Drew Holden Profile picture
Jul 24, 2024 24 tweets 11 min read Read on X
🧵THREAD🧵

The media are already hard at work to mislead about VP Kamala Harris.

The latest is an effort to memoryhole Harris’s role leading Biden’s disastrous immigration policy as “border czar.”

Who’s up for some side-by-sides, lest we forget? ⤵️
There’s no better place to start than with @axios, who made waves today when they claimed that Harris was never the “border czar.”

The problem?

Axios had called her exactly that back in 2021.
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They added a truly Orwellian editors note after the backlash, claiming that they had misreported initially.

Really. Image
Oh and this headline from @axios.

“Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis” Image
How can @axios believe both of these things?

I feel like I’m losing my mind.
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But it wasn’t just Axios.

One of my favorite was @nytimes, who tried to explain why Republicans were “misleading” in tying Harris to Biden’s immigration policies.

In 2021, they called Harris “the face of President Biden’s plan to bolster the region and deter migration”

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I mean, @nytimes even said the old “border czar” stepped down because Harris’s new “role as one of the administration’s top border officials” had “eclipsed” the position!


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@USAToday “fact checked” the claim that Harris was “in charge” on immigration despite a previous “fact check” where they said that Biden had tapped Harris to “lead a federal effort to deter migrants.”

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@USAToday also said that “Harris will lead U.S. efforts to stem migration.”

Hello?!

I feel like whatever little is holding me to this temporal plane is fraying.
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@CNN should probably get their talking points in order.

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Particularly rich is this from @politico, who claimed tying Harris to the border was misleading despite a headline from 2021 that called her “the point person on immigration issues amid border surge.”
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To be clear: The idea that Harris was in charge on the border isn’t some figment of your imagination.

Look at these headlines from 2021. The facts were so damning that CNN reported that Harris was trying to distance herself from the mess at the border.

Now why would that be?


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But, no, that hasn’t stopped outlets from pretending that Harris’s role had nothing to do with the border and immigration.

Here’s @CBSNews

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@PolitiFact on another planet as usual. Image
@VOANews continues to disappoint me after I once went to the mat to defend them.

“Experts”! Image
@MotherJones called it a “myth” that Harris was tasked with doing what Biden told her to do. Image
Methinks it isn’t Republicans who aren’t interested in the “facts” here, @voxdotcom Image
Look I’m not waiting on @TIME to be honest, but cmon guys. Image
What the coverage quite deliberately elides is that Harris was, unequivocally, tasked with leading Biden’s immigration policy to combat the surge at the border.

Biden’s own remarks say so.

Whether she accepted the title of “border czar” is totally irrelevant.

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But get used to this. I suspect the media’s efforts to paper over VP Harris’s shortcomings—in office and otherwise—are only just beginning.
I’m sure I’ll be covering the topic frequently at my newsletter, @Holden_Court.

Throw it a follow, and subscribe here: open.substack.com/pub/drewholden
@Holden_Court If you’d like to support the beer fund that gives me the mental and emotional fortitude to do these threads as yeoman’s work, I’ve added a tip jar to my newsletter: paypal.com/donate/?busine…
@Holden_Court Sometimes what can be is, in fact, burdened by what has been.
@Holden_Court The press is still going. @ddale8 is the latest to join the circus. (H/t @CurtisHouck)

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More from @DrewHolden360

Jun 11
🧵Thread🧵

The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.

Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.

Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.

You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.

Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate. Image
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As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
Read 25 tweets
May 29
🧵Thread🧵

The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.

The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️ Image
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?

But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.

Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.

Did they forget what the media reported?
Read 21 tweets
May 20
🧵THREAD🧵

Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.

But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.

The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.

I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.

Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”

The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.Image
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(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
Read 26 tweets
May 15
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.

Quick 🧵⤵️ Image
A couple quotes:

“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.

What? What does that even mean??

That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?

Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”

Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.

This is firmly out of touch with reality.
Read 13 tweets
May 13
Wow what a potentially valuable insight worth sharing with the American people when it mattered rather than saving for your book!
This conversation started in June *2023* so if you believe the media wasn’t aware of it before the election I have a bridge to sell you.
I’m going to write a book about this book.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 29
🧵Thread🧵

Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.

That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.

Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.

Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.Image
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That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.” Image
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Read 24 tweets

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