In the opening scene of the 1979 film The Jerk, protagonist Navin Johnson begins his life story as follows: “It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child.” This line immediately revealed the film as an absurdist comedy because Johnson was played by the quintessentially white Steve Martin.
But it appears that many Democrats see The Jerk as a career planning seminar. In a rapidly spreading epidemic that is as alarming as it is humorous, liberal politicians have been exposed for blatantly fabricating basic details about their lives in an embarrassing effort to score points on the left’s victimhood hierarchy.
A case in point is Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s nominee for New York City mayor. According to a widely read New York Times story, Mamdani identified himself as “Black or African American” on an admission application to Columbia University. As the Times noted, Mamdani “has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.”
Mamdani admitted the report was true. Yet the Grey Lady was denounced by its own staff, readers, and numerous left-wing pundits for this rare foray into honest journalism. These critics have clearly become inured to Democrat politicians who misrepresent their backgrounds and heritage.
This isn’t the only time Mamdani has fibbed about his background to gain some perceived advantage, whether with a college admissions board or with voters. The 33-year-old has also repeatedly portrayed himself as being the child of a poor immigrant family – despite the fact that his mother is a famous Bollywood film director and his father is a tenured professor at Columbia.
Another obvious entry into the “fake hardscrabble background” genre is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who defeated 10-term Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018 largely on the basis that neither he nor his children lived in the New York congressional district he represented. She frequently declared, “I wake up every day and I’m a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. Every single day.”
Well, not exactly every single day. Ocasio-Cortez lived in the East Bronx for a brief time as a toddler, but her family moved to upscale Yorktown Heights in Westchester County before she entered kindergarten. Her parents’ home remained her legal residence until it was sold in 2016—about a year before she rematerialized in the Bronx and began her campaign to unseat Congressman Crowley. Relative to the vast majority of her constituents, she was a child of privilege.
Like her fellow “Democratic Socialist,” Zohran Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t talk much about her affluent background. Both spend the bulk of their time cultivating fictitious public images by pretending to speak truth to power while currying favor with moneyed elites.
Mamdani and AOC are hardly the only Democrats to burnish their public images with lies about their backgrounds and heritage. One of Mamdani’s most vocal supporters is Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “Zohran’s inspiring campaign showed what grassroots movements can achieve when we fight for bold policies,” Warren said recently.
The irony of this endorsement was not lost on those who remember Warren’s false claims to Native American ancestry. In addition to claiming to be the only such person on the faculty of Harvard Law School, The Washington Post reported that she had also registered for the State Bar of Texas as an “American Indian”:
“Using an open records request during a general inquiry, for example, The Post obtained Warren’s registration card for the State Bar of Texas, providing a previously undisclosed example of Warren identifying as an “American Indian.” Warren filled out the card by hand in neat blue ink and signed it. Dated April 1986, it is the first document to surface showing Warren making the claim in her own handwriting. Her office didn’t dispute its authenticity.”
Yet another Democrat who has finessed her ethnic background and the circumstances of her childhood is former Vice President Kamala Harris. During her abortive 2020 presidential race, she called out Joe Biden on his opposition to school desegregation and busing during a debate. In doing so, she implied that she had personally endured a childhood of hardship: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.” She followed up by tweeting a photo of herself meant to elicit sympathy for a supposedly oppressed young Kamala.
However, according to a brief bio published by The Week, Harris is the daughter of immigrants who enjoyed quite a posh upbringing in Northern California. Her Indian-born mother was a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Jamaican-born father was a Marxist economist at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
This is hardly the stuff of hardship, yet she frequently claims to have been raised in a “working class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers who tended their lawns with pride.” In reality, she divided her time between Berkeley and Palo Alto until she moved to Montreal with her mother, where she remained until finishing high school.
It’s impossible to discuss the carefully curated biography of Kamala Harris without mentioning the serial prevarications perpetrated on the hapless voters by her erstwhile running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz lied about serving in the war, his National Guard retirement rank, using IVF in the conception of his children, his 1995 DUI conviction, the length of time he kept children out of school pursuant to COVID-19, ad infinitum.
But Walz, Harris, Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani just barely scratch the surface of the left’s ranks of liars. The list also includes former President Joe Biden, whose 50 years of falsehoods about his own background may well be a world record.
All of which begs the following question: Why do so many Democrats fabricate their personal biographies? There is no single answer to that question, but it is undeniably connected to the obvious collusion between them and the corporate “news” media. They know that even friendly publications like The New York Times will be denounced for honestly reporting an irrefutable fact about a dishonest Democrat. Consequently, people like Zohran Mamdani and the rest of the politicians noted above are confident that even their most outrageous lies will be buried or, at worst, excused by the media.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the following in an 1816 letter to Charles Yancey: “[I]f a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.” Yet, it is obvious that much of the corporate “news” media is dedicated to keeping the voters as ignorant as possible about Democrat skulduggery, while creating fictitious narratives about Republicans.
As long as this continues, Democrats will emulate The Jerk – and their party will accordingly be regarded as a laughingstock by the voting public.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange, and a variety of other publications.
Read full article here