A lot of time, it’s hard to understand exactly what Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to say. She talks in circles without really saying much of anything. But now, we are learning that it’s also hard to trust anything that the vice president says.
Certainly, she is not the first politician to create stories about their lives that are more appealing to voters. That has been a part of the government for a long time. But Kamala Harris is a case by herself.
She has tried to portray herself as always having the heart to serve the public, even since she was just a toddler. One example is the story that has been told since 2004. Allegedly, when little Kamala was a toddler in a stroller, her mother asked what she wanted during a civil rights rally. The vice president responded, “Fweedom!”
But some news sources reported when the story was shared that she may have plagiarized a story that was originally told by the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Even when the accusation was made against Harris, she continued to tell the story.
So now, let’s get up to date in 2022, it seems like Harris is at it again. She and President Biden sometimes can get lost in their inane stories and sometimes they just don’t have any basis in reality. Kamala has been caught again, this time with a story about her support of labor unions.
There was an article published on The Nation’s website this Labor Day that revealed how Kamala Harris was just about a perfect fit to be asked by Biden to raise the visibility and build support for the labor movement.
Harris told a story about how she had never eaten grapes until she was in her mid-20s. She did this in “solidarity” with a long-standing boycott that unions had created against the growers at that time in her life.
Harris waxed eloquently, well sort of, telling the story of how when she was growing up in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s her mother was “very deeply rooted” in the movements for economic, social, and racial justice.
She said that she was inspired by Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers because they used grape boycotts to force growers to negotiate.
“The farmworkers movement was very much a part of my childhood,” Harris said. “This sounds quaint, and so I’m reluctant to say it, but, you know, I didn’t eat a grape until I was in my 20s. Like, literally, had never had a grape. I remember the first time I had a grape, I went, ‘Wow! This is quite tasty.’ It was absolutely ingrained so deeply in me: Never cross a picket line.”
Here’s the problem. The three-decade-long union boycott of grapes did not start until just before Kamala turned 20 years old. Staying clear of grapes was a value for labor activists from the time Harris was 19 to 36. So if she did eat grapes in her twenties, she certainly crossed the picket line.
The truth is that her story is just not consistent with the timeline of the three major grape boycotts that were promoted by the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers.
The string of stories that have been told by Harris touting her “youth activism” just continues to grow, so it’s just not possible to give her the benefit of doubt and believe that she just slipped up on a timeline and maybe didn’t eat grapes until her 30s.
The vice president has a problem with authenticity and believability. This is not good for a vice president when there is so much doubt about whether the incumbent president is even able to serve a second term.
