Ben Cline’s memory hole

You may recall, from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the memory hole, where inconvenient and embarrassing documents and records were disposed of, thus eliminating them from the historical record.

Congressman Ben Cline has tried to make use of a modern memory hole by deleting without explanation at least two posts from his campaign Facebook page. Thanks to the magic of Screen Capture, he hasn’t entirely succeeded.

Cline posted in November 2020 that he was proud to support his friend, the crazed election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.

Powell has since argued that “no reasonable person” would believe her claims of massive election fraud.

At some point, that post was removed from Cline’s Facebook page. To borrow another term from Orwell, Powell has become an unperson.

Now I’ve noticed that Cline also “disappeared” a post from July 2020, in which he claimed that the story of the slave-owning Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson involved “bridging racial divisions.” He also mocked the City of Lexington for renaming the cemetery named for Jackson.

As I noted at the time:

Congressman, you can’t simultaneously enslave Black people, as Jackson did, and “bridge racial divisions.” It doesn’t work that way.

After revealing his contempt for Lexington (which voted heavily against him in the 2018 Congressional election), Cline speculates sarcastically about the cemetery’s new name.

“Future Democrat Voter Quarry?” What are you saying here, Congressman? That Stonewall Jackson and others interred at the cemetery will rise from their graves and vote Democratic? That local Democrats will cheat in future elections by voting on behalf of the people buried there?

Apparently Cline realized he had gone too far. But instead of publicly acknowledging that fact and apologizing, he behaved like an employee of Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s Ministry of Truth. He decided that the Facebook post “did not exist; [it] had never existed.”