The comment, which brought scorn from the internet as a “cringey” story that likely never happened, also called to mind when Harris seemed to plagiarize a story that Martin Luther King Jr. told about protests in Birmingham, Alabama.
“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing, and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom,’” Harris said in an interview in 2020 and recounted the story in two of her books.
In King’s version of the story, a small girl at a protest faces down a cop. “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 said in 1965.
Like her boss, President Joe Biden, Harris is quickly developing a reputation as a politician who isn’t scared to embellish the truth or pull from greater figures of the past. Biden infamously had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race when it surfaced he plagiarized British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock in his speeches. It would later be revealed he also exaggerated his academic record and was caught plagiarizing work while at law school.
More recently, Biden has taken significant heat for lying about his involvement in the civil rights movement.