July 21, 2024 US President Joe Biden stated, which is removed from the election of the head of state, and suggested as the new Democratic candidate for Vice President Kamala Harris. Soon, videos with the politician’s participation spread across the Internet, allegedly indicating her incompetence, as well as allegations about some details of her biography. Some speakers even insist: according to US law, Harris cannot participate in the presidential election. We tested five such statements.
Is it true that Harris is ineligible to run for president?
On the night of July 23, the Telegram channel “RT in Russian” (205,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) reported that Harris cannot participate in the US presidential election because her father and mother were born outside the United States. The authors refer to an interview with former US Army officer Scott Bennett. “Neither of her parents were American... This is a very real obstacle - the possibility of finding that, according to the US Constitution, she cannot be president: vice president, yes, but president, no,” Bennett said.
Harris is truly a descendant of immigrants. Her mother is a biologist Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India, and her father is an economist Donald Jasper Harris, - in Jamaica. They met in California, where they came to study at the university. There, in 1964, in the city of Auckland, a couple was born daughter Kamala.
In the US Constitution it says:
“No person, except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be entitled to the office of President; nor shall any person be eligible to hold this office unless he has attained the age of 35 years and been a resident of the United States for 14 years."
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1866, guarantees:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside.”
Experts from Cornell University Law School explain, that there are two rare exceptions to this law: children born to diplomats from other countries working in the country, as well as to “foreign enemies during the occupation,” do not become US citizens. Harris fits none of these conditions.
Claims that the politician could not be elected to senior public office because her parents were immigrants first spread in 2020, when Harris first intended to run for president and then agreed to become vice president in the Biden administration. In August 2020, more than 40 lawyers from leading US universities published an open letter confirming Harris' right to run for office.
Is the video of Harris saying, "I'm a woman sitting at a desk in a blue suit" true?
On July 22, the day after Biden dropped out of the presidential race, a video of Harris saying, “My name is Kamala Harris,” began circulating on Telegram channels. My pronouns are “she” and “her.” I am a woman sitting at a table in a blue suit.” Bloggers who shared the video escorted with his comments like “Well, the world and the nuclear button are in good hands,” “A worthy replacement,” or “And if I wear candybober on my head, that doesn’t mean I’m a woman or a ballerina.”
Similar posts were posted by Telegram channels “Skabeeva"(79,000 views), "The goat screamed" (72,000) and "Tucker Carlson for Russia» (49,000), users Facebook, LiveJournal And X.
The video was widely circulated in the English-speaking segment of the Internet. So, the owner of the social network X Elon Musk retweeted post with this video and added: “Imagine four years of this...” The publication collected more than 156 million views.
A video with similar comments was distributed back in the summer of 2022 - for example, the publication SVTV News wrote, that “the US vice president and great orator met with activists for the rights of the disabled.” “The United States is lucky to have a president who says stupid things because of dementia, and a vice president who does it out of vocation,” the author of the note commented on that video.
On July 26, 2022, Harris did participate in a roundtable with disability rights advocates that took place to mark the 32nd anniversary of the passage of People with Disabilities Act (ADA). Transcript the politician’s speeches were published on the White House website, and video broadcast - on the YouTube channel of the US Presidential Administration. According to these sources, Harris did say, “My name is Kamala Harris. My pronouns are “she” and “her.” I am a woman sitting at a table in a blue suit.”
Similar visual self-description - a common practice when communicating with interlocutors with visual impairments. Typically, the speaker will briefly describe what he looks like and what he is wearing, optionally adding details that he thinks may be important to blind or visually impaired participants in the meeting. Some people with visual impairments (for example, Jasmine Bailey, a blind employee of the American Association of People with Disabilities) thinkthat visual self-description helps make an event more inclusive. Chris Danielsen, PR director for the National Federation of the Blind, echoes this view: “Vice President Harris has strived to be more inclusive. And we fully respect her intentions." However, this practice also has opponents, which believe, that verbal description is necessary only in theatre, cinema and television, and at business meetings unnecessary time is wasted on this. In any case, in the context of the roundtable with blind and visually impaired people at which Harris spoke, such a self-description was appropriate. Other speakers at that event done the same thing at the beginning of their speeches.
Harris included the pronouns “she/her” in her greeting for probably two reasons. Firstly, this gave blind and visually impaired interlocutors the opportunity to avoid awkward situations when communicating with the vice president, whose gender might be unknown to them. Second, using your preferred pronouns when communicating with strangers is another inclusive practice that President Biden's administration is promoting. In 2021, the White House added feedback form the ability to indicate the pronouns that the author of the response letter should use. Users could select “she/her”, “he/him”, “they/their” or “other”, enter their own option, or refuse to fill out the corresponding field for personal reasons.
Thus, the video circulated in July 2024, intended to discredit Harris, was filmed two years earlier at a roundtable with the participation of the blind and visually impaired. The US Vice President appeared to be committed to living up to the principles of inclusion and recommended practices for communicating with people with disabilities.
Is it true that Harris had an affair with the married mayor of San Francisco?
Shortly after Biden withdrew from the election, media and social media users reported that his vice president and likely new Democratic nominee in the 1990s was dating then-married San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Some Russian media not only questioned the ethics of Harris’ actions, but also saw in her affair with Brown a desire to advance her career. Similar notes were released, for example, “Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Constantinople" And Men Today. The authors also reported this Telegram channels, social network users (“VKontakte", X) And blogging platforms.
In 1994, a newspaper wrote about rumors of an affair between 30-year-old Harris and 60-year-old Brown. The Los Angeles Times - just in connection with the career growth of the young lawyer. At that time she occupied Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission. Already in 1995, judging by messages Californian media, the couple broke up. Mayor of San Francisco Brown became only a year later, before that he had been speaker of the lower house of state parliament for a decade and a half.
