Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently experienced a “gaffe,” as the White House is now framing it, in which she called for Climate Change™ carbon mitigation efforts to be used to “reduce population.”
What she actually meant to say, according to the government and dutifully reprinted without any skepticism by the New York Post, was “reduce pollution.”
Via New York Post (emphasis added):
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday called on the US to “reduce population” in an effort to combat climate change, but she meant to say “reduce pollution,” according to the White House.
The shocking gaffe happened as the 58-year-old vice president delivered remarks at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on the need to build a “clean energy economy.”
“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said, eliciting applause from the audience.
The official White House transcript of her speech acknowledges and corrects Harris’ disquieting error.*
In the transcript, “population” is crossed out and “pollution” is added in brackets to denote what the VP intended to say.
As useful as the New York Post is, as a well-funded corporate state media outlet that hasn’t been throttled by algorithms to the same extent as PJ Media, which often reports on stories in the public interest that its peer publications won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, this is shameful framing. Since when does the government have the authority, using public resources, to rewrite transcripts so that they reflect what was “intended” to be said rather than what was actually said by the second-highest-ranking official in the government? How would rewriting transcripts Animal-Farm style not fall under the rubric of the “misinformation” that these same authorities claim is rampant in media that they disapprove of?
Here's the video excerpt of her depopulation call:
Did you hear that? Listen again pic.twitter.com/Uh2gyL9mIZ
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) July 22, 2024
And here is how the transcript has been amended, via The White House (emphasis added):
And so, we set an ambitious goal to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The investment we are announcing today will help us to achieve these goals, and it will do so much more, because think also about the impact on not only the local economy, not only on an investment in the entrepreneurs and innovators from and in the community. Think about the impact on something like public health.
When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce
population[pollution], more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water. (Applause.)
Related: Bill Gates Met With Trump, Pressured Him Not to Investigate Vaccine Safety
Bill Gates had a similar so-called “gaffe” back in 2010 during a Ted Talk he called “Innovating to Zero!” (zero what? being the operative unanswered question hanging in the air) in which he revealed that the real “zero” he’s aiming for is not carbon (which all life is predicated on anyway) but human population:
The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3. [Emphasis added]
