The New Yorker, as anyone familiar with the oeuvres of Michael J. Fox and Keifer Sutherland would know, prides itself on the meticulousness of its supposedly-rigorous "fact-checking" department.
But the New Yorker falsely claimed that Trump's statement that Kamala Harris supports taxpayer-funded transgender operations for illegal aliens -- and won't correct the record, even after being shown the report from leftwing CNN, which pointed out that Kamala Harris stated, explicitly, that she supported just this in a 2019 questionnaire submitted by the ACLU to all Democrats running in 2020.
More than 24 hours have passed since the New Yorker published a post-debate column that states "no one knows" what Donald Trump meant when he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris's support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants.
The column from staff writer Susan Glasser led the magazine's website after Tuesday evening's debate. It argues that the president said a number of "crazy and unhinged" things during the 90-minute affair including that "the Vice-President 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.'"
"What the hell was he talking about?" Glasser wrote. "No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris's point."
But, as CNN reported Monday, Harris explicitly endorsed using "executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care--including those in prison and immigration detention--will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care." Unlike some of her other left-wing positions, neither Harris nor her campaign has disavowed that view, which was first articulated in a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Users on X, where Glasser posted the column, added a community note to provide "context."
"Kamala Harris told the ACLU she supports this policy," the note states.
Pressed by a Trump campaign official who asked the New Yorker to correct the record, Glasser said she stood by the "view expressed in the column that this was a memorable line and also one that would be hard as heck for someone in the audience to understand what the former president meant by it." She maintained that she was not fact-checking the president's statements but rather "questioning the political advisability of bringing up these things in a national debate."
That same official noted that Time magazine had corrected a piece that included the same error.
"Despite this back and forth I still have no idea what the heck the former president was talking about," Glasser told the Trump official. "Kind of like claiming she is a Marxist. Or saying she supports abortions of babies--after they are born. Are you retracting those claims and correcting the record on them? Thanks."
Yes, it's exactly like claiming Kamala Harris is a Marxist -- both statements are true.
The New Yorker's fact-checking desk is considered world class for allegedly going to great lengths to verify all information in the magazine's stories. A former editor there once described the process as "each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."
The Free Beacon now follows up: the questionnaire may have been filled out by Harris's campaign manager, one of her highest current aides.
Kamala Harris's campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez wrote the candidate's response to the 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in which Harris expressed support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants, metadata from the document show.
The Washington Free Beacon pulled the questionnaire from the ACLU website, and a review of the document's metadata shows the author as "Julie Rodriguez." The same data indicate the document was created on July 16, 2019. The ACLU published the questionnaire on September 1, 2019, three months before Harris ended her 2020 presidential primary campaign.
The revelation indicates that Harris's responses to the ACLU survey were crafted at the highest levels of her 2019 campaign. Rodriguez served as Harris's California state director before joining her 2020 campaign as national political director. She is now Harris's campaign manager.
Rodriguez's role in crafting answers to the ACLU survey undermines the Harris campaign's efforts to distance itself from the responses provided in 2019, which became an issue when CNN's Andrew Kaczynski resurfaced the questionnaire on Monday.
The Harris campaign has tried to dismiss the report, with a spokesman telling ABC News that "old questionnaires are a complete distraction from the task at hand right now" and arguing that the questionnaire responses are "not what she's proposing ... not what she's running on."
Of course "she's not running on it" -- it's politically radioactive.
But she continues refusing to repudiate this position, and just keeps telling her voters: "My values haven't changed."
Chávez Rodriguez has served alongside Harris for nearly a decade. After a stint in President Joe Biden's White House, she became Biden's and now Harris's campaign manager.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The ACLU's 2019 questionnaire came as Harris worked to tout her liberal bona fides in a primary field that included Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). It asked Harris to support left-wing policies such as "reducing incarceration by 50% in the federal prison system" and "ending the use of ICE detainers."
Each question included "Yes" and "No" boxes for the respondent to check. In some cases, Harris did not check either box, opting instead to express her policy position in a written response. In the case of the transgender surgery question, however, Harris checked "Yes."
As mentioned, she also wrote out a full answer. It wasn't just a tick box, which one could claim was a "pencil typo." She wrote out an emphatic defense of using taxpayer funds to pay for transgender surgeries to all of those in prison or in immigration detention.
The garbage-institution New Yorker doesn't care about its credibility any longer. It's blowing it all up for their beloved Marxist-Democrat Party.
Note that Time Magazine pushed the same RUSSIAN Disinformation -- but has now issued a retraction for its completely-false "fact" check:
Is Kamala Harris really against taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners and illegal aliens?
If so, she has a chance to prove that now: The GOP is introducing a bill to ban the use of taxpayer funds on such lunatic undertakings. Think she'll endorse it?
Fox News:A new House GOP-led bill is being introduced to block federal dollars from paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants.
Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., introduced legislation called the Stopping Transgender Operation Payments and Wacky Expenses for Illegal Residents and Detainees (STOP WEIRD) Act on Thursday, and it is backed by at least five other House Republicans.
"Kamala could implement her weird and disgusting plan today, or in the very unlikely case of a Harris-Walz administration," Steube told Fox News Digital.
"Congress has the responsibility to safeguard taxpayer dollars from funding transition surgeries for illegal immigrants -- I can think of a million things that are a better use of taxpayer dollars -- for one, our veterans who fight for months, and sometimes years, to get the medical care they earned through service to our country."
It is part of the House GOP majority's increased scrutiny of Vice President Kamala Harris and her policy platforms since the vice president became the Democrats' 2024 White House nominee in late July.
Harris signaled support for federal dollars going toward transgender surgeries for detained illegal immigrants and U.S. prisoners in a recently resurfaced American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questionnaire from 2019.
The then-junior California senator filled it out alongside other 2020 presidential primary hopefuls.
It has earned her aggressive blowback from GOP critics who say it is proof that Harris is not the moderate she is styling herself to be during her campaign.