Media’s Soviet-Style Airbrushing of Kamala Harris’ Problematic History
After episodes of Axios and GovTrack retroactively changing their reporting, we are in uncharted territory where we are in Soviet style rewriting of history, not just media bias.
Today I time traveled back to my days in the USSR as a student, and my study of Soviet history. Or should I say Soviet historical revisionism.
Below is my take on these two stories we covered:
- Axios vs. Axios: New Article Claims Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s Border Czar, 2021 Article Says Otherwise
- Election Interference: GovTrack Deletes Its Page On Kamala As “Most Liberal of All U.S. Senators”
Today I had a little bit of PTSD reaction to the news cycle.
As many of you know, I studied in the Soviet Union during college. I traveled extensively throughout the country and I became very friendly with dissident and refusenik families who were being persecuted. So I knew Soviet history very well.
And there’s a joke that I saw on Twitter today, which was that in the Soviet Union, the future was always written, but it’s the past that kept changing. And what they were talking about is Stalin and other Soviet leaders had a habit of changing history. And they would do it in many ways. And one of the ways they would do it as featured in this image.
Stalin was notorious for having a group of Photoshop, before there was Photoshop, of photo editors who could take people out of photos, could airbrush people who were now politically not acceptable. But they also did it by replacing pages in encyclopedias. Beria, the former secret police chief, had his pages replaced in the Soviet encyclopedias so that future generations literally would not know he existed because all they had then was the encyclopedia.
And I felt a little bit of that vibe, a lot of bit of that vibe today when there were stories about how Axios was going back and essentially rewriting its history. As we know for Kamala Harris, one of her big problems is that she was responsible for the border. And we all remember she was called the Border Czar. And you know what? Axios wrote an article today saying that’s not true. She was never called the Border Czar. And then people found from 2021 articles in Axios calling her the Border Czar because she doesn’t want to now take responsibility for the border problems.
So Axios just reinvented it, wrote an addition saying, oh, we were wrong back then. We used it improperly.
No, they didn’t. They used it in context at the time because that’s what she was called. And just like the Soviets go back and airbrush people and rewrite things, that’s what Axios did today.
But it even got worse because another one of Kamala Harris’s major problems, and this is already running in GOP ads attacking her, is that in 2019 GovTack.us, which is not a governmental agency, it’s a private company, but people rely on it as an authority on what happens in the government. GovTrack had rated her in 2019 as the most liberal senator in the Senate. That means to the left of Bernie Sanders. That’s a problem for Kamala Harris, and that is something that Republicans are hitting her on.
And in completely Soviet style. GovTrack simply took down her page and posted a notice saying that they’ve reconsidered things. And their whole methodology that they used in 2019, not just for her, but for everybody, was now wrong. And they removed the page much like the Soviets would remove pages from the encyclopedia.
So that’s what I felt today, we are in really uncharted territories. We are used to media bias, that’s baked into the system. We are used to politicians and the media lying about each other’s history.
We’re really not used to Soviet style recapitulation, Soviet style airbrushing, Soviet style reinventing of history. And that’s what the media appears to be set to do because she’s such a problematic candidate with her positions, with her ratings as being to the left of Bernie Sanders, they are simply going to rewrite history. They’re going to pretend that that never existed. Now maybe you like that, maybe you want somebody to the left of Bernie Sanders, but they know that’s a problem.
So we are in uncharted territory where we are in Soviet style rewriting of history, not just media bias.
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Comments
Agreed. Let’s call it what it is: whitewashing/scrubbing of a mostly mediocre career. Fluff it, exaggerate or just outright lie, to put lipstick on the pig.
There isn’t enough lipstick.
I think official term.is Memory Hole
Winston Smith, call your office. Your inbox is full; you’re gonna need to put in some overtime on this one.
“White washing!”
“WHITE WASHING!!!!
But, but, but… Saint Kamala is (whisper) black!
No, wait… Jamaican!
Uh, sorry, Indian, but the IT support version, not the tomahawk version…
Pfft! I can’t keep up with intersectionality.
I like Jordan Peterson’s take on intersectionality. He says if it’s pursued to its logical conclusion, what will be found is the individual – the person with whom conservatives have always been concerned. So, welcome to the club, intersectionalists! (I probably just coined a word, because spell check doesn’t like it.)
You know, all of the voters who are against Trump think that Trump supporters like you are racist.s. Why do you insist on proving them true? Do you think this will help Trump?
Go away. Your side has called us RACIST long enough. Take your hate and division elsewhere.
^^^and maybe check out the trailer for Matt Walsh’s new movie “AM I RACIST?”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PA_kshZh0&feature=youtu.be
(No I have no personal or professional connection to the movie, or DW, or anyone in it. It just seems relevant, and ……. what’s the word I’m searching for, oh yes, funny.)
It isn’t racist to mock the way the Left “finds” racism where there isn’t any. I still remember the kerfuffle over the word “niggardly” which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with race. Or the way feminists want to rename “history” as “herstory”.
