Fact-checkers slammed Vice President Kamala Harris for several contradictions during an interview on Thursday, Newsweek reported. Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sat for the interview with CNN's Dana Bash meant to help the campaign.
The interview was Harris's first since naming Walz her vice presidential running mate. She was asked softball questions, and Bash seldom pushed back on Harris's statements.
Despite the help from Bash, there were several times that Harris' answers were not completely truthful or at least evasive which could imperil her candidacy. She made claims about positive job numbers, her immigration record, and other key policy proposals.
One of the most glaring problems came when she was asked about banning fracking. This is an important issue to voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, and it's clear that she has that in mind when suddenly flip-flopping on it.
Even a leftist media outlet couldn't ignore some of the incongruencies, though Newsweek attempted to spin them. Harris touted President Joe Biden's administration that created "over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs" as well as "300,000 new clean energy jobs."
This is not entirely true, as the numbers for manufacturing jobs are revised based on seasonal fluctuations, and green jobs are projected but not actual. However, one glaring omission was the role the COVID-19 pandemic played in the rebound in employment.
In the years following the lockdowns, businesses reopened, and people went back to work, resulting in a significant increase in jobs. Harris similarly falsly claimed that illegal immigration from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador was down by playing with the timing.
While the decrease was true as of 2023, the 2024 data already revealed an increase year over year in the number of these immigrants illegally crossing into the U.S. However, Harris's most dubious claim was her changing views on fracking.
When Harris was a candidate for president in the 2020 presidential election, she unequivocally supported a ban on fracking. She implied that those vies have changed, but the rhetoric on the issue only softened when she was reflecting Biden's views as his running mate.
Ohio GOP Sen. J.D. Vance, who is former President Donald Trump's running mate, slammed Harris. "If you look at the way that Kamala Harris has governed, she's actually governed as a far-left person," Vance said on Fox & Friends Friday, Fox News reported.
"She's just trying to pretend that she's not far left now because, of course, she wants to win the American people's votes over the next couple of months. But if she does, she's going to do the same thing that she's been doing for the last few years," Vance predicted.
He went on to point out that she is claiming to have moved to the center while her record shows she's a rabid leftist. "She has governed as a person who believes those things, and unfortunately, the American people are far off because of it," Vance said.
Harris is an avowed leftist who will continue to govern as such despite her lies. She had to tell a different tale in the interview because the truth is unpopular with the American people, and she knows it.
