Censorship, control, and rewriting American history
I’ve discovered the line in the sand for corporate America.
It’s not invading a sovereign nation to kidnap its leader.
It’s also quite OK to take potshots at peaceful protesters and disappear American citizens into human cattle pens.
As for sabre rattling and threatening allies and friends? Knock yourself out.
And let’s not get all up in a flap about the rights of children to attend places of learning rather than lining up as targets in shooting galleries.
But the one thing that has corporate America clutching at its pearls?
Swears.
Yes, really.
I found that out the hard way when I discovered that the only Amazon platform I can’t use to advertise my latest novel, Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give, is the US.
And you know what that got me thinking about, don’t you?
That’s right. Strongmen and censorship.
Because, “fuck.”
Yeah, I know. I was being a little too cocky back there about ignoring the advice that came my way about being a little less fruity in the title.
Care factor? Meh. Cue me channelling my inner Piaf. Non, je ne regret rien.
Even if it stops me from promoting my new book to the largest English-speaking market in the world, that “fuck” means too much to me.
It’s not like I just throw a random jumble of words at a page, et voila! There’s my book. Every word is a choice.
Because words carry weight. And that gives them power.
It’s why words make strongmen quiver in their Pampers.
The pen is mightier than the sword
Truth.
Although whoever said that never found themselves at the pointy end of a Valyrian blade.
Yeah. I’m a GOT tragic. Sue me.
But it’s never wise to get too literal with figures of speech.
When my mum advised my daughter to say to the school bully, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” my daughter very wisely decided that she wouldn’t do that because, she said, “then Amanda will just get sticks and stones and hurt me.”
The truth is that words can hurt.
But there’s another thing.
Words can change the world.
They’re also the vehicle through which the significant events we’re living through will be transmitted to the future.
That’s why strongmen like to corral words, break them in, and hitch them to their wagons.
It’s how they make sure that the stories being told reflect their view of the world and, most importantly, paint a portrait of themselves for posterity that measures up to their bloated ambition.
It’s the way they write themselves into history.
Here’s an example right out of the headlines
Melania.
Never has there been a less likely biopic candidate.
If stories and words don’t matter, why would so much time, money and effort be going into screening what will almost certainly be the greatest filmic stinker of all time, and eventual winner of all the Razzies on offer in 2026?
Melania Trump’s greatest life achievement has been to… how can I put this politely?… marry well.
Two hours of watching her story? I’d rather shit in my hands and clap.
Judging by early box office figures, I’m not alone in that.
But this has become a thing because the Trump family is trying to rewrite the historical record.
There’s a conga-line of sycophants lining up to help them.
It isn’t the first time in history this has happened. There are plenty of precedents.
Here’s just one.
In 1475, to curry favour with the all-powerful Medici family, a Florentine banker paid famed Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli, to depict three of the Medici as the Three Kings in a portrait of the infant Christ in his manger.
Playing the part of the banker, Gaspare di Zanobi del Lama, in our story, is Jeff Bezos.
As the owner of the Washington Post, Bezos was an oversized thorn in the side of the first Trump administration.
After losing a US$10 billion government contract due to perceived anti-Trump bias at his masthead, Bezos sued the Pentagon. That didn’t go down well.
So, when Trump Mk II looked to be headed for the White House, Amazon was in trouble.
Bezos had some catching up to do.
He started by pulling an editorial endorsing Harris for president, then followed up with a US$1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration.
But the clincher was Amazon’s US$40 million bid to secure Melania’s life rights; triple the nearest offer from rival studio, Disney. US$28 million of that will be funnelled directly into the First Lady’s pocket.
Because my career is chaotic, in addition to being an author, I’m also a screenwriter in film and TV. And I can tell you that this is a disproportionately huge sum of money for a project like this.
To put it in context, Netflix paid the Beckhams US$25 million for their life rights. Netflix got a series out of that one. And what do you reckon the Elvis estate was reportedly paid for the Baz Luhrmann biopic? US$5 million. Yes, you read that correctly.
To date, Bezos has ponied up US$75 million to get Melania’s vanity project up on screens around the world.
Just to put that in perspective, with budgets adjusted for inflation, $75 million would get you a killer bundle deal: Casablanca ($20 mi), The Silence of the Lambs ($44 mi), and On The Waterfront ($11 mi).
Not that it’s any skin off the nose of the world’s… what is he now? Can’t be fucked checking… fourth-richest human? He’d find that in loose change between the sofa cushions.
Provided JD Vance didn’t get there first.
Why the First Lady?
This is about erasing the legacy of the First Ladies who came before Melania.
Just as Trump bulldozed the spiritual home of those women—the East Wing to house an obscene monument to himself.
Just as he paved over the Kennedy Rose Garden, an enduring monument to the best-loved First Lady of the modern era, and turned it into a shopping-mall food court, complete with cheap patio furniture and ghastly, phallic umbrellas.
