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‘Reduce Population’: Kamala Harris’s Verbal Slip-Up Sparks Outrage

Lorenz Duchamps
By Lorenz Duchamps
July 15, 2023Politics
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‘Reduce Population’: Kamala Harris’s Verbal Slip-Up Sparks Outrage
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the conclusion of the Investing in America tour at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on July 14, 2023. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Vice President Kamala Harris mistakenly indicated while speaking in Maryland that the Biden administration is investing to reduce the U.S. population in order to provide cleaner air and drinking water to Americans.

“When President [Joe] Biden and I took office, we set an ambitious goal … to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050,” Ms. Harris said at Coppin State University in Baltimore on Friday, addressing Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda.

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” she declared.

The White House corrected the 58-year-old vice president’s error in the official transcript of her remarks, putting a line through “population” and adding “pollution” in brackets to refer to the word she intended to say.

Ms. Harris spoke at the event to address the Environmental Protection Agency’s $20 billion investment program across two grant competitions under the Biden administration’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that aims to spark clean energy investments across the country.

After clips of Ms. Harris’s verbal miscue emerged online, social media users and a number of Republican figures seized on the error to suggest the Biden administration was publicly calling to reduce the population in the United States.

Responding to Ms. Harris’ verbal slip-up in a Twitter post, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) asked the vice president what exactly she meant by reducing the population.

“Abortion? Assisted suicide? Or what means are you suggesting to reduce population in order to help public health?” Ms. Greene wrote.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), meanwhile, warned his followers on Twitter, asking: “Are you the population she wants to reduce?”

“Kamala Harris admits she wants to reduce the population for environmental reasons,” Ohio state Sen. Michael Rull said in a post on Twitter. “That’s not just anti-American. That’s anti-human.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also commented on the vice president’s mix-up of the phrase, tweeting: “We need to increase population.”

Drop in Polls

According to national polling data by FiveThirtyEight on July 13, Ms. Harris had a disapproval rating of 51.3 percent, with 39 percent of registered voters having a positive view of the California native. Last month, her numbers stagnated at a lower level than many of her predecessors’ ratings.

Responding to the drop in approval ratings, commentator and journalist Marc Thiessen told Fox News on July 13 that he believes the abysmal approval rating is due, in part, to how she speaks to the American public.

“Why is she so unpopular? One may be that none of the issues she’s taken on, like the border or anything else, she hasn’t made any progress and so part of that is the failure of the administration,” Mr. Thiessen said. But the other aspect is how she addresses the American people, he added.

“People don’t like to be talked to like a child. And so either they just lose confidence in her or they think she’s talking down to them, and that makes her profoundly unpopular.”

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