No, Kamala Harris isn’t using a Nazi-rooted phrase as her campaign slogan

Some social media users are claiming Vice President Kamala Harris is using a slogan derived from Nazi Germany for her presidential campaign.

In an Aug. 19 Instagram reel, a man says, "I’m sure by now you’ve heard Kamala Harris running around the country, (saying) ‘Joy! We’re gonna bring back joy! Strength through joy!’ I want you to Google ‘strength through joy.’"

The reel then shows a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for "Strength Through Joy," which says it was the name of a Nazi Germany program.

The Instagram post’s caption said "Strength Through Joy" is Harris’ "latest campaign slogan."

(Screengrab from Instagram)

This 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.)

Users on X and Facebook made similar claims.

Featured Fact-check

X posts

stated on October 22, 2024 in posts on X

A photo shows The Atlantic published a story headlined “Trump is Literally Hitler.”

Harris has spoken about joy on the campaign trail and at the Democratic National Convention, which ran Aug. 19 through Aug. 22 in Chicago. At an Aug. 6 campaign rally in Philadelphia, vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz thanked Harris for "bringing back the joy." The next day at a campaign rally in Detroit, Harris called her supporters "joyful warriors."

But there’s no evidence that Harris has made "strength through joy" her campaign slogan. PolitiFact searched campaign speech transcripts and news articles and found no instances of Harris using that exact phrase.

Since Harris launched her bid for president in July, her campaign has used multiple catchphrases, including "Let’s win this," "When we fight, we win," and "We are not going back." The word "joy" is not mentioned on the Harris-Walz campaign website.

NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation and rates news and information sources, found that this claim about Harris was also shared by a pro-Russian conspiracy theory website.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi German Labor Front created the "Strength through Joy" program in 1933 to "improve ‘Aryan’ workers’ quality of life and build popular support for the Nazi regime."

Harris has not adopted the phrase "strength through joy" as her campaign slogan. We rate this claim False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.