Kamala Harris, “Border Czar” — What Can be, Unburdened by What has Been.
Posted by Ed Folsom, July 28, 2024.
Photo: July 13, 2024, Kevin Mohatt/Reuters.
This past week, in the wake of President Biden’s announcement that he has withdrawn from the presidential race, and with Vice President Kamala Harris the apparent shoo-in for the Party’s nomination, the media immediately swung into overdrive to rewrite Harris’ history. From Harris’ 2020 support for the “defund the police” movement; to her fundraising efforts for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for people arrested for criminal acts during property-destroying and arson-filled protests; to Harris uniformly having been described as Biden’s “border czar” by the media beginning in 2021, the U.S. media began backflipping in near perfect unison.
Becket Adams does a great job cutting through the media’s gaslighting campaign in a piece titled “Inventing Kamala,” in National Review. For instance, Adams documents that, in 2021, the New York Times reported:
“Ms. Harris will . . . soon be taking over work from a departing official with years of experience. Last week, Roberta S. Jacobson, the former ambassador to Mexico chosen as Mr. Biden’s ‘border czar,’ said that she would retire from government. She said she was happy to see Ms. Harris assume the work of stemming migration from Central America.”
In the same piece, the Times explained that Harris would be “the face of President Biden’s plan to bolster the region and deter migration.” There was Harris, in 2021, taking over the work of then-“border czar” Jacobson to stem migration from Central America, and serving as the face of Biden’s plan to deter migration and bolster the region. And yet, this past week, the Times got into the business of fact-checking people who say that Harris had the role of “border czar,” calling “border czar” a “misleading phrase,” and declaring:
“Ms. Harris was not, in fact, appointed border czar” and she was not “tasked with addressing the broader problems plaguing the border itself, where minors have at times slept on the floors of overcrowded facilities for days beyond the legal limit.”
Back in 2021, Axios reporter Stef W. Kight wrote an article titled, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.” Another Axios reporter, Shawna Chen reported that Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar” and would be examining the “root causes” of the border problem. And Yet, this past week, Stef W. Kight was back reporting, in Axios:
“In early 2021 President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue…Confusion around the VP’s exact role, early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent.”
Just a little “slice” of the issue – that’s all she was responsible for, you see. What Axios said back then was then. This is now.
PolitiFact got in on the act too. In a “fact check” they argued:
“Joe Biden didn’t name Kamala Harris ‘border czar.’ He tasked her with addressing the issues driving migration from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. U.S. Border security is the Homeland Security Secretary’s responsibility.”
As Adams puts it, in his National Review Piece: “Ah, so never mind all those people streaming across the border from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — she was merely tasked with handling ‘issues.’ Don’t get it twisted.”
USA Today was also in on the act. In 2021, the paper reported that Harris would “lead a federal effort to deter migrants from coming to the U.S. border to seek asylum.” In another piece, they said “Harris will lead U.S. efforts to stem migration” — Lead U.S. efforts to stem migration? Not according to USA Today this past week, when they lectured, “Harris’ border work was on ‘root causes’ of immigration; she wasn’t in charge.”
And then there’s Politico, which reported in 2021, “Biden makes Harris the point person on immigration amid border surge.” But, this past week, Politico tut-tutted:
“Harris was tapped by Biden to address the root causes of migration in 2021 — not the border — but the GOP has frequently used the vice president in their attacks about the White House’s handling of the border crisis.”
The National Review piece includes a film clip assembled by the Media Research Center, showing the then-versus-now flip-flopping of multiple media outlets on the matter, viewable here.
All of this brings to my mind George Orwell’s description of the work of the Ministry of Truth in “1984”:
“As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped the speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of ‘The Times’ and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then…he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”
…
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date… nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
The problem for our present-day-media ministers of truth is the difficulty of erasing all traces of inconvenient past truths. Technology giveth, but it also taketh away. Now, the erasure efforts must be focused more directly on the minds of those receiving the ministers’ messages, through concentrated gaslighting. But that doesn’t stop today’s ministers of truth from trying to erase the outdated materials as well.
Right on cue, GovTrack, which tracks congressional voting records, and rates senators and congressional representatives on a left/right ideological scale, took down a web page that contained its 2019 rating of then-Senator Harris as the most liberal member of the Senate, more ideologically left than the Socialist from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Why did they make it disappear? According to the New York Post, GovTrack says it stopped basing ratings on single-year voting records years ago. Apparently, it suddenly dawned on them this past week that the 2019 rating was too unreliable not to be placed in the memory hole, to be devoured by the flames.
It’s a concerted effort by America’s media to make manifest what Harris herself fondly and repeatedly refers to as, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” Onward, unimpeded, toward the fulfillment of history, unburdened by the past! God help us.
