The tech bros are lining up at Mar-a-Lago to lick Trump’s boots because they know he will cut their taxes and wipe out the regulations that barely slow down their complete takeover of our brains. Ann Telnaes nailed it with a hilarious rendering of the billionaire sycophants – and then The Washington Post decided that her cartoon was too hot for them. That’s MAGA for you –it’s a world in which common knowledge becomes forbidden content, and big business readily bends over for our incoming authoritarians. Kudos to Telnaes for calling out her editors and resigning with a flourish. The skeptics might say that bosses have the right to refuse submissions, and artwork gets rejected all the time – but it’s patently obvious that this rejection is not your run of the mill “no thank you.” Historian Timothy Snyder would call The Washington Post’s attitude “anticipatory obedience” – which is when people and institutions preemptively censor themselves, demonstrating allegiance to their repressors without having to be asked. Sadly, we’ve seen a lot of that kind of behavior lately – in relation to the war in Gaza, and most recently in the willingness that embattled Democrats have shown to throw migrants under the bus to save their Congressional seats. There is no reason not to expect more of this in the next four years, which is exactly why artists should follow Telnaes’ lead and hang Trump’s minions out to dry.
