A clip has been circulating today of Kamala Harris in 2015 saying that 18-24 year olds are stupid:
(full video here)
Here’s the background on the speech:
During a keynote address at a symposium hosted by the Ford Foundation, the then–California attorney general — now Democratic candidate for president — laid out her vision for a crime recidivism reduction initiative in Los Angeles.The program, modeled on a similar initiative that Harris launched in San Francisco, would provide social services to young people 18 to 24 who were convicted of nonviolent felonies.Why that population?People that age are “stupid,” Harris told the audience.“What’s the other thing we know about this population? And it’s a specific phase of life. And remember, age is more than a chronological fact. What else do we know about this population, 18 through 24? They are stupid,” Harris said, to wide laughs from the audience.“That is why we put them in dormitories, and they have a resident assistant. They make really bad decisions. So we focused on that age population. […] When I was at Howard University, and we were in college, we were 18 to 24, and you know what we were called? College kids,” Harris said with a loaded pause.”It was a joke,” a spokesperson for the Harris campaign said of the candidate’s remarks.
It’s pretty funny, and no doubt that will be her defense. It was JUST A JOKE!
But there’s a background that makes it even funnier.
In 2019, over 125 House Democrats voted to lower the voting age to 16.
While the measure failed, it was and is a Democrat talking point. There is an initiative on the ballot this fall in San Francisco to allow 16 year olds to vote in city elections.
At a Democrat primary Townhall, Harris said:
“I think there is no question if we are looking at what is going on in our country, we’re putting more responsibilities on people at young age the larger number of people we can involve in the electoral process, I think the more robust it would be. I think one of the down sides but thank you do CNN for doing the town hall with students is if they don’t write checks, they don’t get heard.”
When the issue came up another time, Harris said:
Asked later about lowering the voting age to 16, Harris said: “I’m really interested in having that conversation.” Some Democratic bigwigs now think it’s time to have a conversation about Kamala Harris’s interest in “having that conversation.”“At some point this could end up being a problem,” David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, said last night on CNN. “She is an incredibly compelling personality; a very bright and accomplished person. But she’s very cautious — and that caution was pretty apparent in a lot of her answers.”
So “maybe” Harris was joking about 18-24 year olds, and “maybe” being willing to have a conversation about lowering the voting age to 16 was just a joke. I’m sure that if a Republican had made such comments, they would be given the benefit of the doubt.
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