Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris “border czar,” corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.
Biden first charged Harris with leading “our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border” in March 2021. At the time, he claimed the former California attorney general and senator was “the most qualified person to do it.” Harris didn’t do much with the title and task. Yet, even her delayed first and only(and heavily staged) visit to the border received celebration from her allies in the press.
This kid-glove treatment intensified recently when corporate media accused those critical of Harris’ failure to do anything but exacerbate the Biden administration-incentivized invasion of making the VP a “convenient scapegoat.”
“Harris’s job was meant to be narrow,” The Wall Street Journal insisted, “and over the years Harris has fulfilled it by announcing tranches of private investments by companies like Pepsi, Cargill and Nestle in Central America.”
Axios insinuated in an X post on Wednesday that Republicans are wrong to point out Harris’ border failures because the Democrat “never actually had” the title border czar.
The outlet’s complaints that the Trump campaign and Republicans like House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik have unfairly labeled Harris’ role, however, fall short in the face of its own reporting, which repeatedlyreferred to Harris as Biden’s border czar.
Axios added an editor’s note to the storyshortly after publication with a notice stating three years later it “was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar.’”
Why, other than the usual motivations for the corporate media to deliberately distort the narrative, would publications like Axios lie about something its own pages contradict? It’s because the border has been and continues to be a “political grenade” for the Democrats who wrecked it. Stef W. Kight explicitly stated in her latest story thatshe aimed tosignal it “has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.”
“Making a clear immigration pitch to voters could be critical for Harris’s campaign,” Kight repeated, before noting that illegal border crossing activists are invigorated by Harris’ rise on the ticket because she is “personally well-versed and invested in the issue.”
Politifact, known for aiding Big Tech’s censorship efforts by printing fake fact-checks designed to demonize political dissenters, even joined in the propaganda dogpile when it claimed that Harris was merely “assigned to tackle immigration’s causes, not border security.”
USA Today, similarly, published a “fact-check” that deemed the claim that Harris was the presidential pick to oversee the skyrocketing number of illegal crossings “exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border.”
One quick look at Biden’s border czar pronouncement in 2021 suggests the opposite.
Biden noted that he was tasked with a “similar assignment” to “determine the best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave” during the Obama administration.
“The Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”
Harris also explicitly emphasized in her acceptance that “we will enforce the law.”
The real border story continues to be that the Biden administration ushered in the deadliest invasion in the world without facing any accountability. Corporate media, however, are more interested in running propaganda to help Democrats’ 2024 election chances instead of covering how Americans are suffering the consequences — like violent crime,fatal drugs, and infrastructure problems — that are directly linked to the ongoing influx of illegal border crossers.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
After naming Richard/Rachel Levine, a man who parades around in ladyface, as one of its 2022 “Women of the Year,” USA Today is back to remind us that it doesn’t know — or doesn’t care — what a woman is.
Earlier this week, the outlet released its list of 2023 honorees, and the name getting the most attention is that of Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, a pink-haired man who dresses like a woman and has been in office for less than 12 weeks.
Nothing says “we respect women” like elbowing them out of their own awards to laud a man who makes a mockery of womanhood. Finke isn’t the only man coopting the “woman of the year” pedestal. Here are eight other men who have displaced women at their own game.
Rachel Levine
Finke’s predecessor as USA Today’s token male Woman of the Year, Rachel (formerly known as Richard) Levine, failed upward into a cushy Biden administration gig after condemning thousands of nursing home residents to die of Covid in Pennsylvania.
The Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson is still locked out of Twitter for clearly acknowledging that Levine is a man.
Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, was a recipient of one of Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year awards in 2015. Jenner, a 6’2” former Olympian who began going by “Caitlyn” in 2015, came away with the title of the magazine’s “Transgender Champion.” (One of Jenner’s co-recipients that year was the now-disgraced girlboss fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, whatever that says about the awards committee’s wisdom.)
After Glamour’s decision to name Jenner, a man, among its “women of the year,” James Smith, whose police officer wife was posthumously recognized by the magazine after she died rescuing people from the World Trade Center on 9/11, returned his wife’s award, calling Jenner’s recognition an “insult.”
“Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” he asked in an open letter to the magazine.
Laverne Cox
The year before Jenner scored Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” title, the magazine handed it to another man: Roderick Laverne Cox, who now goes by “Laverne.”
Cox’s award from Glamour followed his June 2014 Time Magazine cover, a glowing profile that openly discussed the trans lobby’s attempt to coopt the gay rights movement and boasted about “Fixing Nature’s Mistake.”
MJ Rodriguez
Among Time Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2022 was MJ Rodriguez (born Michael Anthony Rodriguez Jr.), a male stage performer who “identifies as an AfroLatina trans woman,” according to Time.
Over the course of the same year, Rodriguez was lauded as the first transgender entertainer to receive a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for lead acting.
