Just how hard can we expect the Protection Racket Media to work to rewrite its history to rally around the anointed Democrat nominee, Kamala Harris? If we judge by Axios' Ministry of Information efforts this morning, we can expect them to burn the midnight oil to obfuscate any previous negative reporting on Donald Trump's presumptive opponent in November.

Jazz wrote about this earlier in relation to NBC and ABC, but Axios has a special category of gaslighting. In a ludicrous bit of sophistry from reporter Stef Knight, Trump and Republicans get cast as perps in an attempt to create "confusion" around Harris' role in the Joe Biden border crisis:

Driving the news: The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the "border czar" title — which she never actually had.

• "Harris was appointed 'border czar' in March of 2021, and since that time, millions and millions of illegal aliens have invaded our country and countless Americans have been killed by migrant crime because of her willful demolition of America borders and laws," Trump told reporters on a call on Tuesday.
• House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik introduced a resolution condemning the administration and its "Border Czar" for failing to secure the U.S.
• Harris supporters have rushed to her defense. "She assumed the role that Vice President Biden had during the Obama administration, which is diplomacy with Central America," former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told Fox News on Tuesday. "She is not the border czar."

First off, the term "czar" has been commonly used for decades to denote a specific portfolio assignment in US administrations. Of course it's not an official title, because it's a colloquialism borrowed from the Russian imperial era, a term which got used for a very good reason. A "czar" takes full leadership via an informal grant of presidential authority over a particular issue in order to provide efficient leadership and solutions to a pressing political problem. Policy czars answer only to presidents and are fully vested with his authority, if informally, to act immediately and finally. 

And that's exactly what Biden did in March 2021 in assigning Harris to run the administration's efforts to deal with the border crisis. As the Associated Press reported at the time (Jazz linked this earlier as well), Biden assigned both the border and the diplomacy to Harris ... who ended up handling neither:

President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem.

Biden made the announcement as he and Harris met at the White House on Wednesday with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas and other immigration advisers to discuss the increase in migrants, including many unaccompanied minors, arriving at the border in recent weeks.

In delegating the matter to Harris, Biden is seeking to replicate a dynamic that played out when he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president. Obama turned to Biden in his first term to lead the White House effort to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq and oversee implementation of stimulus in response to the Great Recession.

“When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden said, noting her past work as California’s attorney general makes her specially equipped to lead the administration’s response.

"When she speaks, she speaks for me" is precisely the kind of authority that policy "czars" get granted. It's the entire reason to create them in the first place, apart from the need to make it appear that the issue is a priority and that Top Men are working on it. TOP. MEN.

So yes, Biden made Harris the border czar. And you know who else recognized it at the time? If you say "Axios," you win the Protection Racket Media Kewpie Doll!

This you? pic.twitter.com/KICYihXgF4

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 24, 2024

This you? pic.twitter.com/4CA0H7VVfj

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) July 24, 2024

This you? pic.twitter.com/FhqVuPlvw6

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) July 24, 2024

Same author lol pic.twitter.com/eTb6jz0Fbb

— Legal Voter (@LegalVoter1975) July 24, 2024

Just in case you need the link to Axios' April 2021 report from Shawna Chen highlighted in these tweets, here you go:

Vice President Harris said Wednesday she plans to visit Mexico and Guatemala "as soon as possible" in a diplomatic effort to address surging migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Reuters reports.

Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration.

Emphasis mine. Clearly, whoever handles the Winston Smith role at Axios' Ministry of Truth has slacked off on the job. Save those screen shots, because eventually Axios will have to scrub these articles to keep pursuing Harris' utter lack of accomplishments as a "Republicans Pounce®!" story. 

At a certain level, I agree with my friend Olivier Knox, who argues that this is a distinction without a difference:

I think it's a pretty silly conversation. Is the idea that she was not *technically* the 'border czar' and therefore she can repudiate Biden's border policies? Does someone believe that?

— Olivier Knox (@OKnox) July 24, 2024

Yes, it's a good point. Harris has to run on Biden's record, so it doesn't entirely matter whether she does it as VP or "border czar." But the effort to discredit the latter is an effort to remove any personal responsibility Harris has for those failures, which is why Axios and others are trying so very hard to erase her "border czar" status.

Guy Benson predicts the end game for the mainstream media, which is to label any argument that Harris had policy control of the border crisis as -- wait for it -- "misinformation":

Pretty soon, it will be “fact-checked” “misinformation” to accurately refer to Kamala Harris as the Border Czar. That’s where they’re heading.

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 24, 2024

"Fact checking" will require another category of scrutiny in the upcoming Protection Racket Media campaign to elect Kamala Harris.