Kamala Harris’ Campaign Is Consciously Spreading Fake News

Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a meteoric rise ever since she replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, as Democrats have rallied around her while the press has largely given her a pass to date in their coverage of her presidential campaign. There is a tacit understanding that real policy announcements won’t come until the Democratic National Convention next week, and so in the meantime the press has largely ridden the coconut vibes en route to broadly uncritically examining Harris’ nascent bid for president.

That pass is likely gone now, given this new report from Axios:

The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

This is a common practice among many advertisers and is a Google problem more than anything. In their insatiable bid to abandon their “don’t be evil” creed and take over the world, Google has decided to ruin their core search product in favor of producing results that people pay them to put in front of our faces. Their business model now is more about laundering propaganda through their brand’s dwindling credibility than helping users find real information. When it’s a soulless brand telling you how some other entity supposedly says they are the best, that’s one thing we have become inured to in our depraved late capitalist hellscape, but when a politician does it, there’s an added sinister element to it.

Like the genocide in Gaza, it’s instructive to think about how this issue would be perceived among liberals if Donald Trump did it (and per Axios‘s report, Trump is not taking advantage of Google’s sketchy loophole). Producing fake news is Trump’s whole deal, and if it was discovered that he was faking news headlines, there is no doubt in my mind that it would be a whole weeklong cycle in liberal media as everyone gravely intoned the threat to democracy he presents.

But this has largely been met with radio silence on the left. A few have acknowledged how obviously horrible this is, but generally if you search for this report, it’s right-wingers promoting it, which is the worst thing liberals can do right now. This is an opportunity to demonstrate that the opposition to Trump is principled and not based in personal revulsion and partisan hackery, and it’s a layup to simply say that Kamala Harris should not be spreading misinformation.

Not to mention how this is an immense unforced error from the Harris campaign in terms of their relationship with the media. She has yet to do a sit-down interview or speak in any real detail about her plans with a journalist, and despite a few calls here and there to sit down and chat, the media has largely given her a pass on her substance-free vibes-based campaign to date.

That is surely going to come to an end now that news organizations learned that the Harris campaign is slandering them and boosting this lie to audiences all around the web. It was inevitable that the press would eventually look at Harris with more scrutiny, but this has likely accelerated the process. It’s impossible to tell how much all this friendly coverage from the press has factored into Kamala’s surging poll numbers, but it definitely has had some influence.

Ultimately this is yet another data point demonstrating that Google must be broken up and brought to heel. Its search engine was one of the greatest internet tools ever created, and its destruction is the best illustration you will ever find of how capitalism is based around exploitation and not providing goods and services that people want. That the Harris campaign pursued this loophole before the Trump campaign evinces a kind of arrogance that trends on hubris. Those who wanted the Harris campaign to come under far more scrutiny from a friendly press will likely get their wish, all in large part due to the Harris campaign’s overreach in their desire to spread fake news.