Two seemingly distinct news stories about Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign cast light on each other and also illuminate the central quality of deception in her bid for the White House.

One story is that she bought ads for delivery to people searching Google for news. Users get a stack of links to stories on real news sites. So far, so normal. But the headlines and decks are changed to messaging crafted by Harris campaign operatives. You can see how they look at the Google Ads Transparency Center.

Items are labeled as sponsored content, such as advertisements, and Harris is not the only Democratic or Republican politician doing this, as the Washington Examiner has reported. So this new tactic does not involve flat-out lies.

But it does involve deliberate deception. Headlines reporting facts are altered to express opinion suggesting the candidate is doing unalloyed good of which the publication approves. The clear intention is that online readers either get a general impression from the menu of headlines that news coverage is more favorable to Harris and her policies than they are, or they ingest the idea that a specific publication has delivered an endorsement. Neither is true.

This brings me to the second story that is mutually illuminating with the one above. It is that Harris is promising price controls if elected president and is presenting it as an economic plan that addresses voters’ No. 1 concern, inflation.

Basic economics teaches that price controls don’t work. They create scarcity, which in turn pushes prices up, whether for groceries, gasoline, renting an apartment, or anything else.

But Harris is not really thinking about keeping prices affordable in the future. She is worrying about her record of four years in office enthusiastically advocating and implementing policies that produced the worst price rises in 40 years. She injured voters but wants them to believe that only she will apply balm to their wounds.

On prices as on nearly every other policy, Harris and her campaign are scrubbing history — revivifying the old joke about communism that the future is certain and only the past has to be changed.

The cumulous vapor of Harris’s price control policies also blames inflation on “price gouging” rather than on the $5 trillion of excess debt-financed spending that is central to her record in the White House as vice president. Second only to inflation, voters say they are concerned with corporate greed — a data point that shows how effective false left-wing messaging can be. Thus, promising price controls to deal with gouging hits two big voter concerns.

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But like the rewritten headlines being presented to online readers, the promise on prices is false. It is intended to win voters between now and Election Day by muddying the record and falsifying the past where it cannot be erased entirely. No wonder Harris is refusing to face press questions and instead is spreading her message via online influencers uninfluenced by an understanding of reality.

The common quality revealed by Harris falsifying headlines and promising to stop inflation by tackling corporate greed is that she is trying to fool those whom she wants to lift her to the peak of the federal government.