Re: Ted Rall Subscription Service (fwd)

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

I think I disagree somewhat here.  The only superpower that the resistance
has at the moment is satire.  If no one is allowed to become a satirist or
poke at those in power, then fascism will really have arrived.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:10:27 -0700 (PDT)
 >
 >  > From: Ted <http://www.96714821.mailchimpapp.com/~tedrall>
 >  > Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:48:34 +0000
 >  > 
 >  > The Ted Rall Subscription Service
 >  > Thank you for supporting independent political commentary
 >  > Here is this week's column. Thanks for subscribing to the Ted Rall 
 >  > Subscription Service.
 >  > 
 >  > Jimmy Kimmel Enabled Censorship
 >  > by Ted Rall
 >  > 
 >  > First they came for Jimmy Kimmel, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn�>  > ��t…a lameass?
 >  > 
 >  > No. In this Niemöller scenario, the deplatforming of the host of “Jimmy 
 >  > Kimmel Live!” comes at the end of the slippery slope, not the beginning. 
 >  > ABC canned Bill Maher 23 years ago for mocking Bush-era propaganda about our 
 >  > sainted Middle East occupation troops. Also at the request of right-wing 
 >  > Bushies after 9/11, MSNBC fired Phil Donahue—despite having the network’
 >  > s highest ratings—for being too liberal and not pro-war. CBS News fired 
 >  > Dan Rather on a trumped-up ethical breach, and CBS radio fired Don Imus.
 >  > 
 >  > Lenny Bruce died in 1966 while appealing a prison sentence for obscenity. 
 >  > The Smothers Brothers, a top-rated comedy show, was canceled by CBS at the 
 >  > request of LBJ in 1969.
 >  > 
 >  > As broadcast television matured and corporatized over the better part of a 
 >  > century, it sanitized itself of content whose politics unabashedly leaned 
 >  > left, replacing Norman Lear’s 1970s progressive social-commentary programs 
 >  > like “All in the Family” and “Good Times” with 1980s and 1990s shows 
 >  > like “Family Ties” and “Home Improvement,” that had a pronounced 
 >  > sociopolitical subtext.
 >  > 
 >  > Nobody said much. They didn’t notice, because the median line of 
 >  > mainstream politics in both parties was sliding right. There was also a 
 >  > pressure-release valve. Viewers who preferred edgier content migrated to 
 >  > non-major network broadcast channels like Fox (“The Simpsons,” “The 
 >  > X-Files”) and cable (“The Sopranos,” “Weeds,” “Breaking Bad,” �>  > ��Shameless”), where an FCC in thrall to an out-of-control president 
 >  > couldn’t brandish license-revocation over broadcasters’ bank accounts.
 >  > 
 >  > By the time Trump’s censors came for the safe, milquetoast humor and 
 >  > celebrity fluff that has long defined late-night talk shows on broadcast TV, 
 >  > anything smart, edgy and left had long been purged from the legacy broadcast 
 >  > channels. CBS’ decision to axe Stephen Colbert whose not-entirely-lame “
 >  > Colbert Report” contrasts with his current uninspired dreck, was less of a 
 >  > harbinger of doom than a formal acknowledgement of long-accepted reality.
 >  > 
 >  > Media observers shocked by the demise of late-night titans Colbert and 
 >  > Kimmel at the hands of corporations sucking up to Trump to get their 
 >  > multi-billon-dollar mergers approved—with more on the chopping block, if 
 >  > Trump gets his way—should have seen this coming years ago.
 >  > 
 >  > So should Mssrs. Colbert and Kimmel themselves.
 >  > 
 >  > As with Niemöller, censorship and suppression of American political 
 >  > humorists has been a lengthy, ongoing process in which Kimmel’s ouster is 
 >  > the culmination. This includes both economic censorship—private employers 
 >  > firing popular purveyors of satire because they annoy the wealthy and 
 >  > powerful elites, and refusing to hire them in the first place—as well as 
 >  > the medieval-style government suppression currently in the news, supposedly 
 >  > prohibited by the First Amendment, in which a president and his pet 
 >  > regulator order the elites to get rid of comedic wimps like Colbert and 
 >  > Kimmel over the most banal of utterances.
