File photos of Vice President Kamala Harris showing records she bought at Home Rule Records in ... [+]
A video featuring Vice President Kamala Harris speaking gibberish has gone viral on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. And while Harris has been criticized in the past for making strange speeches with a lot of empty buzzwords, this video is completely fake. In fact, its a deepfake used to make Harris look like she’s saying words she never actually said.
“Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today,” the vice president appears to say in the deepfake video.
The video is originally from a speech by Vice President Harris at Howard University on April 25, but has been digitally manipulated. Planned Parenthood Action first published the original video on Facebook where anyone can watch the original speech.
The deepfake was created by using audio that’s been circulating on TikTok to make fun of Harris. That audio was mashed together with the video from Howard University in April, with the Vice President’s mouth manipulated in a way to make it look like she was actually saying those words.
I’ve pulled together a video with the deepfake, the parody audio, and the original video to hopefully make it easier to understand which parts are fake and which parts are real. You can watch the video, which includes yellow text at the bottom explaining where I got each clip, over at YouTube.
Unfortunately for Harris, the things she was saying in the original video clip are only slightly less confusing than the gibberish from the deepfake. Harris is often criticized for delivering a “word salad,” a mixture of phrases that don’t seem to mean much at all.
“So I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future,” Harris said in the very real video.
The confusing mix of words in the real video perhaps speaks to why it went viral in the first place. But the version where Harris says “yesterday was today yesterday” is completely fake.
