WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: Media’s Soviet-Style Airbrushing of Kamala Harris’ Problematic History.

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.

And that’s after Biden was ushered out like a late-period Soviet party chairman – which was just last week, astonishingly enough.

But will any voters on the lefthand side of aisle care? Democrats have portrayed Trump as the second coming of Hitler since about 2015 or so, and more recently, along with repeated choruses that “Democracy is on the line in November.” Such superheated rhetoric may be more than enough to overcome the Democrats’ Soviet-style tactics in the eyes of the proverbial low information voters.

UPDATE: And speaking of late-period Soviet vibes:

“Ho-hum; of course we all knew. But more importantly, we didn’t think it was necessary for you to know.”