recent speech.
A Facebook user shared the video May 3, which appears to show Harris saying, “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.” Text on the screen says: “Our VP: I can only hit the bong 1 more time, I gotta go give this speech.”
This was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Harris wasn’t inebriated during a speech. The video is altered, manipulated from footage of an April 25 speech Harris gave at Howard University.
The real footage shows Harris making her first speech since the announcement that she and President Joe Biden would run for reelection. By some accounts, the altered version was meant as a parody of Harris appearing to stumble over a sentence in her speech, a moment the Daily Dot described as “a tangent about the present and history that’s hard to parse.”
According to the transcript, Harris said, “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.”
But Harris did not repeat the words “yesterday,” “today” and “tomorrow” over and over, as the manipulated video shows.
PolitiFact has reported previously on the telltale clues that prove a video’s not real.
The claim that a video shows Kamala Harris talking nonsensically about today, tomorrow and yesterday is Pants on Fire!
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
Comments