Gilbertson: 5 Ways Kamala Harris’s Democrat and Media Enablers Are Gaslighting America

Vice President Kamala Harris’s Democrat and mainstream media allies are gaslighting American voters in five ways as her presidential campaign gets underway with just over 100 days to election day.

The manipulation is being carried out in various forms: the covering up of President Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline, claims of insensitivity over questions about Harris’s competency, the claim Harris was chosen “from the grassroots, bottom-up,” and efforts to bury her record on the border and in the Senate.

1: Hiding Biden’s Cognitive Decline

More than a year ago, in May 2023, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 57 percent of Americans, including nearly a quarter of Democrats and two-thirds of independents, had doubts about Biden’s mental fitness. That same poll found that 65 percent of Americans say Biden is “showing he is too old to be president.”

However, while the American public has long worried about Biden’s faculties, Democrats, Harris, and many media outlets ignored those concerns after the Democratic National Committee helped ensure Biden would stave off a serious primary challenge.

For example, on February 21, 2024, Harris told an interviewer, “Our president is in good shape, in good health, and is ready to lead in our second term.” And there are at least 14 other instances of Harris affirming Biden’s overall fitness. 

Only after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, which imperiled his reelection bid and those of down-ballot Democrats, did the party and legacy media begin focusing on the narrative surrounding Biden’s mental faculties. The scrutiny came immediately but seems to have softened now that Biden has stepped aside as the nominee.

After the debate, Harris notably defended Biden during an ABC News appearance, saying he had “a slow start, but a strong finish.”

“Let us not decide the outcome of who’s going to be president of the United States based on a 90-minute debate,” she added.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Monday that Harris “lied about [Biden’s] capacity to serve as president.”

Since Democrats abandoned Biden for Harris, a swell of Republicans, led by Vance, have come forward, demanding that Biden resign or that Harris and the rest of the cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment. They argue that if he does not have the cognitive ability to run for president, he should not be serving as president.  Harris and the cabinet have taken no such action.

Moreover, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced articles of impeachment against Harris on Tuesday, with one article accusing her of misleading the American public “to obfuscate the physical and cognitive well-being of” Biden. 

2. Casting as Offensive Questions About Harris’s Competency  

Though Harris did not run as a presidential candidate in the 2024 primary and yet is on a path to securing her party’s nomination without doing so, Democrats and members of the media are attacking those questioning her competence.

For example, when former Trump administration official Matt Mowers said the election came down to “immigration, inflation, and incompetence” on CNN’s Situation Room, political commentator Ashley Allison said calling Harris “incompetent” is offensive to her as a black woman.

“There is a way to attack her record on policy without calling her a name,” she said. “Incompetent is an unflattering name, and when people do that to black women, that is what Van is talking about. You might not agree, but as a black woman, let me tell you how we hear it.”

Other Harris critics have suggested she was a “DEI hire” for the administration. The labeling has drawn comparisons from the left to “racist dog whistles”; however, last May, Biden stated that his administration is proud of its commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and has “the most diverse administration in history that taps into the full talents of our country. And it starts at the top with the Vice President,” Breitbart News reported.

When Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) commented that Harris “was a DEI hire,” MSNBC blogger Clarissa-Jan Lim dubbed the comment a “racist dog whistle.” And Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) also accused Burchett of the same.

“Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean,” Frost told CNN Tuesday when asked about Burchett’s comment, per the Hill.

3: Claiming Harris Was Selected “from the Grassroots, Bottom-Up”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) took to gaslighting voters on Tuesday by falsely and boldly claiming that Harris’s selection as the presumptive presidential nominee was from the “bottom-up,” yet voters will not have a say in who the Democrat presidential nominee is. 

“So now that the process has played out from the grassroots, bottom-up, we are here today to throw our support behind Vice President Kamala Harris,” Schumer excitedly announced. As he clapped his hands and realized others were not clapping, he awkwardly added, “I’m clapping. You don’t have to.”

As Breitbart News has noted, Democrat party leaders, Hollywood elites, and major donors pressured Biden to drop out of the race only after the party cleared the way for him to gain the nomination, ensuring that thousands of delegates at the Chicago convention next month will select the nominee and not the millions of Democrat Party voters who participated in their states’ primary elections.

Black Lives Matter, for example, has taken issue with the effort to “anoint” Harris, as Breitbart News noted.

“We do not live in a dictatorship,” the group declared in a statement. “Delegates are not oligarchs. Any attempt to evade or override the will of voters in our primary system-must be condemned.”

“We demand an informal, virtual snap primary now that the incumbent president is no longer in the running,” they added.

4. Covering for Harris’s Record on Illegal Immigration

In March 2021, less than two full months into the Biden-Harris administration, President Joe Biden placed the vice president in charge of heading up “efforts with Mexico and the northern triangle and the countries that need help in stemming… the migration to our southern border.”

At the time, many news outlets, including Axios’s Shawna Chen, described Harris as Biden’s “border czar,” though Biden never used the language himself. The border chaos during the Biden-Harris administration has become a vulnerability for Harris’s campaign; and media outlets, including Axios, worked to distance Harris from the “border czar” term on Wednesday.

In an Axios article titled “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign,” Stef Kight wrote that “the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.”

After X users quickly pointed out that Axios had used the term in April 2021, the outlet updated the article with an editor’s note.

“Editor’s note: This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021,” it reads.

Though Harris was tasked with addressing the root causes that drive illegal immigration, over 11 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States during the Biden-Harris administration, as Breitbart News noted.

Harris also supported decriminalizing illegal immigration as a candidate during the 2020 Democrat primary and flip-flopped on the issue during a subsequent appearance on ABC’s The View before standing by her initial stance.

Ogles’s impeachment resolution notably includes a second article against Harris for “willfully and systemically” refusing “to uphold Federal immigration laws.”

5. Deleting the GovTrack Page Rating Harris as the Most Liberal Senator

Another example of the gaslighting came Wednesday when it was realized that GovTrack had deleted a page that ranked Harris as the most liberal senator in 2019.

In the list of all 100 senators in the 116th congress, GovTrack had rated Harris as the most liberal (100 of 100), Breitbart News reported. She was followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at 99 while Sen. Marsha Blackburn represented the conservative side of the spectrum with a 1 of 100 ranking.

The website noted that Harris signed onto bipartisan legislation the least often of any of her Democrat colleagues.

However, as of Wednesday, just days after Harris became the frontrunner for the Democrat nomination, the page was deleted. The URL showed “page not found.”

“The cover up is on!” declared National Republican Senatorial Committee press secretary Mike Berg in a tweet.

On Thursday, the National Desk reported that GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer said, “The page that you are referring to was based on a single calendar year. Several years ago we discontinued creating new single-calendar year ‘report cards.’” Tauberer said a single year of data was “not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators.”  Tauberer did not explain why this particular page from 2019 was deleted, but noted that a more recent page for Harris lists her as the fourth most liberal senator.

GovTrack notably touts itself as one of the world’s “oldest government transparency websites.”