 >  > 
 >  > Politics-infused satire has long been systemically eradicated from our media 
 >  > and institutions of mass culture. As I’ve noted before, at their 20^th 
 >  > century height America’s newspapers employed scores of satirical political 
 >  > writers on their opinion pages. A current-day update of H.L. Mencken, Art 
 >  > Buchwald, Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Molly Ivins or Dave Barry would never 
 >  > be interviewed today, much less be allowed to launch a career. Assuming you 
 >  > can get one to call you back, they’ll tell you why: jokes, especially 
 >  > political jokes, especially smart political jokes, especially smart jokes 
 >  > that target rich and powerful individuals, institutions and their adherents, 
 >  > cause trouble. They generate letters to the editor, phone calls to the 
 >  > publisher, even the occasional cancellation of ads and subscriptions. It’s 
 >  > easier and safer to do without—while hypocritically bemoaning the death of 
 >  > the genre.
 >  > 
 >  > My profession, political cartooning, has been obliterated by the same 
 >  > censorious forces that decimated political humor columnists. As print media 
 >  > migrated to the Internet, we weren’t invited along with our hard-news 
 >  > colleagues. When you post them, cartoons generate clicks. Like the print 
 >  > forebears, online editors prefer to play it safe.
 >  > 
 >  > Also like the Niemöller trope, resistance to earlier instances of 
 >  > high-profile censorship both public and private might have prevented America 
 >  > from descending to its present bleak state, in which Trump’s random masked 
 >  > goons kidnap random Americans off the street and raising the possibility 
 >  > that a douchebag may still have been a douchebag even if gets assassinated 
 >  > can get the safest of watered-down stand-up comics terminated. As one 
 >  > outrage after another hit the news, we said “huh” and did nothing. We 
 >  > shook our heads over Donahue and Ed Schultz (fired by MSNBC for reporting 
 >  > about Bernie Sanders’ campaign). If we were editors and producers, we 
 >  > opined over the murder of my Charlie Hebdo colleagues at their drawing 
 >  > tables, bloviating from the offices of media organizations that themselves 
 >  > refuse to hire any cartoonists.
 >  > 
 >  > In cases like Kimmel and Colbert, victim-blaming is as appropriate as it is 
 >  > churlish. Both men presided over giant megaphones and enjoyed massive 
 >  > budgets. Night after night, they doled out drivel, never thinking for a 
 >  > moment that they might have used their platforms to defend those who were 
 >  > being deprived of theirs—and whose canceling were paving the way for their 
 >  > own doom.
 >  > 
 >  > In 2019, for example, the international edition of The New York Times 
 >  > published a cartoon by António Moreira Antunes, a Portuguese cartoonist, 
 >  > depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog, wearing 
 >  > a Star of David collar, leading a blindfolded President Donald Trump, who 
 >  > held a yarmulke inscribed with the Twitter logo. (The cartoon would still 
 >  > work today!) After the usual gang of Zionists complained it was “
 >  > anti-Semitic”, the Times removed the cartoon and apologized. Then the 
 >  > Times fired its two staff cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song—
 >  > neither of whom had anything to do with the cartoon—and permanently banned 
 >  > all cartoons.
 >  > 
 >  > As far as I know, neither Kimmel nor Colbert, nor other major late-night 
 >  > hosts (Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Conan O'Brien) had anything 
 >  > to say about this outrageous act of censorship by the Times.
 >  > 
 >  > During this time period, I was fighting The Los Angeles Times in court. They 
 >  > had fired me as their cartoonist under orders by the LAPD, whose pension 
 >  > fund owned controlling interest in the Times’ parent company. Again, the 
 >  > late-night comics had nothing to say. Silence was death when it came to AIDS 
 >  > in the 1980s; it’s also death when censorship is running rampant, as it 
 >  > has throughout the post-9/11 era. If they had used their power to stand up 
 >  > for humorists like Chappatte, Heng and me, they might be in a better 
 >  > position to save themselves now.
 >  > 
 >  > By the time Hitler came to power, parliamentary democracy had become so weak 
 >  > and ineffectual that Germans didn’t mourn its passing. As I watch Colbert 
 >  > and Kimmel and their ilk fade away (or migrate to cable), I can’t help but 
 >  > see the parallel.