Fact Checking
Biden, Hillary Clinton quoted from song 17 years apart
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A social media post claimed clips of President Joe Biden and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton saying similar words 17 years apart shows that their words are “all scripts and copied, all fake.”
The Jan. 24 Instagram post toggled between clips of speeches by Biden and Clinton, who used similar phrases such as “come too far from where we started” and “nobody told me the road would be easy.”
One commenter on the Instagram post said, “Check it out on how criminals sound the same.” Others accused Biden of “plagiarism…again,” a reference to a 1987 speech in which Biden was accused of lifting words from a British politician.
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The clips shared in the Instagram post omitted the portions of Biden’s and Clinton’s speeches that explain why their words were so similar: They each are quoting from the lyrics of a gospel song.
Longer footage from the Biden and Clinton speeches shows that.
On Jan. 8, Biden was speaking at a political event at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine church members were killed in a 2015 racially motivated massacre.
Near the end of his speech denouncing white supremacy, Biden quoted from the James Cleveland gospel song, “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired.”
“Folks, my fellow Americans, this is a time of choosing, so let us choose the truth. Let us choose America. I know — I know we can do it together. And as the gospel song sings, ‘We’ve come too far from where we started. Nobody told me the road would be easy. I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.’ My fellow Americans, I don’t think the good Lord brought us this far to leave us behind.”
On March 4, 2007, Clinton, then a New York senator running for president, spoke at First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, on the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when Alabama state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Near the end of her speech, Clinton, who spoke about voting rights, also quoted from Cleveland’s song.
“We have to stay awake. We have a march to finish. On this floor today, let us say with one voice the words of James Cleveland’s great freedom hymn, “I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.”
Biden has quoted from the gospel song on several occasions when talking to predominantly Black audiences: a January 2023 event honoring Martin Luther King Jr.; a February 2023 Black history month reception; a 2023 Juneteenth concert; and at a 2020 Souls to the Polls event in Philadelphia.
We rate the claim that video of Biden and Clinton speeches prove their words “are all scripted and copied” False.
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