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In democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on nongovernment websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”
The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here Are the People Trump Doesn’t Want to Exist.”
Identified from a database obtained by The Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.
It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility.
Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised. Some of those photos were fairly quickly reposted, along with other images whose removal had drawn criticism—photographs of the Code Talkers, for example. But thousands of photos were kept offline, making it clear that the basic goal of that purge, the intent to revise history and erase truths and realities that the Trumpists believe challenge their ideology, remains unchanged.
Reading the Post roundup and other articles on the subject reminded me of an event that, while not identical, was similar in meaningful ways to the Trump team’s chainsaw assault on the Pentagon photo archives. It, however, took place in a very different time and setting—nearly 49 years ago, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was then a journalist in Hong Kong, covering stories in China and elsewhere in Asia. Several years into that assignment, in September 1976, China’s longtime Communist ruler, Mao Zedong, died in Beijing. Less than a month later, in early October, his successors arrested his widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates, now condemned as counterrevolutionary criminals for their leading roles in Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.
Only weeks earlier, hundreds of millions of Chinese and other readers around the world had seen photographs in the Chinese communist newspaper, the People’s Daily, and other official media showing all four sitting in the front row of mourners at Mao’s funeral. After they were arrested, Chinese publications continued to carry those photos—but with Jiang and her three allies, now labeled the “Gang of Four,” airbrushed out. The editing was anything but subtle: Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been in the originals, while their names in the captions were blotted out by vertical rows of X’s.
Though I haven’t found copies of those memorable images, an online search turned up a different set of before-and-after shots without the smudges and blotted-out captions I remember but with equally obvious gaps where each of the four had been standing when the photo was taken.
The technology in that now-distant era was different, but the Communist Party officials who doctored those photographs were acting in the same way and for the same reasons that motivated President Donald Trump’s minions nearly a half-century later, when they eliminated those supposedly DEI-related images and descriptions from the Pentagon archives. Both intended to wipe out any evidence that conflicted with the preferred (and often wildly false) historical narratives propagated by their rulers. Both sought to obliterate visual records that might have raised uncomfortable questions about the political messaging of their leaders and the policies and underlying values they reflected. Both were entirely ready and willing to disregard truth and deny reality in order to protect falsehoods their bosses wanted people to believe.
I have no way of knowing what, if anything, President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or their censors might know about that earlier example—or anything else about Mao, for that matter, or if any of them have ever even heard of Jiang Qing or the Gang of Four. It’s likely that, like most Americans, they know little or nothing about that now-distant Chinese past. It’s more than likely that they’ve never even heard the name Jiang Qing or the label Gang of Four. Still, the parallels are a chilling reminder that, in democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
I had another first-hand encounter with airbrushed history some years later on a short visit to the other 20th-century communist superpower. That glimpse came during a university-sponsored study tour to the Russian Far East in the summer of 1990, just a year and a half before the final breakup of the Soviet Union. In the decades preceding our trip, the Soviet authorities had preserved the communist structures of government, while continuing to proclaim Marxist-Leninist ideology. They had, however, repudiated the brutal legacy of Joseph Stalin’s rule, which ended with his death in 1953. Consistent with that shift in official thinking was an exhibit at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok (named for an explorer and naturalist who had been a pioneer in that once remote region), which I visited twice while there. The exhibit, which had been installed just a year before our trip, offered a remarkable display of artworks and relics that recalled the terror of the Stalin era.
On my first visit to the museum, accompanied by two students from the local university hosting our tour, I walked through the Stalin exhibit with Irina Yatskova, a brisk, forthright woman who was the chief of the museum’s Soviet history department. Irina was also co-chair of the provincial branch of the Memorial Committee, a nationwide organization seeking redress for victims of the terror campaigns of the Stalin era. Over the doorway where we entered the gallery, strands of barbed wire hung between bare boards. They were meant to represent the gates outside the entrance to one of the concentration camps of that era. Inside, one wall was covered with photos from the Stalin years, images of smiling workers or grateful peasants thanking the Soviet ruler for their supposedly happy lives. In front of that display stood a huge blown-up photo of Stalin himself, circled by a ring of inscriptions reproducing the worshipful titles he was customarily accorded during his years in power—“creator of happiness and friendship,” “leader and teacher of the Communist Party,” and dozens more in the same vein.
If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out?
On another wall, a stylized map showed the route by which prisoners were transported to concentration camps scattered across the Soviet Arctic—a journey that began on the Trans-Siberian railroad from the Russian heartland to Vladivostok and then by ship for another 1,400 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the gateway to Russia’s vast frozen northern region. A row of display cases in front of the map contained bits of memorabilia: prisoners’ ID cards, photographs, a few letters, and two shriveled roses tied with a red ribbon—brought there by a former prisoner’s daughter, Irina told me. There was also a panel listing the names of prominent victims of Stalin’s terror, including many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who were later exiled, imprisoned, or executed as Stalin eliminated possible rivals for power.
