On a day when Vice President Kamala Harris officially named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the Harris campaign is in damage control to put out a viral, resurfaced video of her spreading like wildfire across social media.
As first reported by Fox News, a resurfaced clip of Harris from 2017 calling on “everybody” to be “woke” is running rampant on social media, sparking critics and conservatives to roast the official Democratic nominee as a “Communist functionary” who is “too radical” to serve as president.
“We have to stay woke. Like everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke,” then-Sen. Harris said in 2017 during Recode’s annual Code Conference, alongside philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, during the conference.
The conference focused on issues such as immigration and the environment, including Harris speaking out against the Trump administration’s drug policies and immigration polices just moments ahead of her call on Americans to be “woke.”
“I get upset when we say we’re going to shut our door to refugees who are fleeing such atrocities and have been standing in line for two years to qualify for refugee status, and they arrive here, and we turn them away. Yes, I’m gonna get mad about that. I’m gonna get mad when we have an attorney general who’s trying to resuscitate the war on drugs. And he thinks the greatest evil that mankind has ever seen is marijuana. … Leave grandma’s medical marijuana alone,” Harris said.
Here’s a snippet of the old clip of Harris:
Kamala: "Everybody needs to be woke"
The ads write themselves these days.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 5, 2024
Harris didn’t back down. In a message posted to X a day later, she said: “We have to stay active. We have to stay woke.”
We have to stay active. We have to stay woke. #codecon
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 1, 2017
If you recall, the word “woke” grew in popularity in 2017. Dictionaries such as Oxford and Merriam-Webster added the phrase to their texts, defining it as people who are attentive to issues such as social justice.
It has since become a catch-all word for left-wing issues and agendas.
Critics on social media are relentlessly attacking Harris over the clip, including conservative author James Lindsay describing Harris as a “Communist functionary.”
“Kamala is a low-level Communist functionary, and I’m tired of being told we have to pretend she’s not,” he wrote.
Recently, Harris critics have unearthed a slew of other, past news articles and video clips of the presumptive Democratic nominee, such as her voicing support to the defund the police movement in 2020, and her praise of a pastor who blamed the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks.
According to the initial report, Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the clip and criticism, but did not immediately receive a reply.