Kamala’s Stolen Working-Class Valor
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/30/kamalas-stolen-working-class-valor/
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been found guilty of puffing up his military record to look more manly – also known as stolen valor. Now it looks as though Kamala Harris has committed her own version of stolen valor by claiming a working-class medal that she may never have earned.
Harris and her campaign have been bragging about her modest roots and her supposed connection to working-class folks, exemplified by her having toiled at McDonald’s while in college, a claim she repeatedly makes in her speeches and that came up countless times at the Democratic National Convention.
But, like so many things about Harris and Walz, this story started to fall apart on closer inspection.
Earlier in the month, Harris’ campaign said that “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college.” An ad produced by a pro-Harris PAC said she’d “worked her way through school at McDonald’s.”
That’s fishy enough. Even if Harris worked full-time all summer every summer at McDonald’s, she’d have earned only a fraction of Howard University’s tuition and fees. (The line about Harris’ “working mother” is also a stretch. Her mom was an eminent cancer researcher, and her dad was a tenured Stanford economist.)
In any event, Harris couldn’t keep up this particular fabrication, and later in August at a campaign event said only that she’d “worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money.” Still later in the month, the New York Times said she’d worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, “for a summer” while going to college in Washington, D.C.
Suddenly, Kamala’s working-class roots don’t look so working-class anymore.
But it’s worse than that. It’s doubtful that Harris ever worked at McDonald’s at all.
When the leftist “fact-checking” site Snopes looked into it, it couldn’t find a shred of evidence to support her boast.
We reached out to Harris’ campaign, as well as McDonald’s headquarters, seeking such proof — which could include photos or videos of her working at the restaurant, employment records or physical items such as a uniform or name tag. We also looked for public interviews by friends or family members of Harris’ to confirm the story, with no luck.
Making her claim even more suspicious is the fact that Harris never once said she’d worked at McDonald’s until she decided to run for president in 2019.
The Washington Free Beacon did some digging and found that:
For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she ‘was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.’
(We will leave aside for the moment the curious fact that Harris, a person of no notable accomplishments, has written two memoirs and had two biographies published about her.)
More evidence that Harris’ working-class roots are phony came when her campaign staged a photo op at the popular Primanti Bros. sandwich shop outside Pittsburgh.
The campaign’s tweets, the images, and mainstream news stories all made it look as though she and Walz and their spouses just dropped into the working-class restaurant where they were cheerfully greeted by humble restaurant patrons.
It turns out the entire event was staged. The campaign had cleared out the actual patrons hours before (for a “private event”), then brought in Harris supporters by the busload who pretended to be diners.
In other words, Harris shoved aside real working-class folks so she could pretend to rub elbows with the hoi palloi.
Snopes tried valiantly to defend Harris on this one by saying that the people in the restaurant weren’t “paid actors” as some critics of the event had claimed. But Snopes also pointed out that the press committed a worse crime.
The Associated Press reported that “she later stopped at a Primanti Bros. restaurant, a famed chain known for sandwiches layered with coleslaw and fries, where she met diners and posed for a few pictures.” A photo caption referred to them as “customers.” The AP’s bogus description got picked up by ABC News, NBC New York, and numerous other local TV news websites and newspapers.
So, we are left with a question: If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are so willing to lie about their past to win votes, why should anyone believe anything else that comes out of their mouths?
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