In a glaring repudiation of free speech and ideas, Gannett newspapers have banned a comic strip that merely spoke the truth.
The 27-year-old conservative comic strip “Mallard Fillmore” was dropped by Gannett papers across the country this week over two strips critical of President Biden and his championing of transgender men taking over women’s sports.
“It was a big shock,” creator Bruce Tinsley told The Washington Times. “From what I’m hearing, it was unprecedented. My syndicate had never seen anything like it.”
Tinsley said officials at syndicator King Features said that “a decision was made at the [Gannett] corporate level, and they weren’t sure exactly why, except that they were sure it was about those two cartoons.”
Both comics ran in mid-February. The first has Biden thinking: “For too long, segregation sullied women’s sports … They were restricted to women! Thank goodness those dark days are over.” In the second, Biden says, “I hear what you, the American people, want me to do … kill fossil-fuel jobs … devalue Americans’ labor … and help more transgender athletes beat the *@!# out of biological females.”
Tinsley said the strips about Biden’s Jan. 20 executive order on gender identity and sexual orientation were not over the top.
“I’ve thought a million times, ‘This is it, I don’t even know if I’m going to turn this in,’ ” said Tinsley, referring to previous comics. “But of all the cartoons — it vaguely centers on Biden’s doing that as his first executive order. There certainly was nothing derogatory about transgender people. It was just about what I see as a really unfair environment in sports.”
His strip has been dropped before — sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently — but he said those moves were made by local editors on a newspaper-by-newspaper basis, not by corporate headquarters in a decision affecting multiple publications.
“So I’m used to this phenomenon, I’m just not used to it coming from the corporate level,” Tinsley said.
