A 2017 clip of Vice President Kamala Harris urging “everybody” to be “woke” has resurfaced on social media, prompting critics and conservatives to denounce the official Democratic nominee as a “Communist functionary” and accuse her of being “too radical” to serve as president, Fox News reported.
“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,” a cackling 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.
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Kamala: “Everybody needs to be woke”
The ads write themselves these days.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 5, 2024
The conference addressed topics like immigration and the environment, with Harris criticizing the Trump administration’s drug and immigration policies just before her call for Americans to be “woke.” She said: “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 doubled down on her comment in a message posted to X a day later, which read: “We have to stay active. We have to stay woke.” The term “woke” gained prominence in 2017 when dictionaries like Oxford and Merriam-Webster included it, defining it as an awareness of social justice issues. Since then, it has evolved into a broad term often used to describe left-wing concerns and agendas.
We have to stay active. We have to stay woke. #codecon
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 1, 2017
Seven years after Harris joined the 2017 conference, critics on social media are criticizing the presumptive Democratic nominee over the clip. This includes conservative author James Lindsay, who described Harris as a “Communist functionary.” He wrote: “Kamala is a low-level Communist functionary, and I’m tired of being told we have to pretend she’s not.”
The clip resurfaced after President Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race late last month and endorsed Vice President Harris as his successor. Harris officially secured the Democratic nomination for the 2024 presidential race on Friday, obtaining a majority of votes from convention delegates, according to the DNC.
With fewer than 100 days until the November 5 election, Harris must intensify her efforts to appeal to voters ahead of facing former President Donald Trump at the polls. As she ramps up her campaign, critics have resurfaced a range of news articles and video clips highlighting controversial aspects of her past, such as her support for the defund the police movement in 2020 and her praise for a pastor who blamed the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks.
But her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a self-avowed far-left socialist, on Tuesday isn’t likely to help her quell nervousness about her progressive views.