In a Labor Day interview, cackling Kamala Harris proudly claimed that she didn’t eat a grape until she was in her 20s due to union boycotts of grape producers, but a look at the timeline suggests otherwise.
In a recent interview with John Nichols of The Nation, Vice President Kamala Harris expressed her unwavering support for the labor movement and how she was inspired by Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers, whose grape boycotts compelled growers to negotiate.
“The farmworkers movement was very much a part of my childhood,” she recalled.
During the course of the interview, she revealed that she never ate grapes until she was in her 20s.
“This sounds quaint, and so I’m reluctant to say it, but, you know, I didn’t eat a grape until I was in my 20s,” Kamala claimed.
“Like, literally, had never had a grape. I remember the first time I had a grape, I went, ‘Wow! This is quite tasty.’ It was absolutely ingrained so deeply in me: Never cross a picket line,” Kamala claimed.
“Kamala Harris says she never tried a grape until she was in her 20s, having grown up amid United Farm Workers-inspired grape boycotts in California” https://t.co/LxKQM7deeo
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) September 6, 2022
However, an analysis from New York Post says otherwise. According to the outlet, Harris’s story doesn’t fit with how the three major grape boycotts led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers happened.
And Kamala moved to Montreal at age 12.
More from the Post:
The UFW launched its third and longest California grape boycott in June 1984, just over four months before Harris’ 20th birthday, and it lasted until 2000 when Harris was 36.
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on the discrepancy.
It’s not the first story told by Harris to raise eyebrows and during the 2020 campaign then-President Donald Trump and his allies attacked Harris as an unprincipled “phony.”
Detractors say that Harris lied in a 2019 radio interview about smoking pot in college while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
Critics pointed out that Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986, long before Tupac released his first album in 1991 and about seven years before Snoop Dogg released his first album in 1993.
Harris defenders argued she did not lie, but instead was saying which musicians she listened to while getting high but not necessarily in college. But the episode became a campaign flashpoint, especially due to the fact that Harris went on to oversee 1,900 marijuana convictions as San Francisco district attorney.
She also took heat for allegedly plagiarizing Martin Luther King Jr. by claiming that as a child attending a protest she memorably demanded “Fweedom” — an account that mirrored a 1960s account by the civil rights hero.
Harris was born in 1964, just before the UFW’s first grape boycott fighting for higher wages and better work conditions. The first UFW grape boycott ended in 1970, when Harris was 5 years old. A second boycott began three years later in 1973 and ended in 1978.
