Sometimes it is not the falsehood that is the most surprising thing about DC propaganda, but the speed with which it was created.
Soon-to-be minted Democratic presidential candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris was dubbed, as is extremely common in cases when a government official is put in charge of a specific problem, the “border tsar” literally thousands of times of the past three and half years by press outlets across the political spectrum.
It was never challenged.
The reason she was called this is because that’s what she was – she was thanklessly tasked by President Joe Biden to try to deal with illegal immigration. It did not go well, as evidenced by the massive surge in illegal immigration, in part because she focused on her obsession with “root causes” of migration and not actually stopping illegal immigration.
That is why now – after so much ink was spilled touting her supposed leadership on the issue – the media is saying that Harris was not “border tsar” at all. She wasn’t in charge of literal border security, that’s the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security story after story now reads.
It's a “misunderstanding” that only dastardly Republicans are saying, trying to improperly tie her to the border disaster.
Fascinatingly, as well as terrifyingly, literally the same people who once wrote stories about her being “border tsar” are writing stories that she never really actually was. Typically, when one makes a mistake like that, a correction is involved, but nah – not this time – too much to do.
But remember when she went to Central America – not the border – to discuss the “root causes” of emigration? That’s when she famously said, when asked why she hasn’t visited the border, that she “hadn’t been to Europe” yet either.
To NBC News’s Lester Holt, she said the following:
During that trip she also said, to the nation of Guatemala, point blank: “Do not come,” to the United States.
Sounds like a person who is in charge of something.
Typically, when the DC blob is trying to figure out how to foist yet another lie on the public, it takes a few days. With “border tsar” the reaction was essentially instantaneous and the past few days have been filled with stories and “fact checks” saying no, no, no that’s not true.
So the border is not her fault so stop saying anything like that.
The speed of the counter-attack was astonishing, even faster than the time it took for the press to stop calling her an ineffectual drag on the Biden ticket who cannot properly speak English to calling her a dynamic personality with a new vision for America.
The same goes for various and sundry once-extant bits of facts that are now, well, gone, like the rating as the most liberal senator in the 2019-2020 session – you know, the year before she became veep.
Critical terms like “word salad” are gone, or are now considered somewhat laudatory, if not at least cutesy. Here’s the New York Times take on the now:
"Harris now presides over a post-coherence landscape, one where her occasionally meandering phrasing feels refreshingly low stakes. It’s a quirk, not an existential threat to American democracy.”
Seriously - “Post-coherence landscape.”
As to “border tsar” now not being true, the media is actually one-upping the fact checkers by not even bothering to wait for them to use the “Robert/Bob” argument to attempt to debunk a fact.
This process is reminiscent of the “kill switch” debate, in which fact checkers said a currently-being-researched federal program to create a device that will not a person start their car if the car thinks they’ve been drinking and/or will stop the car and pull it over to the side of the road.
Even though it will not let you start the car and could actually stop it while in motion, it’s not a “kill switch” because those specific words are not in the authorizing legislation.
The press’ untasring of Kamala is the fastest ever example of call someone a liar because they called someone “Bob” when it’s actually “Robert” on his birth certificate.
Strap in tight – this is about to happen a whole lot.