I used to work at McDonald's when I was in high school in the late 1970s.

Kamala Harris, who's close to the same age as me, claims she did, too, when she "was a student," and "in school."

The Washington Free Beacon checked on that through various means and found no evidence of it.

The first all-female audience ever on The Drew Barrymore Show was whooping and cheering for Kamala Harris, its guest of honor, this April when Barrymore’s sidekick, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.

"I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?"

"I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s," laughed Harris. "When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier."

"I didn’t know that about you," gasped Barrymore.

Neither did anyone who followed Harris’s long career in public life—that is, until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the job a centerpiece of her biography.

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she "was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s."

Yet Kamala persists in this story, as can be seen in this 2019 video here and in statements since on the campaign trail.

Short bus VP Kamala Harris claims she was once a McDonald’s employee that was in charge of the french fries and ice cream machine

pic.twitter.com/Vfq2MMqZEA

— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) August 10, 2024

That claim about working at McDonald's "as a student" would have almost certainly have been in college in the U.S., because Kamala was monolingual in bilingual Montréal at a time of separatist fervor when she was in high school, making it very unlikely she would have been hired on those grounds alone if they even had a McDonald's at the time, which is unknown, let alone her non-Canadian citizenship.

It had to have been post-1982, back when she was a sorority sister at Howard University, toking and listening to Snoop Dogg, who apparently hadn't been born yet.

Let's just say that alone is hard to believe. What would her status have been with her tony sorority sisters if they knew she was working at McDonald's?

Be that as it was, the 'tell' for me was in the lingo she used to claim she worked for that outlet.

"I did the french fries."

Anyone who has ever worked for McDonald's, which the company claims amounts to have employed one out of 8 Americans, knows that the term used is "dropped fries." Google that phrase and you'll see how often it's still used. You don't "do" fries, or even make fries. At McDonald's, you drop fries!

You open a big white bag of frozen french fries, empty them into the wire basket, hit the button at the top of the fry maker, and lower the fries into the vat of hot oil. Then as the buzzer goes off, you lift the fry basket from the holster, empty the fries into the scooping area, and sprinkle a giant metal can of salt all over them. After that, you drop fries again into the empty basket as you know that the scooping area's fries won't last long with orders coming in. Drop, empty, repeat.

You don't "did the french fries" unless you are making it up.

Her message on the fries is obnoxious, too -- blaming McDonald's for workers being unable to find other jobs in the depressed Harris-Biden economy as their skills improve and implicitly calling for higher wages above the $20 an hour they are getting now in California, which is cutting down on the availability of even McDonald's jobs for workers on their first rungs of employment.

William McGurn in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled Kamala Harris's McJobs has a very good take on this hypocrisy:

But does Ms. Harris have a kind word for what McDonald’s and other companies do? Or show any appreciation that the best thing for workers—and their wages—is a growing economy that drives employers to compete for their workers’ labor?

In 2019, when Ms. Harris mentioned her McDonald’s job, it was in the context of criticizing the company for not providing a living wage. “If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said.

Leave aside that most minimum-wage jobs aren’t held by a sole wage-earner raising a family of four. The inflation of the Biden-Harris years has put the squeeze on companies such as McDonald’s offering low-cost food—as well as on their customers. McDonald’s President Joe Erlinger says a Big Mac that sold for $4.39 in 2019 now costs $5.29—a 21% increase.

Ditto for minimum-wage hikes. Economists note that the real effect of imposing a minimum-wage law is to price some workers, especially those at the bottom, out of the market. Already McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are looking to cut costs by automating jobs. That means fewer opportunities for future Kamala Harrises.

But the bigger hypocrisy is in the identity-creation narrative of it all in order to pander to voters.

How is it Kamala Harris refused to list her McDonald's experience in her résumés and job applications for tony law firm jobs, but now speaks with abandon about it as she attempts to run for president?

Suddenly, it's a point of pride, and at the same time, stolen valor. That's more fakery from her with her rich-girl background as the daughter of a top cancer researcher and a Stanford professor whose first college, a brief stint at Vanier College in Montreal, appears to be a remedial college, and whose partying was so intense she couldn't get into Stanford even with old dad on staff nor pass the bar on her first try.

Based on that lack of work skills and inability to apply herself, I seriously doubt she ever worked at McDonald's. She wouldn't have lasted one day even if it were true.

Image: Screen shot from Prime Time with Alex Stein video, and common meme, via YouTube