Jesse Watters has ignited controversy once more, this time targeting Vice President Kamala Harris’ frequently mentioned narrative of growing up in the “rough and tumble” streets of Oakland. Watters argues there’s a significant discrepancy—asserting that Harris didn’t actually grow up in Oakland. On his prime-time Fox News show, Watters presented Harris’ birth certificate, claiming it reveals the “real truth” about her upbringing. According to Watters, Harris was born in Berkeley, not Oakland, challenging the portrayal of her as having a gritty, working-class background.
“Kamala Harris wants you to believe she’s a product of Oakland’s hard streets,” Watters said, showing a copy of Harris’ birth certificate. “But in reality, she was born and raised in the People’s Republic of Berkeley—yes, Berkeley, the most insanely liberal precinct in America.”
Watters described Berkeley as “Berserkly,” the epicenter of radical leftist movements, meaning Harris grew up just a stone’s throw away from the University of California campus. “Her birth certificate lists an apartment right next to Berkeley’s campus, a half block south of People’s Park,” Watters continued. “This is ground zero for every single radical protest movement in the country.”
The Fox News host didn’t stop there. He highlighted that Harris attended public schools in Berkeley and was even bused to schools within the city, contrasting sharply with the urban struggles of Oakland that she has often used as a political talking point during her failed 2020 presidential bid. Watters mocked Harris’ famous debate line, “That little girl was me,” suggesting that the Vice President has crafted a misleading story about her upbringing. “If you lie about where you grew up—about something that’s at the very core of who you are—how can people trust anything you say?” Watters questioned.
WATCH:
Jesse Watters uses Kamala Harris’ birth certificate to claim she didn’t didn’t grow up in Oakland
pic.twitter.com/CL8V2eehrv— ??? Country Over Party???????? (@gagirlpolitics) August 27, 2024
The New York Times noted:
She was indeed born in an Oakland hospital in 1964, but she did not settle in the city until she was in her 20s and working as a prosecutor in the county district attorney’s office.
Her birth certificate lists an apartment building near the University of California, Berkeley campus, where her parents were pursuing Ph.D.s. It sat just a half-block south of People’s Park, the campus land taken over by activists in 1969, just a few years after the Harris family moved out of the building.
When Ms. Harris was a toddler, her family moved to the Midwest where her father, Donald Harris, taught briefly at universities in Illinois and Wisconsin. After her parents split up, Ms. Harris returned to Berkeley when she was 5, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and her sister, Maya, and eventually settled into the little yellow house in the “flatlands,” then a working-class part of the city with a large population of Black families.
Ms. Harris’s mother was steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland. Ms. Harris attended Berkeley public schools and was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in a more upscale neighborhood in the hills of north Berkeley as part of a voluntary program to integrate schools.
Meanwhile, Harris appears to have been caught in another falsehood. Since launching her 2019 presidential campaign, Harris has frequently mentioned that her first job after her freshman year of college was working for the world’s most recognizable fast food brand. “I did fries,” she recently revealed on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” adding, “and then I did the cashier.”
The Washington Free Beacon researched Harris’s past public statements on her work history and found the first time she mentioned a summer job at McDonald’s during a labor rally in Las Vegas that year. “I was working in a McDonald’s,” she told the enthusiastic crowd. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times dutifully reported, without attribution, that Harris “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.”
The Beacon conducted further research and found that neither of Harris’s two memoirs—published in 2010 and 2019—mention her brief stint at McDonald’s. Her summer job was also absent from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. Stacey Johnson-Batiste, who detailed Harris’s rise in a 2021 autobiography, confirmed she had never heard about Harris working at McDonald’s.
The situation took a dramatic turn when the outlet acquired a copy of a 1987 job application from Harris, which would have been completed after her first year of college. At that time, Harris was in law school and applying for a position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. The application required a detailed employment history, including a month-long stint at a stock brokerage, listing every job she had held over the past decade. Notably, there was no mention of working at McDonald’s.
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.