Trump is censoring history. He’s shaping the cultural record.
Presidential Walk of Infamy
Let’s take a stroll down the newly inaugurated “Presidential Walk of Fame,” shall we...
If you can look past the ghastly goldening that would be more at home in a suburban Thai restaurant, you’ll notice that the plaques beneath the photos are a masterclass in petty spite.
But they’re also rewriting history to serve a strongman’s whim (oh, how I hate that word, because leaders like Trump, although always men, are rarely actually strong).
Obama was “one of the most divisive political figures in American History.”
Reagan was “a fan of President Donald J. Trump.”
And “Sleepy Joe Biden” was, according to the Trump Manifesto, “by far, the worst President in American History.” He’s represented in the lineup by a photo of an autopen.
Damnatio Memoriae
There’s a name for what he’s doing. And it’s the oldest form of censorship.
Damnatio memoriae. Yes, it does sound like something you’d learn at Hogwarts.
It means to condemn someone’s memory. And, yes. Damnatio comes from the same Latin root as “damn”, so “damn you!” means to condemn someone. Don’t say I never teach you anything.
In Ancient Rome, damnatio memoriae was a big thing. For example, historians still squabble over how much of what we think we know about the batshit fucking crazy Emperor Caligula was true, and how much of it was the equivalent of what Trump’s trying to do with his predecessors’ reputations.
Did Caligula really appoint his horse to the senate?
Was it true that he wanted to be worshipped as a god, and tried to erect a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem?
Was he really sleeping with his three sisters?
And did he turn the imperial palace into a brothel to raise funds?
I should stop. Might give someone ideas.
Imagine the gaslighting
There’s no doubt that rewriting the record to serve the interests of a narcissistic leader has been going on for as long as we’ve been capable of abstract thought.
Imagine the gaslighting that would have gone on back in the day as control of the ceremonial leadership cudgel passed hands back in Palaeolithic cave-dwelling times.
The first historical record we have of it happening was in Ancient Egypt. The Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ushered in a cultural golden age and was wed to the famed beauty, Nefertiti, decided Egypt needed a new religion.
It was out with the old polytheistic faith, and in with Ra, the sun god. All references to other gods were erased from temples and monuments.
When Akhenaten died, the gods had their revenge. Akhenaten’s name was chiselled from statues and monuments, and the temples he built were knocked down.
Damnatio memoriae 2028-style
Between the ballroom, the triumphal arch, the Rose Garden Club, the Presidential Walk of Fame, and the Trump Kennedy Center of Performing Arts, the damnatio memoriae officers of the future will be working overtime.
It’s already happening, and it started in 2016, during Trump’s first presidency. Buildings bearing the Trump name were rebranded as feelings towards the president soured to the point of utter distaste.
If it had been another time in history, citizens would have been chiselling genitals and heads off statues, smashing inscribed tablets, and levelling buildings.
Oh, and burning books that mention him.
But as tempting as that is, burning books is never a good thing.
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself” John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.
This is where things get tricky. Because if you’re a fan of history, then you’re a fan of all history, warts and all. Not just the chapters you enjoyed.
Before the invention of the printing press in 1440, it was much easier to control and rewrite the record. Because manuscripts were handwritten, extremely expensive, and generally preserved in monasteries and the palaces and mansions of the world’s wealthiest.
There wasn’t any point in being literate, because unless you were one of the elite, there was nothing to read.
But after Gutenberg gave Europe the means to reproduce text, the world changed.
With books, came knowledge, and with that the appetite to learn. Ordinary people could transform their lives because knowledge was no longer a commodity controlled by the elite.
It’s why authoritarian regimes always go for the books.
They want to wind back the clock to a time before the populace had knowledge at their fingertips. Because knowledge is power.
It happened in 213 BC, when first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang—he of the terracotta army—burnt all the scrolls and books that spoke of the past, so that history began with his dynasty.
Destroying a civilisation’s written records was also a function of conquest. When the Mongols overran Baghdad in 1258, it was said that the Tigris River ran black with ink from the books tossed into the water from the famed House of Wisdom.
Hitler. Mao. Stalin. Putin. The Aztec leader, Itzcoatl.
They all do it.
And it’s happening in America today.
If they can’t burn it, they ban it. According to PEN America, there were over 22,000 instances of book banning from 2021-25.
Censor this
The difficult part these days is knowing who to blame for all this.
Used to be that the official government censor had an office. You could write a complaint.
The first ‘censor’ was appointed in 443 BC in Ancient Rome. The word comes from the Latin for “appraise, value, or judge.”
The censor oversaw public decency and morals. He—because of course it was always a ‘he’—could punish citizens for everything from ‘improper divorces’ (whatever that means), cruelty to slaves, perjury, excessive luxury… even failing to maintain your fields.
The position was abolished around 22 BC, when the Republic became an Empire, and the emperor decided he’d like those powers for himself, thank you very much.