Laurel Hubbard
Before he began taking experimental hormones, Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting. After he competed against women at the 2020 Olympics as part of New Zealand’s team, finishing dead last in the super-heavyweight category, Hubbard was nonetheless named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago. The accolade has been around since 1908.
Ebony Harper
California’s Assembly District 7 named Ebony Harper, a man, as its 2021 Woman of the Year. This year, Harper also received a “California Woman Making History” recognition from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. He’s the executive director of a group called “California TRANScends.”
Cecilia Chung
Several years earlier, in 2014, another California district honored a man who goes by the name Cecilia Chung as its “Woman of the Year.” Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assemblyman, bestowed the award on him a year after Chung successfully pressured San Francisco officials to make their city the first in the country to pay for uninsured residents’ mutilative sex surgeries.
Bonus: Lia Thomas
Lia Thomas, a man who competed under his given name, William, through his sophomore year of college, was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania for the NCAA’s 2022 Woman of the Year award. While Thomas wasn’t ultimately selected for the national recognition, his nomination kept female Penn students from being tapped — just like his national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle a few months earlier displaced his female competitors from the top of the winners’ podium.
After the controversial championship, NBC News was caught doctoring Thomas’s face to look less masculine.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Trans-identified Biden administration official, Dr. Rachel Levine, formerly known as Richard, has been named among USA Today’s “Women of the Year.”
The national publication included Levine, who serves as assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health, as one of its “Women of the Year.” The full list of USA Today’s Women of the Year, released Monday, honors “strong and resilient women who have been champions of change across the country, leading and inspiring as they promote and fight for equity, and give others a place to seek help and find hope.”
Suzette Hackney, USA Today’s deputy opinion editor and national columnist, interviewed Levine, a man who identifies as trans, as part of a profile on the cabinet member she described as “the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official.” In addition to serving as the assistant secretary of health, Levine leads the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which Hackney characterized as “a group of 6,000 uniformed public health officers.”
Additionally, the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that Levine works for, included him on a panel titled, “A Conversation With HHS Women Leaders to Celebrate Women’s History Month.”
Levine’s recognition among USA Today’s Women of the Year and inclusion on a panel featuring “women leaders” comes as the U.S. is engaged in a debate about whether recognizing men who identify as women puts biological females at an unfair disadvantage.
When Levine became the first trans-identified four-star officer to serve in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy contended that Levine had also become “the first female four-star officer to serve in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.” This did not sit well with Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind.
In response to Murthy’s assertion, Banks remarked on Twitter, “Calling someone that was born and lived as a man for 54 years the first ‘female’ four-star officer is an insult to every little girl who dreams of breaking glass ceilings one day.”
Banks had his Twitter account suspended for a separate tweet he sent out lamenting that “the title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.” The social media company cited Banks’ tweet as a violation of its hateful conduct policy, which prohibits tweets that engage in “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
Concerns about assigning the “female” label to men who identify as female extend beyond Levine into women’s athletics. Lia Thomas, a man formerly known as Will Thomas, competes on the women’s swimming team at the University of Pennsylvania. Since joining the team, he’s shattered women’s swimming records throughout this past season. Thomas’ strong performance, especially compared with the athlete’s mediocre performance when previously competing on the men’s swimming team, is reinforcing concerns that the biological differences between men and women give biological males an unfair advantage over their biologically female counterparts in athletics.
Abigail Shrier, who has written extensively about the impact of the rush to “affirm” the chosen gender identities of youth suffering from gender dysphoria, recently weighed in on Thomas’ record-breaking performances.
Shrier suggested that informing someone who has been in a coma for 20 years that “America’s top women swimmer has a penis” would be “the hardest thing to explain to them” if they were to wake up in 2022, she posted on Twitter. In addition to concerns about women’s athletics, critics of trans-policies believe they pose a threat to the safety of biological women.
Specifically, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling warned of the implications of a Scottish bill that would change the process for obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate, which claims it “legally recognizes that a person’s gender is not the gender they were assigned at birth, but is their ‘acquired’ gender.’” The legislation would require any Scottish resident who is at least 16 years old and has lived in their “acquired gender” for at least three months to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate.
Rowling retweeted a post shared by a self-described “leftie” and “radical feminist” from Australia testifying that “Men are self-identifying into female sexual assault recovery services” in her city of Melbourne, which has embraced a similar “self ID” policy. The author insisted that the law will “harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women.”
For the most part, USA Today’s profile of Levine focused on the doctor’s career, influences and interests. However, the publication did ask Levine to provide advice to “transgender, nonconforming or questioning people.”
Levine told USA Today that “you have to be true to yourself and I think that you have to be who you are,” adding, “You have tremendous worth just for who you are, no matter who you love, no matter who you are, no matter what your gender identity, sexual orientation or anything else, and to be, be true to that.”
Other honorees on USA Today’s Women of the Year list include Vice President Kamala Harris, philanthropist Melinda Gates and Olympic athlete Simone Biles.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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