Unearthed Kamala Harris Interview May Come Back To Haunt Her

It's no surprise that the 2020 presidential election was a tense run. President Donald Trump often referred to President-elect Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe" and brought up the 12,469-person Swine Flu death toll as evidence that Biden could not take over a pandemic-stricken America. On the other hand, Biden dug into the reignited Black Lives Matter movement in America and declared that Trump was "one of the most racist presidents we've had in modern history," as reported by The New York Times in October 2020.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also received her fair share of disapproval from Trump. In an interview following the October 2020 vice presidential debate, Trump called Harris a "monster" and "unlikeable," per NPR. It's safe to assume that any person running for political office is prepared to face the fiercest criticism. However, Harris might not have foreshadowed the latest reason she's in hot water. An unearthed interview Harris did with Elle magazine has resurfaced, and it's already haunting her. Keep reading to learn why people are upset.

An October 2020 Kamala Harris interview with Elle magazine is making its rounds again because people are accusing the vice president-elect of plagiarizing Martin Luther King Jr. In the interview, Harris tells a story supposedly from her childhood when she became separated from her mother at a civil rights march in Oakland, Calif. Once reunited with her mother, Harris says her mom asked her what she wants. "I just looked at her and I said, 'Fweedom,'" Harris stated.

Several Twitter users found and circulated the article, noting that the story is shockingly similar to one told by King Jr. in a 1965 interview with Playboy magazine, per The New York Post. In his narrative, the civil rights icon tells a story of a 7- or 8-year-old Black girl who marched with her mom in a protest and was accosted by policemen. "'What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom,'" King Jr. recalled.

This is not the first time Harris has used this anecdote. She referenced it in her 2010 book Smart on Crime and detailed it again in her 2019 book The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, per The New York Post.

Naturally, people took to the internet to air their grievances about Kamala Harris' strikingly familiar story. "She is learning how to plagiarize and lie like Biden. They make a good con artist team," one Twitter user wrote. Another person wondered why she didn't just give credit to Martin Luther King Jr. instead of possibly fabricating an entire story.

Several people mentioned that Harris was following in the footsteps of Joe Biden. The former vice president came under fire in 2019 for his "Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice," which included sentences copied directly from environment groups with no credit given, per NBC News. This was not the first time he had been accused of plagiarism.

Opponents of Biden and Harris had previously used plagiarism accusations as a way to weaken the public's trust in the team. "Plagiarism, nothing new for Joe Biden," Fox news anchor Sean Hannity said during his broadcast just months before the election, per Fox News. "In the 1980s, he was forced to end his presidential campaign [when] he was caught red-handed plagiarizing a British politician by the name of Neil Kinnock word-for-word on multiple occasions."

Furthermore, people were quick to point out that this isn't the first time Harris has been associated with plagiarism.

Politico reported in 2019 that there is evidence of Kamala Harris plagiarizing several times by using facts and data without mentioning from where the information originated. Politico found that under the since-deleted gender equality section of Harris' website, she wrote that "More than 1 million women in America today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner." Almost the same sentence appeared on the website for gun safety organization Everytown: "Nearly 1 million women alive today have been shot, or shot at, by an intimate partner." However, the sentence has also since been deleted. The publication noticed that Harris seemed to use information from the American Heart Association website also without citation. 

As the accusations of plagiarism grew, Harris was busy encouraging Georgians to vote in their state Senate race. The vice president-elect has not addressed the most recent allegations, and a spokesperson for her could not be reached by The New York Post.