Matt Taibbi on his disgust at Mehdi Hassan, Jamal Bowman, and Hasan Piker doing USSR nostalgia at Mamdani’s victory party: ‘I could fill a whole book with stories of horrible things I heard and saw from eyewitnesses to the Soviet history. And to see people laughing about that shit, I can’t even describe the emotions. When I saw some of those clips [from Mamdani’s party], I went through in my mind, I started cataloging all the top 20 or 30 awful things that I heard, and I just want to share one. I did a story once on Boris Yeltsin. I was actually planning on writing a biography of him at one point. I traveled to his birthplace, which is in this little place called Bukha, in the middle of nowhere. It’s near what’s now called Yekaterinburg. Yeltsin, he came from a long line of peasants who had basically made no dent in Russian history ever. You go back, you can’t find any of them in censuses going back hundreds of years. But his grandfather, Ignati Yeltsin, was a legendarily, mean, tough character in the area. And through hard labor his whole life and being a bit of a disciplinarian when it came to farm labor, he eventually acquired a horse and a mill on his property. And as a result, they had to be liquidated during Dekulakization. He became a kulak. If you look in western definitions of that, these are rich peasant farmers, the Encyclopedia Britannica talks about how they were even so wealthy that they sometimes gave out mortgages. No, this guy just had a horse basically. So he gets sent off. He dies in transit, Ignati, during this time period. But I asked some of the old timers who were still in the region to talk about that time period. There were a lot of people who were sons and daughters of people who remembered. And one of the things that they did at that time period is that they didn’t even want to waste money on bullets for the kulaks. So what they would do is just declare you a kulak, you and your family, and then there would be a proclamation that it would be illegal for anybody in the area to give shelter to that person and his family and his kids. So for years on end, people went to bed at night to the sound of people freezing to death, kids screaming at night in the Soviet Union, because that’s how they liquidated the kulak class. And there were millions of people who met ends like this. And that’s just the beginning of the shit they did. They only got to them after they eliminated a whole long list of other people, from intellectuals, landowners, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks. Then, eventually, they get to peasants who have a horse. And that is what happened when you have a bunch of intellectuals running a revolution in the name of a working class.’

Voor mensen die een probleem hebben met deze uitspraak, vraag je misschien af waarom rugged individualism duidelijk niet meer aanspreekt—zoveel zelfs dat iemand als Zohran, die het openlijk bekritiseert, überhaupt gekozen kon worden.