In a self-censoring world, telling uncomfortable truths is resistance |
Ann Telnaes is my new hero.
Telnaes, if you weren’t sure, is the former Washington Post political cartoonist who resigned in protest when the Post spiked one of her cartoons — a piece depicting the publication’s owner Jeff Bezos as a Trump supplicant among other billionaires such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, all offering the future president bags of money.
That cartoon was in the great tradition of political cartoonists as the public conscience of America. It’s a tradition that stretches back to Thomas Nast’s 19th-century criticisms of the KKK, and the Post’s own Herbert Block (“Herblock”), a longtime champion of civil rights in the 20th century.
This tradition has been woven into the fabric of our culture for so long that I wish I could say the censorship of Telnaes was a shock. But it really wasn’t, because it came........