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:
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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