A little more than five years ago, I blogged about “cancel culture.” See https://ezwwaters.com/2020/07/24/the-cancel-culture-conundrum/. Given the backlash in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, rebranded as a “conservative activist,” including canceling nighttime talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for his comments on Kirk, I thought it was time to re-post said blog.

In 1963, when JFK was assassinated and Malcolm X stated that the “chickens had come home to roost,” the Honorable Elijah Muhammad sidelined and silenced Malcolm. (The same thought came to my mind as soon as the killing of Kirk hit the news, and I knew, but not to this extent, that some voices would be silenced!) In 1963, it was all about the optics. Mostly everything in America during the Civil Rights and Black Power era was political, but Elijah Muhammad thought it wise to stay clear of this political minefield. In 2025, it is all about weaponizing the tools at Trump’s disposal to silence detractors, including comedians. Whatever one may think about Trump, it’s indisputable that he lacks a sense of humor; therefore, comedians are on his hit list.

He who controls the narrative, controls the country.

I’ve often said, with tongue-in-cheek, that one of the few things the Founding Fathers got right was the First Amendment. It’s one of the remaining things, albeit under attack, that one should love about America. (Dictators want to control the narrative.) Look at any dictatorship with state-run and controlled Media, and one will see the assassination and imprisonment of truth-telling journalists. In America, we take them off the air, but it might not be long before we imprison and kill them.

NOTE: In attempting to generate an AI image for this post, I got the following error message: “This request has been flagged by the OpenAI moderation system. Please try to rephrase your post.” Even OpenAI – the coders who wrote the algorithms – is in on the cancel culture business.