Taking a page from Donald Trump’s birtherist playbook, Fox News’ Jesse Watters used Kamala Harris’ birth certificate to claim she lied about her childhood during Monday’s “Primetime” broadcast.
Unlike the GOP presidential nominee, Watters avoided claiming the vice president wasn’t born in the United States. Instead, he decided to split hairs about which Bay Area locale she has a right to identify with.
“Did you know that Kamala Harris didn’t grow up in Oakland as she always said she did?” Watters said on his show, referring to the California city. “Kamala Harris grew up in Berkeley, the ‘People’s Republic of Berkeley,’ ‘Berserkely,’ the most insanely liberal precinct in America.”
“Her birth certificate lists an apartment right next to Berkeley’s campus,” he continued — omitting the fact that Harris was born in an Oakland hospital. “It’s half a block south of People’s Park, which is basically ground zero for every single radical protest movement. Kamala attended Berkeley public schools and was even bussed to [them.]”
Watters began the segment by referring to a New York Times article published Sunday, in which a former Berkeley neighbor suggested Harris might’ve distanced herself from the city in favor of nearby Oakland because “we have such a reputation for being on the far left.”
Watters even pointed to her anecdote during the first 2019 presidential debate in which then-Sen. Harris chronicled being bussed to school and claimed “people can’t trust you” if “you lie about where you grew up” — only for a horde of social media users to speak out against him.
“She grew up 20 minutes from me. Oakland and Berkeley are right next to each other… he’s such a stupid ahole,” wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter, with another commenting: “tell me you know NOTHING about California, let alone Alameda County, without telling me.”
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Harris’ birth certificate lists an apartment near the University of California, Berkeley, which her father, a Jamaican immigrant, and her mother, originally from India, both attended.
In the memoir “The Truths We Hold,” she recalled living in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Berkeley as a girl, and she was bussed to Thousand Oaks Elementary as California schools were being desegregated. Harris noted that she “spent the formative years of my childhood living on the boundary between Oakland and Berkeley.”
Also in her book, Harris wrote that her mother “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya [Harris’ sister] and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” Harris would move to Montreal and Washington, D.C., before ending up back in the Bay Area as an adult, per the Times.
Just hours before his “Primetime” rant, Watters had been scolded by his own colleagues for making a sexist remark about Harris, whom Tucker Carlson famously accused in 2021 of being “not from this country.” Watters filled Carlson’s slot after his exit from the network.
Since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, right-wing politicians — most notably, Trump — have used birth certificates as a racist campaign tool to question nonwhite candidates’ origins.
Trump was forced to retract the lie that Obama was not born in the U.S. shortly before taking office.
Social media users, meanwhile, continue to hilariously rebuke Watters’ clueless take.
“Ah yes, because we all know birth certificates are magical documents that determine where you spend your entire childhood,” wrote one X user. “I guess Jesse thinks babies are just left at the hospital until adulthood.”
