In her 1994 novel The Memory Police (published in English in 2019), Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa creates a world in which memories are forbidden. When a group of people begin to lose their memories and attachment to objects and concepts, a military force called the Memory Police enforces the loss of memories. The Memory Police beat those who claim that yes, yesterday a book was in fact on the kitchen table.
It’s a great concept, and one that is analogous to the situation in America and the West over the last hundred years. One of the reasons the left is apoplectic these days is that they can no longer police our thoughts and memories. (We are taking advantage of this leveling of the playing field by holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival, celebrating pro-freedom films that the left wants us to forget.)
Think about it. Liberals told us that there wasn’t any repression or famine in the old Soviet Union. They insisted that there were no communist spies in the American government after World War II. They told us that the peace, culture, and family life in the 1950s never really existed. They told us our soldiers in Vietnam were evil, and that anonymous sex with hundreds of partners was not the cause of sexual diseases. They called Brett Kavanaugh a gang rapist – and still do. They lied about Charlie Kirk or are attempting to. Liberals are our Memory Police, and have been for decades.
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a major story and now it isn’t – in fact, George Floyd is getting more coverage at this point. The Memory Police are doing their job.
At least it’s not as bad as it once was. Before the internet, it was easy for the left’s Memory Police to police the rest of us. They controlled the media, they controlled the universities, they controlled Hollywood. Under the old system, Charlie Kirk’s murder would have been a one-day story, a brief mention about some crazy young right-winger who ranted about marriage or something, and who would be quickly forgotten. Those of us who were alive in the 1970s and 1980s remember how impossible it was to get a heterodox opinion past the gatekeepers of the New York Times or the television networks. Under the new, fairer rules, Kirk’s death is getting covered, at least by the conservative media, as the major cultural event that it is.
This drives the left insane. In the past, it was not only that they could platform their own stories about their own heroes, but that they could suppress and memory-hole reality.
In a new updated edition of his book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, journalist Matt Taibbi offers a term for a new practice of the corrupt media that is, in my view, a useful weapon of the Memory Police and related to the suppression of memory. Taibbi calls it “bombholing.” Bombholing is the practice of platforming wild and unsubstantiated stories all over the media, only to send those same stories down the memory hole when they don’t pan out. You then distract viewers and readers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” People are led “from mania to mania.” Goaded into focusing on today’s outrage, we quickly forget the previous “bombshell,” which was a dud. Russiagate was the epitome of bombholing.
Taibbi once laid it out in more detail: “News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow? The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.”
The Jimmy Kimmel story is a classic example of the left trying to police our memories and bombhole at the same time. Yes, it’s sad that Charlie Kirk was murdered, but wait a minute! Look over here! Jimmy Kimmel got fired! It’s the end of democracy! Wait a second! Trump just tweeted! Put Bill Kristol on TV! Iryna Zarutska? Who is that?
The most incredible piece of bombholing I ever witnessed was by Joe Scarborough in 2018. Within the space of one week, Scarborough went from hyping a ludicrous story to denouncing it and anyone who had spread it or believed it. On September 27, Scarborough had on his program John Heilemann, a left-wing journalist. Heilemann had secured an “exclusive” interview with Julie Swetnick, a woman who claimed that Brett Kavanaugh, then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had attended ten high school parties where girls were drugged and gang raped. On Morning Joe, When asked by co-host Willie Geist if Swetnick offered any “specificity” to her claims,” Heilemann offered this: “She was not in a position yesterday, she was not really ready, to do a full formal sit-down interview. We got a chance to talk to her a little, but at the end of a pretty long day.” What a hack.
On October 1, the Associated press reported that “Julie Swetnick, one of the women who has publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, has an extensive history of involvement in legal disputes, including a lawsuit in which an ex-employer accused her of falsifying her college and work history on her job application.” That night Swetnick did a disastrous interview on NBC, which almost immediately admitted that there were “credibility issues” with her claims. These are the kinds of things old-school journalists check out before going to air – but not in the age of bombholing.
On October 3, 2018, Joe went off on Morning Joe. Scarborough had been to some recent social events, where he heard people expressing doubt about the stories told by Swetnick and Ford. “Quite a few people that we talked to, and I think a lot of them were registered Democrats, raised questions about Dr. Ford’s story,” Scarborough said.”Now that’s something in 24/7 news coverage, at least in mainstream media, you never hear anybody talk about. They won’t talk about it. They feel that If anybody sticks their neck out and says they disbelieve any part of her story or talks about how there are no corroborating witnesses, well, they’ll get absolutely slammed.”
Scarborough raved on: “There has been the assumption that every single allegation was true….Nobody had dared say, even the Republicans, that part of Dr. Ford’s story might just not add up….I turned on all networks at all times, and Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of being a serial rapist by columnists in national newspapers…the media has dropped the ball on this from the very beginning.”
When regular people stand up to our Memory Police, they get ignored. The Memory Police – and sometimes they are even on the right – tells the victim they are crazy, the world has moved on, and to stop trying to express their memory. It’s why conservatives are brainwashed into accepting that communism was never a threat to America, there was never a time when crime was low and people were happier, and Brett Kavanaugh is guilty.
With the seminal cultural event of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservatives are standing up to the Memory Police. Technology has afforded us a level playing field, and we are going to use it.
We can just call Joe Scarborough’s show Morning Bombhole.
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