Ace right-wing investigator John Solomon introduced Kelly Tshibaka on his TV show March 1 by saying: “You have an amazing story. Your parents were born in Russia. You immigrated here. You’ve become a leader in Alaska.”

What’s surprising is that he didn’t go on to announce that Tshibaka could see Russia from her house.

For a show called “Just the News. Not Noise,” Solomon produces plenty of ear-splitting babble.

Tshibaka’s parents were not born in Russia and are not immigrants. But Solomon tried to set up Tshibaka as someone with real-world expertise about Russia as he asked about President Biden’s handling of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Tshibaka did not bother to correct the false statements about Tshibaka’s background. Predictably, she blamed Biden for the invasion of Ukraine by Putin and one-upped Solomon in the falsehood department by claiming that Biden has “shut down all energy production here in Alaska.”

Tshibaka, a practiced storyteller, played the part of someone with expertise about Russia, saying that Alaska is the first line of defense, is a border state with Russia and extends past the International Dateline, making Alaska the easternmost of the 50 states.

“Instead of drilling for oil right now, we’re drilling our troops,” she said. She said Biden set the stage for this and “isn’t ushering Vladimir Putin off the stage.”

“Russia is an extremely unpredictable country,” she said.

“We’ve known for a long time that Putin is capable of doing anything,” she said. “I was actually in Russia at the fall of the Soviet Union back in 1991 and remember vividly the tanks going through the streets of Moscow. And even Russian citizens being terrified for their lives. If they’re terrified of their ruler, we should be as well.”

“That’s exactly how seriously we’re taking it here in Alaska,” she said.

“We stand ready to defend and protect the United States.”

Perhaps as a child, Tshibaka saw the tanks going through the streets of Moscow on television in 1991 when a failed coup led to the collapse of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of that year.

Tshibaka did travel to Russia in the spring of 1992 when she was 12 years old. She was an eighth-grader at the time, a student at Hanshew Middle School in South Anchorage.

Tshibaka and the other young people went to Irkutsk, Russia from March 6-20 on a school exchange. Her maiden name was Kelly Hartline.

The students from Hanshew and Bear Valley Elementary traveled via London and Moscow March 6-20.

They kept journals about their experiences in Irkutsk, going to school, visiting with host families and the like.

The Anchorage Times published journal entries from about the visit to Irkutsk on March 27, 1992.

On March 14, Kelly wrote about going to the shores of Lake Baikal and having ravioli for breakfast.

In 1993, when Tshibaka was 13, she was studying Russian at UAA.

“Kelly Chaundel Hartline, 13 and a Steller ninth grader who started school at age 3, took percussion ensemble and Russian last semester and takes speech now. Her Russian class was hard, ‘but as long as you kept your mind on it, it was OK.’ She was one of a few young students in the class,” the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time.

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