There was, however, a glaring omission from that list. The name of Leon Trotsky, by far the most prominent of the old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor under Stalin’s rule, wasn’t on that panel. And Trotsky was similarly missing from a display in a different exhibit, dating from a previous era and reflecting an earlier version of ideological orthodoxy. Focused on the original Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, portrayed in the heroic style traditional in past official propaganda, the exhibit included many photos from 1917 and the following years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. None of them, however, showed Trotsky, even though he was at the time a highly visible revolutionary leader, second only to Lenin himself. When I mentioned that to Svetlana Soboleva, one of the teachers hosting our group who accompanied me on a second visit to the museum a few days later, she replied with a question of her own: How did I know Trotsky wasn’t in the photos, since the captions were in Cyrillic script, which at the time I couldn’t read? I knew because I would recognize Trotsky if I saw him, I replied, and I hadn’t seen him in any of the pictures.
Svetlana looked at me in surprise. “I’ve never seen a photograph of Trotsky!” she said. I was startled—and puzzled. If Stalin’s other high-ranking victims had indeed been officially rehabilitated and their images restored to public view, why, I wondered, was Trotsky still a non-person?
I must have asked that question at the time, but I don’t remember how I framed it, or how she answered. Now, relevant details are easy to find on the Internet—for instance, on a page at the Rare Historical Photos site, which notes that, after sending Trotsky into exile, Stalin ordered him “eliminated from all photos.” His censors also erased other rivals or potential rivals, as strikingly shown in a spread of four successive copies of the same Stalin photo. The original print, from 1926, has him standing with three contemporaries; in three subsequent versions each of them would be deleted, one at a time.
A different web page on the same topic, posted on the HistoryNet site, carries the apt subheadline: “Was Stalin the forefather of Photoshop?”
It’s hard not to see a straight line between Stalin’s version of photoshopping and the purge of the Pentagon archives in 2025, though it’s equally important not to overstate the connection. The United States today in no way resembles the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or China at the time of Mao’s death (or today). The communist regimes had no safeguards against official abuses of power; America’s political and legal systems have many. The rule of law, a functioning structure of government by elected representatives, and independent news media constitutionally protected from official repression, all continue to defend the basic rights of citizens and other residents, and still attempt to defend truth in the face of official distortions. It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility, a thought that would never have crossed my mind before witnessing the opening months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Writing this essay, I found myself wondering where his photoshoppers might go from here. Months or years from now, whose names and visual images might they seek to erase from the visual and written record of our history? If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out? Obviously, that’s not a serious thought at this point. But it is one that would never have occurred to me, had the Pentagon files not recently undergone that photo purge. Am I 100% certain that this will never happen? Or will I (and the rest of us) just have to wait and see?
A protest and its aftermath at the University of California, San Diego illustrates the moral myopia of administrators.
Evidencing America’s profound moral depravity is the targeting of campus protesters rather than the genocidal actions of America’s closest ally Israel. President Donald Trump, members of Congress, Christian and Jewish nationalists, and university task forces on antisemitism all charge campus protesters with widespread antisemitism through singling out and demonizing Israel. Ominously, these accusations have prompted universities to impose far-reaching restrictions on campus speech and assembly which match or exceed the crackdowns of the McCarthy era. Consequently, while Israel’s genocide endures, to the silence or approval of leading political, media, and university leaders, it is the protesters who have been substantially silenced.
Granted, within the surge of campus protests in 2023-2024, a few protesters crossed the line into crude antisemitism or other offensive behavior. The partisan university task force reports on antisemitism at places like Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA have seized upon these scattered instances and lumped them with controversial but defensible chants, such as “Globalize the intifada,” to paint a manufactured picture of rampant hostility toward Jews. Conveniently, neither the task forces nor university officials address the cause of these protests: the ongoing destruction of Gaza, judged to be genocide by Amnesty International and other human rights groups, and the complicity of many U.S. universities. To illustrate this moral myopia, I review a recent tempest at UC San Diego.
On May 19, the Murray Galinson San Diego Israel Initiative (MGSDII) collaborated with UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) to host a lecture by Ido Aharoni, a leading Israeli propagandist. In response, the UCSD Faculty Defense Group, GPS students, and the San Diego chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) converged in waging a vigorous protest. While the first two groups featured silent protests, SJP recited, with the help of amplification, multiple chants, including “Israel is an apartheid state. Genocide you celebrate” and “UCSD, you can’t hide. You’re supporting genocide.” Although the atmosphere was heated and a few participants yelled out “baby killer,” “Zionists not welcome here,” and personal insults at attendees entering the lecture hall, the protesters avoided direct altercations and did not try to shut down the talk.
Ironically, in her rebuke of the protests, Dean Freund urged that UCSD continue “to uphold the values that define our community: curiosity, compassion, and a shared commitment to a more peaceful and just world.” The protesters did just that.
An irate MGSDII staff accused the demonstrators of hurling “dangerous antisemitic slurs” and asked for punitive action. Obligingly, the UCSD chancellor and the faculty senate chair issued a joint message that curiously declared anti-genocide protests “an affront to the mission of our university” and promised an investigation for violation of university rules. Dean Caroline Freund apologized for “the disappointment and discomfort this caused for many in attendance, as well as for others in our broader community.”
