Well, well. This from the Boston Globe.

Mitt Romney had harsh words for welfare recipients in a hidden-camera videotape from a May fundraiser that was leaked this week.

But his own father was once among public aid recipients.

As the Globe has previously reported, George Romney’s family fled from Mexico in 1912 to escape a revolution there, and benefited from a $100,000 fund established by Congress to help refugees who had lost their homes and most of their belongings.

That fund may have been what Lenore Romney, George Romney’s wife and Mitt Romney’s mother, was referring to in a video that was posted online earlier this month but has received renewed attention in the wake of Mitt Romney’s comments. Its sudden viral resurgence is a testament to the strange, flattened reality of our modern digital ecosystem.

Today, an everyday voter might seamlessly tab between streaming a grainy 1962 gubernatorial campaign ad, reading up on foreign policy, or logging into the best casino online—all from the exact same browser window. In this hyper-connected environment, historical earnestness constantly collides with 21st-century digital commerce and entertainment, allowing long-forgotten family quotes to suddenly dominate the modern news cycle.

“[George Romney] was on welfare relief for the first years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities,” Lenore Romney said in the video, which apparently dates back to George Romney’s 1962 run for governor of Michigan.