Did Kamala Harris plagiarize a MLK interview during a magazine interview?

In October, Kamala Harris was interviewed by Elle magazine. During that interview, she told a little personal story from her childhood, or at least that was what she tried to do. Now it looks like Senator Harris lifted the story from Martin Luther King, Jr., of all people.

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Remember back in October the presidential campaigns were running at full steam. For the Biden-Harris campaign, that meant lots of television interviews from the Biden family home’s basement or a secure location like the campaign headquarters near his home. Interviews by both Biden and Kamala were given to magazines and podcasts, all to try to make them look like regular human beings who just happened to be running for president and vice-president of the most powerful country on earth. Both candidates, though, suffer from being caught telling less than honest anecdotes.

Joe Biden is a longtime plagiarizer. He keeps getting caught yet he continues to make up some whoppers. Now it looks like Kamala does a bit of her own plagiarizing, too. How ballsy is it to use a story from Martin Luther King, Jr.? Surely she must have thought of the risk she was taking. Maybe not. Perhaps, like Joe Biden, it’s just who she is.

Kamala was frequently criticized by the far left of the Democrat Party for not being sufficiently woke. She climbed the ladder in her political career in California while maintaining a personal relationship with Willie Brown, the former speaker of the California State Assembly and Mayor of San Francisco. Kamala dated him until he became mayor. Brown appointed her to two political posts – first to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, and then to the Medical Assistance Commission. At the time they were dating, he was technically married. Now that she’s risen as she has in politics, Kamala prefers to downplay their past relationship. Let’s just say it looks like she had a lot of help from powerful people along the way. Once she was elected to political office, she acquired a mixed record on civil rights, particularly in the black community.

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The anecdote in the interview with Elle magazine was meant to prove her civil rights cred. She says she was raised by parents who were civil rights activists and she likes to tell a story about being taken to protests at a very young age in her stroller. Normally that wouldn’t be any big deal, parents often drag their kids along. The writer of the article was painting Kamala in a soft and fuzzy way. Kamala was asking for freedom from a young age, you know.

“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. “She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller … and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset.”

“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris told the magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

That interview resurfaced Monday. Twitter user @EngelsFreddie and Andray Domise, contributing editor of the Canadian publication Maclean’s noticed that Kamala’s story was very much like one told by MLK during a 1965 interview with Alex Haley for Playboy magazine.

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“I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a White policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother,” King said at the time. “‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’ She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.”

Hmm. Two young girls walking with their mothers in a protest. Both were asked what they wanted. Both replied “freedom” while mispronouncing the word. It could be a coincidence.

https://twitter.com/andraydomise/status/1346228104675667968

The validity of Kamala’s story on busing as a second-grade student has raised some eyebrows. When she aimed her gotcha-style story at Joe Biden during the Democrat primary in order to paint him as a racist, she was criticized for exaggerating the story. More recently, she came under fire for her musing about her memories of celebrating Kwanzaa with her family as a child. Kwanzaa wasn’t invented until two years after she was born but maybe her family celebrated it. It just came across as Kamala trying to fit in again. Oddly enough, she used a photo of herself and her younger sister waiting for Santa to mention Kwanzaa.

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https://twitter.com/GarbyJooman3/status/1343291597086048256

Whatever the truth is in all of her stories, Kamala should be a good fit for Joe Biden. He’s been the subject of stories about plagiarism since his college days. He even had to drop out of a run for president in 1988 because of plagiarizing a speech. He has no shame, he just keeps going. During the last presidential campaign, he plagiarized policies including his COVID-19 response plan and his acceptance speech at the DNC. Even his campaign slogan – Build Back Better – is plagiarized. That slogan was first used by Japanese Prime Minister Abe in 2015 at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. C’mon, man.

Maybe Kamala isn’t a plagiarizer intentionally. Perhaps she just exaggerates. So far there hasn’t been a comment released by Team Biden.

Update (Ed): I’m on vacation today, but I just wanted to weigh in with a couple of my experiences:

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Hey, these things happen …

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