Following a familiar pattern of selective outrage, Dean Freund and the chancellor ignored the circumstances prompting the dissent. Most importantly, the event was a university platforming of a professional propagandist who founded the government’s “Brand Israel” program. The MGSDII, which funds visiting teaching positions by Israelis, sponsored the talk as part of its mission to exert “a significant potential impact on the image of Israel that is different to, but on par with or exceeding, results of pro-Israel advocacy organizations.” “[M]ore than ever,” it proclaimed in an email blast after October 7, “we need to bring Modern Israel studies to our university classrooms to counteract the hate and biased education being taught by too many faculty.”
The MGSDII chose well in sponsoring Aharoni. Just two months earlier at San Diego State, he boasted of Israeli accomplishments, praised the U.S.-Israeli alliance, defended Israel’s assault on Gaza, and attacked campus protesters. For good measure, Aharoni quipped “I hope he’s deported to Gaza” in reference to the then-detained Columbia graduating student Mahmoud Khalil. As a skilled diplomat, Aharoni evaded the one critical question he received. The MGSDII was right to see the UCSD event as another propaganda opportunity, this time where the dean was lending prestige by introducing the speaker.
A second important dynamic ignored by Dean Freund and the chancellor was the chilling of Israel-related protests for the past year. In spring 2024, UCSD had become a hotspot for Gaza protests. On May 1, a coalition led by the campus chapters of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) assembled an encampment that grew to several hundred participants. The organizers avoided violent altercations with counterprotesters and facilitated cultural, educational, and religious activities, including an anti-Zionist Jewish Shabbat service, that attracted many visitors. This remarkable display of community activism ended abruptly on May 6 when the chancellor authorized police in riot gear to demolish the encampment and arrest resisters.
Although the city has not filed criminal charges, UCSD has disbanded the SJP and JVP chapters, withheld diplomas from graduating students, and consigned continuing students to a prolonged academic probation while they await completion of investigations. In the fall of 2024, the UC and Cal State systems released revised time, place, and manner regulations, which prohibit encampments, establish new restrictions on protests, and impose harsher sanctions. Combined with the draconian moves from the Trump administration, UCSD’s crackdown has had the intended effect. As professor Gary Fields, a faculty mentor to many UCSD protesters reflected, “What happened in the aftermath of the encampment is that there is still on our campus a climate of surveillance and fear—and self-censorship.”
The UCSD protest of Aharoni marks a courageous effort to revive anti-genocide protests. I would have preferred a more disciplined message that did not insult attendees. Moving forward, protesters would be well advised to devote more planning in coordination with faculty and veteran protesters to wage effective protests. The Faculty Defense Group got the balance right in its press statement: “Our aim in this protest is not to cancel or censor the speech of Ambassador Aharoni. Instead, we want to call attention to the one-sidedness of the event at a time when speech on our campus, and campuses everywhere, decrying the genocide perpetrated by Israel and enabled by the U.S., is being censored and criminalized.”
Above all, students are right to be angry. These frightening times demand robust protest, including the dreaded “disruption” that panics so many university officials. As of June 25, the official death toll in Gaza has surpassed 56,000. Having just joined Israel in a lawless attack on Iran, the U.S. continues to bestow Israel complete impunity to wreak destruction throughout Gaza and the West Bank. Ironically, in her rebuke of the protests, Dean Freund urged that UCSD continue “to uphold the values that define our community: curiosity, compassion, and a shared commitment to a more peaceful and just world.” The protesters did just that. Let us hope that Dean Freund and campus officials across the country absorb the lessons from the brave students on what moral responsibility demands.
"To say that 'Everyone is Welcome' in a public school system is not political, it's the law," said one Idaho teacher.
The Idaho attorney general's office has declared schools in the state will no longer be allowed to post signs declaring that "Everyone is welcome here" on the grounds that they are purportedly a political message aimed at criticizing the policies of President Donald Trump.
Idaho Ed News reported Monday that the office has found that signs stating "Everyone is welcome here" violate Idaho House Bill 41, a law passed back in March that bars schools from flying flags or displaying signs that represent "a political viewpoint, including but not limited to flags or banners regarding a political party, race, sexual orientation, gender, or a political ideology."
In explaining its rationale, the Idaho attorney general's office claimed that "these signs are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota following the 2016 election of Donald Trump" and added that "since that time, the signs have been used by the Democratic Party as a political statement. The Idaho Democratic Party even sells these signs as part of its fundraising efforts.”
The signs became an issue after Sarah Inama, a teacher in Idaho's West Ada School District, had refused to take them down from her classroom in the wake of Idaho House Bill 41's passage because she did not believe that a sign welcoming students regardless of their race or ethnicity should be considered political.
In a statement to Idaho Ed News, Inama once again expressed bewilderment that anyone could find the signs to be a political statement, especially given that government institutions are already legally barred from engaging in racial discrimination.
"To say that 'Everyone is welcome' in a public school system is not political, it's the law," Inama told the publication.