By Gonzo Snark
The New Reality Check
This week’s Guardian report warned that U.S. broadcasters may face license trouble if they go “negative” on Trump. That’s the polite version. The real danger is sharper: speaking truth to power is being reframed as grounds for cancellation.
Receipts:
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, leaned on broadcasters after Jimmy Kimmel mocked MAGA politics. Within days, ABC affiliates in several markets pulled the show.
The FCC’s own guidelines insist it is barred from censoring content or punishing viewpoints (FCC FAQ). Yet here we are, with commissioners brandishing licensing threats like weapons.
Sliding Door #1: The Law Holds
America still has guardrails:
The Supreme Court banned prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931).
In NRA v. Vullo (2024), the Court unanimously ruled officials cannot coerce intermediaries (banks, insurers – and yes, broadcasters) to punish disfavoured speech.
If the FCC ever tried to yank a license for satire, it would almost certainly lose in court.
Sliding Door #2: Fear Rules
But that’s not the real battlefield. The quieter danger is in boardrooms, where executives ask: why risk a billion-dollar license renewal battle over one monologue?
That’s how authoritarianism works in the 21st century – not through jackboots smashing presses, but through the weaponised boredom of regulators.
Big Brother with Glasses
Forget Orwell’s looming telescreen. Big Brother now hunches over a stack of license renewals, squinting through smudged bifocals, muttering about “public interest.” He’s not terrifying, he’s banal – and that makes him even more dangerous.
This is censorship by memo. Compliance enforced with paperwork.
The German Parallel
The echo here is Weimar Germany’s press in the 1920s: plural, raucous, mocking Hitler as a fringe extremist. Then came 1933.
The Editors’ Law transformed journalism into a state-regulated “public task.”
The Reich Press Chamber dictated coverage and purged Jewish and “unreliable” editors.
Within months, independent voices were silenced (USHMM, German History Docs).
It didn’t happen because the law suddenly made mockery illegal. It happened because fear and bureaucracy squeezed resistance out of the system.
The Choice Ahead
So here’s the sliding door:
One path affirms the First Amendment and courts slap down intimidation.
The other path accepts the chilling logic of don’t make trouble, don’t risk the licence.
And once that door closes, it doesn’t reopen easily.
Big Brother is already polishing his glasses. The question is whether we let him keep watching.
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It’s astounding to watch the shit going down in the self appointed greatest country on earth.Powerful echoes of the fall of the Roman Empire, and we have a would be mad caesar.
The orange fuckwit is a five star Taren Point Punt.
Good luck to the yanks that actually care..you’re going to need it.
This article powerfully warns about subtle censorship through licensing threats. The historical parallels to Weimar Germany are chilling and relevant. It’s a stark reminder of how fear and bureaucracy can stifle free speech.
If you wish to see a relatively pleasant sight, focus on a surgeon’s bucket of castoffs, cutoffs, unwanted bits, the foreskins, testicles, warts, abscessdrainings, pustular bits, deformed scraps, corpsesy cutoffs, then refocus on a hucking forrible sight, the TRUMP LUMP of impure shit, a’festering, pustular, poxed, all pervertery and swinery. It’s all vomitous, vile, vicious, vast volumes of vanity.
I note an announcement by the Taliban :
Taliban Bans Books by Women in Afghanistan’s Universities
I can, in the prevailing climate, anticipate Trump saying, “now why didn’t I think of that?”.
Weimar Germany is where we sit right now… and we all know what comes next.
It’s almost a cycle:
Roughly every hundred years we seem to see a rise in right wing nationalist thugs and dictators. Napoleon. Hitler, Stalin, etc. Now we have Trump, Putin, Jon Un and a host of other tin pot nasties.