In an effort to tackle climate change, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday urged the US to “reduce population,” but the White House claims that she actually meant to say “reduce pollution.”
When the 58-year-old vice president made the surprising error, he was speaking at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland, about the need to create a “clean energy economy.”
“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, eliciting applause from the audience.
The official White House transcript of her speech acknowledges and corrects Harris’ disquieting error.
In the transcript, “population” is crossed out and “pollution” is added in brackets to denote what the VP intended to say.
The claimed slip-up has gone viral on Twitter, with many seeming to believe that the Vice President accidentally said the quiet part out loud.
“Are you the population she wants to reduce?” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) remarked in a tweet
“Wait, what?” Josiah Neeley, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute think tank, said of the vice president’s eyebrow raising remark.
Harris, whom many still can’t wrap their heads around the fact that she is even in the White House in the first place, has a history of making nonsensical remarks.
Earlier this month she gave a repetitive definition of the word “culture” at a music festival in New Orleans that drew mockery on social media.
“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment,” Harris said, in part, at the Essence Festival of Culture in the Caesars Superdome.
In a meeting with labor union and civil rights groups just this week, Harris stuttered and strained to explain what artificial intelligence is, serving up a word salad.
“I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing,” Harris said on Wednesday. “First of all, it’s two letters. It means artificial intelligence, but ultimately what it is, is it’s about machine learning.”
In April, Harris came under fire for a confusing tangent she made about the “moment” the nation is in while speaking at an abortion rights protest.
“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,” she said.
While senior adviser Anita Dunn has instructed staff members to organize additional events for the unpopular vice president, White House officials are allegedly worried that Harris will become “a drag on the ticket” as the 2024 election approaches.
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