This relationship was not a secret, and Brown does not hide the connection: in 2019 he published in the San Francisco Chronicle column entitled “Of course, I met Kamala Harris. And what?" According to the politician, he wrote the article after Harris announced her intention to participate in the 2020 presidential election, and journalists bombarded him with calls. Brown noted that he was in a relationship with Harris more than 20 years ago and, while he did influence her career, he also helped several other Democratic politicians.
As for allegations that Harris was dating a married man, back in 1984, The New York Times reported: Two years earlier, Brown had amicably separated from his wife Blanche Vitero after 25 years of marriage. In the biography of the Californian politician on the magazine’s website People in 1996 it was also stated that he had not lived with Vitero for 15 years. In 2001, journalists from The Los Angeles Times confirmed this information in an article about the imminent birth of a child from the mayor of San Francisco from businesswoman Carolyn Carpeneti, indicating that he separated from his wife more than 20 years ago. That is, Brown broke up with his wife ten years before his affair with Harris and, judging by media reports, never got back together with her.
Thus, in the mid-1990s, Harris actually had an affair with a formally married man, but he broke up with his wife long before the start of his relationship with the future vice president, so hints that she took the man away from the family are, to say the least, incorrect.
Is the video of Harris saying, “Ukraine is a country in Europe, true? Does it exist next to another country called Russia?
July 22 Telegram channel “Uncle Slava” (175,000 views) published The 17-second recording shows Harris saying: “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a big country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically it's wrong." According to the TGStat service, similar posts on Telegram received about half a million views in total; some bloggers called Harris's speech is "reasoning at the level of an elementary school student."
Soon Russian media published notes on this topic. “Kamala Harris's vast knowledge of geopolitics is comparable to that of a mentally retarded hippopotamus, just imagine her as president,” leads publication "Ukraina.ru" comment from one of the Internet users. In turn, Channel Five mentioned quote from the politician on his website in an article with the headline “Has the disease made itself felt? Why Kamala Harris Can't Speak Eloquently." The author of the publication suggested that the politician may be suffering from aphasia - “a serious illness in which a person loses the ability to formulate thoughts.”
An audio recording of Harris’s quote circulated on the Internet in the form of a fragment of a Fox News broadcast, in which her words are accompanied by a slide with the headline “Vice President Harris: Ukraine is a country,” the verbatim text of the quote and the caption “The Morning Hustle, March 1, 2022.”
The Morning Hustle is American podcast, offering "an entertaining, humorous and informative look at urban pop culture from the perspective of millennials and Gen Z." On March 1, 2022, a week after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Harris took part in the recording of one of episodes, answering questions from the presenters about the situation in Ukraine, possible military conscription in the United States and the appointment of the chairman of the Supreme Court. The full recording of that episode with the participation of the politician can be found at website podcast and its YouTube channel.
The podcast host made this request to Harris:
“If you watch news at any level, even on social networks, you have seen everything that is happening now in Ukraine. Explain this in simple terms for those who do not understand what is happening and how it may directly affect the people of the United States."
To this, the US Vice President replied:
“So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a big country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically it's wrong. And it goes against everything we stand for. There are terms that we use - we say that we respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity of countries, their independence.”
That is, the recording that went viral on social networks is true, but lacks context: the US Vice President responded to the presenter’s request to explain the war in Ukraine as simply as possible. However, many YouTube users were dissatisfied in the words of Harris - under the video with the corresponding podcast episode, you can find comments like “Everyone’s favorite preschool teacher came to talk down to everyone” or “Thank you, Vice President, for explaining the situation in Ukraine as if we were in kindergarten.”
For the past two and a half years, Harris repeatedly in detail spoke out about the war in Ukraine, including during meetings with the president of this country, Vladimir Zelensky.
Is it true that GovTrack removed the page from its website where Harris was named the most liberal senator of 2019?
On July 25, SVTV News published in its Telegram channel (36,000 views) reported, that the GovTrack project, which tracks voting results in both houses of the US Congress, removed from its website the page on which Harris was named the most liberal senator in 2019. “Five years ago, algorithms calculated that Senator Harris's decisions were far left, from expanding gun control to co-authoring Medicare. <…> The former California prosecutor knows exactly how to cover his tracks,” states SVTV News.
Shortly before this, a similar statement did billionaire Elon Musk. On his social media page X, he wrote: “Literally as far to the left as you can! They are trying so hard to wipe out the internet lol.” Musk's tweet received about 47 million views.
In 2019, the independent GovTrack project actually named Harris the most liberal senator. Her profile for the 2019 results also said that the politician, for example, joined bipartisan bills less often than other Democrats, and was also among the top three in the number of missed votes. Now the corresponding page is on the GovTrack website unavailable, however preserved archival copy.
Fact-checking project Lead Stories appealed GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer for comment. He explained that on July 22, not only the page with an assessment of Harris’s work for 2019 was removed from the site, but also similar entries about all the other congressmen. Tauberer noted:
“Several years ago, we stopped creating new annual “report cards.” We determined that the limited data from one year was insufficient to create a reliable portrait of legislative performance... and therefore did not serve as a useful tool for our users and the American public. We subsequently withdrew the previously published one-year statistics for the same reason."
Still on the project website available Harris' 2020 Scorecard, which provides an analysis of her legislative work during the 116th Congress (2019-2021). On this page, the politician is named the most left-wing Democratic senator. Among all senators, according to GovTrack, to the left was only Bernie Sanders, who is not a member of either of the two major US parties.
Thus, allegations that Harris is trying to erase certain online posts to gain support from moderate voters are baseless.
Cover photo: The White House/Wikimedia Commons
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