Last week, the Washington Post, censored a political cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes. It depicted Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and owner of the Post, and four others, bowing down to Donald Trump.
Just like almost every Republican official across the country.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski remains one of the few holdouts. And if we want to live in a country where we’re free to speak truth to power, we need her not to fold like the rest of them.
It was February 2017 when the Washington Post unveiled its new banner “Democracy Dies in the Darkness.” The implication was Bezos and his newspaper were committed to holding Washington accountable, including the newly inaugurated president.
But this time around, Trump has made it very clear that he wants to control what the news media publishes. That’s partly why Telnaes and many writers at the Post believe Bezos killed the paper’s editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s not just the freedom of the press that Trump is challenging though. He also wants to erase the parts of America’s recent history that’s not flattering to him. On that front, he’s trying to prevent release of the Special Counsel’s report about their investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Murkowski knows it’s “important for the for the country to understand” everything that occurred during that infamous period of time. She supported the House bill to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate it. But the majority of Senate Republicans killed it.
“We just can’t pretend that nothing bad happened,” she said immediately afterwards.
House Democrats and a few House Republicans agreed. They eventually established a Select Committee for that purpose. Their investigation exposed a lot of Trump’s contemptuous schemes to the daylight.
Liz Cheney was one of the committee’s co-chairs. On New Year’s Day, Trump once again falsely accused her of destroying all the evidence the committee obtained. He argued it was an “ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE” that made it impossible for lawyers to mount a proper defense on his behalf.
“Donald, this is not the Soviet Union,” Cheney wrote a few days later. “You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us.”
She stood up to him again after learning about his effort to suppress the Special Counsel’s report. Noting that it includes “testimony and evidence from dozens of Trump’s former advisors and Vice President [Mike] Pence,” she called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to release it. “The truth must prevail.”
It would be a mistake to think this is nothing more heated rhetoric between two sworn political enemies. Indeed, Cheney’s reference to the Soviet Union may have been directed at us, not him.
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin mastered the despicable art of rewriting history. His Communist Party published 50 million copies of a “Short Course” that was put to use in all schools and universities. Genrikh Joffe, a prominent Russian historian of that era, described it as “a hammer pounding nails of falsehood into every schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s brain.”
Soviet officials always knew millions of people had been murdered under Stalin’s reign of terror. And they kept that truth from the Russian people to protect him, his successors, and the party.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in the 1980s, he sounded a lot like present-day congressional Republicans when they were asked about the 2020 election. “We’ll sort out the past,” Gorbachev said. “But right now we have to direct our energy forward.”
He eventually changed course, and exposed the nation’s real history to its citizens and the world.
Of course, there’s no comparison between the Soviet’s horrific history and what Trump did following the 2020 election. The point is Stalin censored it not just to avoid accountability for crimes he had already committed. It helped him maintain his brutal hold on power while lying to the Russian people every day until he died in 1952.
To ensure Trump never thinks he has that kind of power over us, we must stand behind Cheney and others who recognize defending the truth is the moral imperative of our time. And do everything we can to encourage Murkowski to join us.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
