Does a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris saying that young adults "are stupid" accurately reflect what she said in a 2014 speech about crime prevention? No, that's not true: The full transcript shows that when she said 18- to 24-year-olds "are stupid" and "make really bad decisions", she was including her college-aged self. A social media video snippet stripped away important context: her proposal was to treat young adults in and out of college with the same patience if they make mistakes.
The claim was implied in a post on Instagram on July 23, 2024. The post included a clip of Harris jokingly saying that people aged 18 to 24 years old were "stupid," with text hovering over the clip that read:
Kamala Harris says all 18-24 year olds are 'stupid' and 'make really bad decisions!'
Completely disrespectful to US Soldiers like Sam Brown who enlisted when they were younger than 24! It'd be a shame if this goes viral and Kamala gets EXPOSED! 🔥
This is what the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Wed Jul 24 14:30:00 2024 UTC)
Harris was not referring to young adults in the military or any specific group within the population demographic of 18- to 24-year-olds.
The clip is footage from a keynote address (archived here) Harris made at the Ford Foundation in 2014, while she was still serving as attorney general of California (archived here). She used the speech to explain her "smart on crime" approach, which she believed would help mitigate crime using measures that skew more preventative than punitive. She also announced a recidivism reduction pilot program called "Back on Track," (archived here) based in Los Angeles.
Harris' "stupid" comment can be found at the 17:43 mark of the video. However, the context of the remark was her discussion about a strategy she implemented to try to reduce recidivism (archived here) in California among young adults. Overall, she argued that young adults are still developing, even referencing her experience at that age as a college "kid" (see the 17:02 mark of the video). She reasoned that they may need some assistance with managing situations that may be overwhelming at their age, such as caring for a child.
Thus, while the post making the claim does show a real clip, it does not provide the full context in which she made her statement.
At the time this was written, the claim had previously been reviewed by multiple fact checking organizations, including USA Today, Reuters and PolitiFact, all in 2020.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to Harris can be found here.
