Jack Hassard, retired science educator at Georgia State University, writes that authoritarians can’t tolerate jokes directed at them. They are thin-skinned. They hate being ridiculed. In Russia, one of Putin’s first targets when he took power in 2000 was a puppet show.
Hassard wrote a book about Trump after his first term, called The Trump Files. No doubt he believed that we had seen the last of Trump. Now he blogs about science, politics, and education.
In one of his latest posts, Hassard wrote:
WHY AUTHORITARIANS FEAR LAUGHTER.
[He added: “They also fear teachers.” That is an amusing echo of the title of Randi Weingarten’s first book, which was just published. Its title: Why Fascists Fear Teachers.]
It is telling that satire, of all genres, is under assault. Authoritarian leaders understand that ridicule delegitimizes power more efficiently than argument. A chart or a speech can be rebutted. A joke that makes the president look ridiculous can’t. That is why Soviet authorities censored jokes. Autocrats in Hungary and Turkey sued comedians. Despots everywhere fear being laughed at. When the United States begins punishing its comedians, it signals a shift. The shift is from democracy confident enough to tolerate ridicule. It progresses to illiberalism that can’t bear mockery….
CONSEQUENCES BEYOND COMEDY
The silencing of late-night satire does not stand alone. It echoes what we have already seen on university campuses, where professors face funding freezes and political monitors in classrooms. It mirrors attempts to pressure journalists with access threats and selective prosecutions. Step by step, the Trump administration is narrowing the arenas in which dissent can be voiced. Censoring satire matters because it collapses one of the last mass-audience platforms for critique. Millions never read a legal opinion. They never attend a lecture. Still, they still meet politics through Colbert’s monologues or Kimmel’s opening jokes. Shut those down, and you have not just silenced comedians — you have muted a public square…
The legal challenges will come. Networks sue. Civil liberties groups will file briefs. Courts eventually reaffirm that the First Amendment forbids retaliation against political speech. But lawsuits take years, and the damage happens now. In the meantime, networks will err on the side of silence. That chilling effect is harder to measure than a canceled show, but it is more corrosive. A student who stops asking questions means a small silence. A professor who drops a reading does too. A comedian who trims a monologue is also a small silence. Collectively, they create a democracy that speaks less, laughs less, and thinks less freely.
NAMING THE PATTERN
If there is one lesson from history, it is this: censorship rarely arrives all at once. It arrives as a series of “exceptions,” each one justified as minor, situational, or deserved. It started on January 20, 2025 with Trump’s first set of Executive orders, and continued for months. Today it is Colbert and Kimmel. Tomorrow it is a journalist, a novelist, a professor, or a teacher. The pattern is clear: when power fears ridicule, it begins by silencing the jesters. The canceling of a late-night joke seems trivial against the backdrop of global crises. But in a democracy, humor is not trivial. Humor is a form of truth-telling. And when the government cancels the joke, it is really trying to cancel the truth.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand the word cancel. The right wing whine about being canceled has given way actual cancellation of shows that poke fun at or seriously criticize public officials. There seems to be a wide variety of meanings for the word cancel.
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In his article, Jack Hassard includes a beautifully evocative image that features his fictional teacher Skyler Fusaro. Skyler occasionally writes to Jack from the future. Skyler lives in Atlanta in the year 2092.
In her latest letter from 2092, “Skyler Fusaro warns Jack about the grim implications of suppressing curiosity and dissent in education. Reflecting on a future plagued by climate disasters and political repression, she recalls the oppressive measures of the Second Trump Administration, paralleling it to historical atrocities. Education has shifted from critical thinking to indoctrination, with banned topics and censored curricula. Skyler emphasizes the importance of reinstating justice and courage in teaching, urging action against growing authoritarianism that threatens students and educators alike.”
Read The Letter.
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thank you, Ed, for bringing Skyler into the conversation. We’ll hear more from her soon. I hope.
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The problem is that tens of millions of Americans voted for this vile putrid 10th rate Juan Peron. And tens of thousands of Americans were there for the Charlie Kirk memorial….that’s the problem, a substantial number of Americans appear to be right wing cheerleaders for Trumpian dictatorship. When the hell do they wake up to reality?!
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I read a column this morning by a youthful newspaper scribe that referred to a meme called, “Old man yells at cloud” which made me feel old and laugh at myself for a spell and then ponder the meaning of everything. Young people will do that, huh. Nowadays, my students incessantly refer with a palms up hand gesture to a TikTok video called, “6-7 Kid”. They adore seeing this teacher imitate them. What, you may ask, does 6-7 mean? It has something to do with a basketball player who is 6’7″ tall, but really, it means absolutely nothing at all. That’s the point.
All religions and philosophies can be placed in one of four categories. The realist believes that if one cannot see or touch it, it may as well not even exist. An idealist has faith in that which cannot be seen. The pragmatist thinks nothing is worth existing if it doesn’t serve a purpose. An existentialist thinks nothing is worth existing anyways.
It’s good to read the scribes of the day. The literary modernists of the early 20th century reflected the destructiveness of the War to End All Wars. That war was a new kind of horror. A Lost Generation. Fav poet W.B. Yeats was all like, “Things fall apart…skibidi… the centre cannot hold,” and “6-7.” That was the point.
And then there were the postmodernists! WWII really blew things up. The 20th century wasn’t all bad, though. There was a New Deal. People got used to the good life for a spell. The 21st century has been the stripping of the New Deal. I remember that day on September 12th, back in 2001, when everyone seemed to serve a purpose “’cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run” “in the U.S.A” the scribe Bruce Springsteen wrote. That’s how that started.
Now,, there’s a lot of war again. And so on. I understand why a lot of Grand Old people are yelling at clouds. They’re just idealist pragmatists unwilling to accept people they don’t see serving their sense of purpose. They have feelings. Their feelings are serious. They believe in the feelings they cannot see or touch. They cannot laugh at their feelings.
But there is a new lost generation now that makes fun of people who yell at clouds. They’re realists. They’re existentialists. If they have feelings, those feelings may as well not even exist. They’re not afraid. They’re not angry. They can laugh at themselves, the highest form of humor.
L’shana tovah, but also, 6-7.
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To you, LCT: Happy 5786
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