A video of US Vice President Kamala Harris saying several rather incoherent phrases has been widely circulated on the Internet. We decided to check if she said something similar.
Internet users Harris is credited with this statement: “Today is today. And yesterday was today for us, but yesterday. And tomorrow will become today for us, but tomorrow. So live today so that the future today will be for you like yesterday’s today, only tomorrow.” Often it accompany derogatory comments about the vice president's intelligence and ability to formulate thoughts. The video can be found in "VKontakte", Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, blog platform "Peekaboo" Even some media outlets posted it (for example, “Komsomolskaya Pravda").
Judging by Kamala Harris' clothing and the surroundings, the video footage was taken from her speeches on reproductive rights at Howard University (USA) on April 25, 2023. The White House website has a complete transcript her speech - however, the quote about yesterday, today and tomorrow, which sounds in the video in question, is not there.
The first thing that catches your eye when watching the video is the desynchronization of the movements of the speaker’s lips and the spoken words. The video itself seems to “slow down” during playback, Harris’ movements are slow and unnatural. Many reputable media outlets have published excerpts from her speech. The voice and manner of speaking in them differ significantly from the video in question. All this indicates that this is most likely an installation.
In addition, at the speech, Kamala Harris stands behind a podium with the inscription Fighting for reproductive freedom (that is, “fight for reproductive freedom”). On the video being distributed, the caption is different: Ramble rants reproductive freedom, which can be translated as “incoherent chatter about reproductive freedom,” although the phrase is grammatically incorrect, probably because it would not fit otherwise. This also suggests that the video was most likely made as some kind of joke, and then some Internet users took it seriously and circulated it as a real clip of the vice president's speech.
That said, Harris's actual speech did come under criticism for being somewhat incoherent. For example, New York Post calls her “word salad”. Sky News Australia journalists claimthat the vice president has absolutely no idea what she's talking about. “And so do we,” they add. In excerpts that criticize the media, she says the following: “I think it is very important - as you have already heard from many great leaders - for us, in each moment of time and certainly in this moment, 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 history and in the present moment, because it is connected not only to the past, but also to the future.” Moreover, if you look closely at Harris’s gestures during her speech, you will notice that it was this excerpt from her speech that was used to create the video we are considering. Probably, one of the Internet users decided to take the situation to the point of absurdity and put an even more meaningless phrase into Harris’s mouth.
Thus, Kamala Harris did not utter the phrase about yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the video being distributed is a montage. This is evidenced by a number of indirect signs: slow gestures, desynchronization of lip and voice movements, a strange timbre that differs from Harris’s usual manner of speaking. “Verified” was unable to find the original source of the video, however, judging by the altered and clearly mocking inscription on the podium, most likely it was originally someone’s joke. In fact, during her speech at that moment she said different words, which, however, were also criticized by some media for meaninglessness and incoherence.
Cover photo: video screenshot AutoSever
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