👍
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PA_kshZh0&feature=youtu.be
I did a quick look at her family tree.. a big part was Irish, on her father’s side.
The black part? Pretty small fraction..
You can’t trust the shifty Irish.
Mama was Jamaican. Daddy was Irish. So that doesn’t make their daughter black. She’s at best a POC. A person of color. But black? Nope. Never was and no amount of claims otherwise will make it true.
Both her parents have PhD’s
Daddy was Stanford University faculty
“Let that sink in.”
She claimed on CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD radio show that she used to listen to Tupac in college. Except that that was not possible due to the fact that Tupac had not ever been on the radio yet when she was in college.
She’s a fake and a fraud.
And she’s not bright.
And she knows it.
She stands for nothing.
She’ll say anything.
She’ll do anything.
She’s filled with rage.
I think she’s quite dangerous.
National Pravda Radio is fluffing her like the porn star she trained to be…..
National Pravda Radio is fluffing her like the porn star she started out to be…..
Given Joe’s refusal to abdicate tonight, I’m beginning to think they’re not 100% committed to Kamala. If they were, they would have had the puppet transfer the presidency to her. They’re still hedging their bets, for something.
And yet the Joseph Goebbels media is already trying to pretend she has had no role whatsoever in the Biden* junta’s numerous calamities. In a week or two they will be claiming she has never been Vice President because … racist dog whistles, or something.
Everyone already understands that Biden is an incompetent, dementia-addled, and angry old man. Putting Harris in the spotlight of the Oval Office would be an opportunity for her to demonstrate she’s not a qualitative improvement. So long as Biden remains POTUS, they are better able to keep Kamala’s failings from becoming as bloody obvious as are Joe’s.
Maybe, but the media wouldn’t report on those deficiencies. Recent events prove that if nothing else. Although if something really calamitous happened that might change things. I hope they don’t know something I don’t.
The plan was for Trump to be dead
And the RNC convention in disarray
And MAGA Nation to be emotionally absolutely devastated, melancholic , catatonic.
So right now, they’re improvising as they go , like when a Hollywood film goes into production before script is completed
I think this is the Soviet joke you were looking for.
The past is rewritten so fast that you don’t know what will happen yesterday.
LOL.
Along the Soviet joke line, my favorite Soviet joke was about 3 doctors who are talking – an AMerican, A Brit and a Soviet. They are discussing which operation is most difficult. The American says that brain surgery is the hardest, the Brit says that heart-lung transplants are the toughest and the Soviet doctor says that tonsillectomies are the most demanding.
“Tonsillectomies??” – The American and Brit are stunned. “Why is that?”
The Soviet doctor responds, “Because we have to go in through the rectum.”
The American asks, “Why do you go in through the rectum for a tonsillectomy?”
“Because … in the Soviet Union, no one opens his mouth.”
I am reminded of this Cold War-era joke:
Unfortunately after J6 the joke isn’t so funny anymore. The United States has a ways to go before it catches up with the Soviet Union, but J6 revealed which way the trend is.
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
Good – as after the Biden-Trump debate.
“…a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly told between two truths.”
Deep Throat, The X Files
Doubleplus good, eh Smith?
They did it in 2020 with Biden, too, and people were stupid enough to fall for it.
How anybody could possibly believe that somebody that had been a far-leftist for FORTY YEARS in the Senate with a record to match was a ‘moderate’ took insane balls, and they did it anyway.
So now they’re doing it again.
I remember that we used to wear wrist bands for the refuseniks.
Nowadays, I think less than 10% of America has any idea what a “refusenik” was. Probably none of the modern commies – the Che and Mao worshipers who think they’re being cool.
The internet doesn’t forget.. Axios can backpeddle, but they have destroyed any shred of credibility. Like them or not, X has a group that will jump in and challenge posts.. the community notes.. The machine will have to work harder now.. But the fact that this is being attempted in front of us is very chilling.
That’s what makes this both amusing and infuriating. The internet is forever and it’s getting near impossible for some reporter to lie when you can pull up proof almost instantly.
But they’re going to lie anyway.
FYI Axios did get a really good spanking from community notes..
Sometimes they get it right.
“So Axios just reinvented it, wrote an addition saying, oh, we were wrong back then. We used it improperly.”
That’s the one that makes me furious.
They got caught in a blatant lie; SHE WAS CALLED BORDER CZAR, but now it’s “Oops, we wrote down the wrong words.”
I can’t stand it.
The problem is more fundamental. No intelligent person who takes even moderate care to keep informed is fooled by these tactics. We are still no where close to Soviet Russia as far as censorship. The problem is that the voting franchise is too wide. Unfettered democracy is as bad as dictatorship.
Today, VDARE, charged with no crime, was forced to shut down due to lawfare.
We are not used to Soviet-Style airbrushing? What country have you been living in?
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