NY Post quietly deletes absurd Kamala Harris smear after fact-checker publicly bust them
The right-wing media machine is reaching new lows of hyperbolic outrage with every passing week, all too willing to stretch the truth or even invent it entirely in its obsessive efforts to smear and disparage the Biden administration out of nothing but pure partisan spite. There is no good that the Biden team can do worthy of praise and no imaginary mistake unworthy of a frothing clickbait-fueled outrage.
In recent months, Vice-President Harris has become Public Enemy Number One for the right-wing ever since Biden appointed her in charge of dealing with the influx of immigrants at the southern border, subject to countless hours of hysterical hand-wringing and criticism from the right-wing for not personally spending every waking moment at the border telling the migrants to go back. This weekend saw the intensely racist and lecherous jackals at the New York Post hit the bottom of the barrel, forced to delete its latest attack in disgrace after
The latest absurd conspiracy being pushed by conservative media is the idea that Vice-President Harris’ picture book is being “illegally” handed out to migrant kids as part of a “welcome kit” for migrant kids, insinuating that Harris may have found a way to personally profit from the border crisis. “KAM ON IN” screamed a NY Post headline, which alleged that “unaccompanied migrant kids brought from the U.S.-Mexico border to a new shelter in Long Beach, Calif., will be given a copy of her 2019 children’s book, ‘Superheroes are Everywhere,’ in their welcome kits.”
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The story immediately got picked up by the rabid right-wing news network and blasted across every platform, even being promoted by top Republican politicians like RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Of course, there is no basis to this story. It appears this was inspired entirely on a single photograph of a migrant shelter showing a copy of the Vice-President’s book that was donated by a kind soul seeking to give the kids some entertainment while they await CPB processing. Fact-checkers at the Washington Post gave the story its worst rating of “Four Pinocchios” and led to the NY Post quietly deleting the story off their website, but the damage is already done.
A Long Beach spokesman tells me *no* books are put in migrant children's welcome packages at the shelter. Rather, an informal library will be set up with the donated books to let kids choose what they want to read. So…wrongness on top of wrongness. https://t.co/5439nFkhha
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 27, 2021
The ironic thing is that exploiting a public issue to personally profit off of it is exactly what the Trump administration would have done, but the right-wing just can’t help but project their own proclivities onto their political rivals. It just goes to show how easily the right-wing manufactures narratives, widely promotes them across social media networks and then removes them without retraction or any effort at all to correct the falsehoods now deeply implanted in the minds of their readers. You can bet your bottom dollar that Facebook or any other social media site will take action to punish the Post for publishing wildly false information with no evidence whatsoever; just one more of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that we face in the fight for truth, decency, and accountability in American politics.
Original reporting by Salvador Rizzo at the Washington Post.
