Does an authentic video show Vice President Kamala Harris saying "Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today so that future today will past today, as it is tomorrow"? No, that's not true: Lead Stories submitted the clip to two AI detection tools, which documented substantial manipulation of the video in the clip. Lead Stories found no evidence Harris said those words in the transcript of the rally speech from which this video clip was taken.
The claim appeared in a post on X, formerly Twitter, (archived here) where it was published on July 21, 2024. The caption read:
"Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today so that future today will past today, as it is tomorrow."
-- Kamala for President, 200 IQ
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Jul 22 13:28:17 2024 UTC)
The video in the post indicates that Harris supposedly said these lines during a political rally. The post did not include any identifying details about the rally.
TrueMedia.org operates a non-profit non-partisan ai detection tool, which found "substantial evidence" the video portion of the clip had been altered, as Lead Stories staff later observed when the transcripts of the event did not match the words in the video. Simple audio editing software would facilitate the clipping and re-ordering of real audio of Harris, but ai would remake video to make her lip movements approximate the words in the doctored audio.
(Source: TrueMedia.org screenshot taken on Mon Jul 22 21:07:44 2024 UTC)
Similarly, the University of Buffalo Media Forensic Lab's DeepFake-O-Meter ai detector determined there's a high likelihood the video includes ai-generated counterfeiting.
(Source: TrueMedia.org screenshot taken on Mon Jul 22 22:00:00 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search (archived here) of a still from the video in the claim matched a clip of a reproductive rights rally posted to Harris' verified X account April 27, 2023.
A Google search of keywords (archived here) led to a official transcript from the White House and a full recording of the rally, which had been held on April 25, 2023, at Howard University in Washington, D.C. A search for the phrases "Today is today," "And yesterday was today yesterday," "Tomorrow will be today tomorrow," and "So live today so that future today will past today, as it is tomorrow" did not show up in the transcript.
At the 1:01:10 mark of the April 25, 2023, rally's recording, it appears to Lead Stories that this is where the clip found in the claim starts. Viewers can hear in the rally recording that Harris does not start the "Today is today" lines like the claim alleges. She actually says:
... for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present.
Looking at the claim's version of this moment, viewers can see that Harris' mouth movements, along with the audio, were manipulated to say the "Today is today" quote.
Lead Stories did a search using keywords on the Google News archive of thousands of reliable information sites, visible here, which found no credible documents or reporting to corroborate the claim.
We have contacted Harris' spokesperson and will update this article when a relevant response is received.
This video was checked by Agence France Press in May of 2023.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on Vice President Kamala Harris are here.
