An Ode to the Moscow Times — as Kamala Harris, in Bid for Relevance, Snatches a Page of Putin’s Propaganda Playbook

Piercing the midsummer torpor this week is a pair of seemingly disparate but in reality dispiritingly interconnected political events on two sides of the world. First let’s take Moscow, which though nobody believes me, was once a rather fun town.Sometime in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia and Vladimir Putin was on the local government circuit at St. Petersburg, I boarded an Aeroflot flight to Sheremetyevo Airport to start a summer job at the Moscow Times.The McDonalds in Pushkin Square was sparkling new, one could buy just about anything (with convertible currency), Americans were greeted with ebullience, and I, for a short time, had the privilege of chronicling some of that electric post-glasnost spirit and New York-style grit for the newspaper that, this week, Mr. Putin has classified as an “undesirable organization.”As Agence France-Presse reported, the Moscow Times’ activities are now outlawed inside Russia, leaving anybody who cooperates with it open to prosecution. I interrupt this column to remind readers that young Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has now been unlawfully detained in Russia for more than 470 days.One would think that an American president could have done something about that by now — any president — but when the current one just mistook President Zelensky for President Putin, what else can be said? Mr. Gershkovich also once worked at the Moscow Times, which, in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, decamped to founder Derk Sauer’s home town, Amsterdam, from Moscow.“We will continue with our work as usual: independent journalism. That’s a crime in Putin’s Russia,” Mr. Sauer writes on X. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office now places that fine newspaper in the basket of publications “containing unreliable socially significant information aimed at discrediting the activities” of the Russian government as they pertain to the war in Ukraine. As the Moscow Times reports, the “undesirable” designation bans the Moscow Times’ “work inside Russia, puts staff members at risk of jail time, and criminalizes engagement with the outlet.”It is depressing news, to say the least, but how could the dismal state of the press in Russia have anything at all to with the robust free press in America? As it turns out, a lot — as Vice President Harris inadvertently reminded everybody in remarks she made this week at Dallas. Ms. Harris erroneously claimed that “Donald Trump has openly vowed if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one” when the truth is that Mr. Trump once said that on day one of a second term he would “close the border.”She also said that Mr. Trump would “weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies,” when in reality the evidence points to President Biden taking great pains to weaponize the DOJ against his political opponents, chief among whom is the 45th president.What the Vice President just did in Texas is to artfully — and artlessly — cherry pick a few of Mr. Trump’s characteristically hyperbolic utterances to falsely portray him, a candidate for office in a free election, as an enemy not only of democracy but of America. After the exhausting theatrics of a hush money trial that failed to move the needle on the former president’s standing in the polls it appears that the Democrats are pulling every last rabbit out of their capacious hat to knock Trump out of the race. Ms. Harris told her cheering audience that Mr. Trump’s positions on things like NATO should “disqualify” him from the presidency — even though she misquoted things that Mr. Trump has said in respect of the alliance and foreign relations. The Veep’s caustic comments are of a piece with the Hollywood elite brigade’s growing intolerance of views they don’t share. It’s not just the former “Facts of Life” co-star George Clooney. Another thespian, Mark Ruffalo, opines that it’s time to “start limiting the scope of the damage” of a possible second Trump term.Which brings us back to Moscow. The ban on the Moscow Times did not come out of the blue, nor is it specifically because of Ukraine. Mr. Putin introduced his “undesirable” list back in 2015. Tightening the noose on his opponents slowly is a tactic that seems to work all too well for the keeper of the Kremlin.Kamala Harris and the Obamaites from whom she draws her support are now attempting to do the same. With no credible political programs to speak of, the goal shifts to robbing those who do — i.e., Republicans — not of their program but their entire platform. If Russia is headed toward “1984” territory, Mr. Biden’s Washington is to starting to look like “Animal Farm.”

An Ode to the Moscow Times — as Kamala Harris, in Bid for Relevance, Snatches a Page of Putin’s Propaganda Playbook

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