The real reason ICE Barbie Noem was fired.

She could violate peoples’ civil rights, injure and kill citizens for all Trump liked, but a crossdressing husband was unacceptable.

And she’s a woman, so she was extra expendable.

So “comics getting smaller” was actually a real thing.

Collectively across the US, the daily newspapers shrunk the size of comic strips, which freed up more precious page space for other things like ads, or in rare cases, more comic strips.

Comic strips are an expense for a newspaper, so having them take up less space was a common practice.

Eventually with declining readership, and especially younger readers, and corporate buyouts of local newspapers, many papers eliminated their comics page altogether.

Late 80s, so that would be the Iran-Contra affair aka the Ollie North hearings that were widely watched, back before cable TV was Balkanized by Fox News.

For many Twitch streamers it isn’t a full time job, but supplementary income.

Except authoritarian government is not good, in the long term, for an economy, because of 1) corruption, and 2) misallocated economic resources, whether by arbitrary state edicts or, again, corruption.

Democracies will always perform better economically than authoritarian governments, but only when measured over the long term.

Authoritarian and directed economies can perform better over short periods of time, but inevitably fail when stale leadership runs out of ideas.

You can look at 80s Japan, 2010s China, 2010s Venezuela for examples.

Hopefully the US will diverge from the path to absolute oligarchy soon, or we’ll add ourselves to that list.

Isn’t this more a meme than a comic?

All they could hear was “arf, arf arf arf arf”

I mean if I went around saying I was emperor because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!

Great! Now he has a great opportunity to volunteer for the Great Patriotic Special Military Operation and get out of psych ward at the same time!

I would blame it on the fracturing and proliferation of unregulated information sources, starting with unregulated cable TV, and then social media.

Simple stupid, but emotionally appealing messages like memes, spread faster than well reasoned and thought out arguments.

And far right propaganda excels at that.

Every radical movement has come with innovations in media: The printing press, newspapers, state propaganda, radio and television, and now social media.

And yeah, a lot of those waves ended in wars that resulted in regulation of media to keep the peace.