The emperor would decide what did, and did not, qualify as “indecent.”
Indecent exposure
It’s that rule—public decency—that I upset by including a curse word in my book’s title.
Because censorship in its most benign form is intended to protect society’s fragile sensibilities from things that might upset it.
Like swear words.
America has been particularly vigilant about shielding its people from offensive things.
They even have a fabulously named law that governs it. And in a roundabout way, it’s the law I fell afoul of.
Comstockery
The Comstock Law was passed in 1873. It made it illegal to distribute pornography, birth control, sex toys, or any information about those things through the US Postal Service.
So, you read that correctly. Sex toys were a thing in 1873. They have actually been a thing for thousands of years. Yes, really.
But I digress.
The idea with the Comstock Law was that erotica and sex toys encouraged illicit sex, and that any birth control or information about abortions or contraception transmitted via post would have the American population rooting around like randy teenagers.
Pearl clutching
So, America does have form.
Ever wondered why all those classic black-and-white movies and TV series show married couples in two single beds, rather than a double? There’s a reason.
During the Depression, studios tried to lure cash-strapped audiences back into the cinema with increasingly scandalous movies like Scarface (1932) and Baby Face (1932) featuring boozing, sex, and glamourised violence.
The Hays Code was introduced to rein in the industry. It prohibited profanity, nudity, graphic violence, and racy sexual behaviour.
Which is why no shared beds.
Also, no toilets. Because bodily functions? No thank you, ma’am! And certainly no flushing ones, until Alfred Hitchock broke that taboo in Psycho.
One of the more memorable and effective movies that bypassed the Hays Code censorship of homosexuality was Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). The gay character, Sebastian, was introduced only in flashback, and purely by reputation. But the audience is left in no doubt what was meant by it.
Head in the clouds
That was the Golden Age of Hollywood, right? McCarthyism and the Black List. Good times.
But social media and the internet are a whole other thing.
Smash those together with Generative AI, which has us all questioning the truth of everything we see, and we’re headed for a whole new era of censorship.
I’ve experienced it myself on a small scale.
Over on Threads, I have a bit to say about the shitfuckery that’s going on over in America. Some 13,000 people are interested in what I have to say, lord help them. And for most of the past 12 months, I was clocking five to seven million views a month.
Until I wasn’t.
It happened overnight. My post views fell off a cliff as I experienced the thing called shadow-banning. It’s how social media platforms restrict reach without explicitly censoring it. I’m back in their good graces now for some reason because nothing’s changed from my end. But it became clear how easy it is for social media to control the narrative, even by stealth.
In openly authoritarian regimes like China, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, they don’t even pretend. The internet and social media platforms are banned outright or strictly monitored.
In the wake of the death of Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE in Minneapolis, TikTok users including Senator Chris Murphy and singer Billie Eilish accused the platform of censoring their posts. Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener called TikTok “state-controlled media.”
That’s why books are so important
I have a vast library of books. Some of them were printed hundreds of years ago.
Yes, in a nod to the post-truth era we’re living in, I do understand that the reality they capture was shaped by the times and circumstances the authors were living through.
Truth has always been a fluid thing.
But the reality of what’s between those pages can’t be altered. The interpretation of the contents might change. But the content itself remains the same.
That can’t be said for so many of the cultural products of the current era.
When the White House posts a digitally altered image of a protestor, Nekima Levy Armstrong, that shows her with darker skin than the original, and makes it appear that instead of holding her head high while being cuffed, Nekima was crying as she was arrested, we have entered very murky waters.
Can’t believe your eyes
This is all happening at a time when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe what we see.
AI is producing artificially generated visual material that’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
What this is doing is training us to question everything. To believe nothing.
Think about what that means for a moment.
Is there anything more malleable than a population that no longer knows what to believe?
It doesn’t stop there
Because, of course it doesn’t.
While this is going on, sources of once-reliable information are being dismantled.
Trump is stripping federal funding from public broadcasting.
He’s bullying and silencing journalists.
He’s using financial shake-downs and threats to bring the major broadcasters to heel.
He’s having prominent critics silenced.
And many of those companies are folding to keep shareholders happy.
Of course, he’s also rewriting history. Museums are being forced to toe the party line according to a cultural manifesto right out of Maoist China, masked as an executive order entitled: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
And at the National Portrait Gallery, Trump’s portrait was replaced with a White House sanctioned photograph.
The plaque was changed to remove references to his impeachments and the January 6 insurrection.
Words matter
I do what I do here and elsewhere because I believe that words matter.
They are fuel that keeps the fire of opposition burning.
I’m half a world away from what’s happening in America right now. But it’s a rallying call to those of us who believe that democracy is something worth fighting for.
So I’m not going to censor myself. And I’ll keep doing what I can to keep the flame alive.
Because I do give a fuck. I really, really do.
This piece is commentary and opinion, based on publicly reported information.
