Vice President Kamala Harris made a verbal slip on Friday that fueled the conspiracy theory frenzy, after she spoke of the need to ‘reduce population’ rather than pollution.
“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said in a speech on the fight against climate change in Baltimore.
The official White House transcript of the remarks corrected the obvious error, crossing out the word ‘population’ and adding ‘pollution’ in parentheses to indicate what Harris meant.
The gaffe quickly drew derision from conservatives on Twitter, particularly after the Republican National Committee’s @RNCRsearch account posted a clip of the event, which quickly pounced on Harris’ slip-ups.
‘I see Kamala Harris subscribes to the Thanos method of dealing with scarce resources,’ one user joked, referring to the fictional Marvel villain who wiped out half the universe’s population.
Vice President Kamala Harris made a verbal slip on Friday that fueled the conspiracy theory frenzy, after she spoke of the need to ‘reduce population’ rather than pollution.
The official White House transcript of the remarks corrected the obvious error, crossing out the word ‘population’ and adding ‘pollution’ in parentheses to indicate what Harris meant.
The comment also highlighted long-standing conspiracy theories that a cabal of global elites plan to dramatically reduce the world’s human population in order to more easily monitor and control humans.
‘He said the quiet part out loud,’ one user commented, perhaps jokingly.
Versions of the baseless theory date back to at least the 1960s, when fringe figures suggested that vaccines or water fluoridation were communist plots to wipe out the US population and take control of the country.
The theory enjoyed a renaissance during the COVID-19 pandemic, when conspiracy theories falsely suggested that vaccines to protect against the virus were a plot to control the global population.
Like Harris’ other recent gaffes, the mistake drew attention away from the intended purpose of his remarks, in which he talked about investing $20 billion in a national financing network to finance clean energy projects as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Harris has drawn repeated conservative derision in recent days for his verbal gaffes, including a confusing interpretation of artificial intelligence earlier this week.
‘AI is kind of a fancy thing. First, it’s two characters. It means ‘artificial intelligence,’” Harris told a roundtable of labor and civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
He continued: ‘It’s about machine learning, and so, the machine is taught – and part of the problem here is what information is going to the machine that will then determine – and we can then predict, if we think about what information is going in and then what decision and will be produced in terms of opinions which may be made by that process.’
Harris was speaking at Coppin State University in Baltimore on Friday, where he talked about a national clean financing network and a $20 billion investment in clean energy projects.
The VP faced similar criticism for his simplistic interpretation of transportation at an event with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday.
“This issue of transportation is fundamentally about making sure people have the ability to get where they need to go,” he told a gathering of disability rights advocates. ‘It’s basic.’
Harris has had a similar blunder lately, and strangely dished out a ‘word salad’ when trying to define ‘culture’ at Essence Festival in New Orleans last Friday.
‘Culture is – it is a reflection of our moment and our time. right?’ The vice president thought.
“And current culture is the way we express how we feel about the moment, and we should always find time to express how we feel about the moment,” Harris continued.
‘It is a reflection of joy. Because, you know,’ he said, pausing and then breaking into a laugh, ‘comes in the morning.’
Then he added, ‘We also have to find ways to express how we feel in terms of just having language and connecting with how people’s lives are feeling. And I think of it that way too.’
While President Joe Biden, 80, has sometimes come under fire for verbal lapses and indiscretions, Harris has been accused of speaking almost absurdly at times.
His signature gaffes are either absurd simplistic truisms, or complex explanations that are difficult to decipher.
The Daily Show compared her unfavorably to the fictional character Selina Meyer on the HBO show Veep, who had a tendency to use truthfulness and roundabout explanations.
In real life, other vice presidents have also faced intense ridicule for their verbal gaffes, as Republican Dan Quayle memorably discovered during the George HW Bush administration.
Biden has already pledged to keep Harris on his 2024 ticket as he seeks re-election, even though he faces approval ratings that are typically lower than he has been.
According to the latest polling data from July 14, Harris holds a 51.3 disapproval rating, with just 39 percent of Americans saying they approve of him, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.
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