(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Submitted for your (dis)approval [1]

['Mark Isaacs', 'Dan K', 'Greg Dworkin']

Date: 2026-06-03  

With the possible exception of Star Trek, no show in the annals of television has been more visionary in predicting the world of tomorrow than The Twilight Zone. Created, often written, executive produced, and presented by the brilliant and wildly imaginative Rod Serling—an oracle who penned (and “Submitted for your approval”) at least as many speculative stories as genre greats Wells, Huxley, Orwell and Asimov—the litany of tales that presaged the future in the hugely influential 1959-1964 anthology series is impressive. For your consideration, take the following handful of prophecies from the series that have gained a solid foothold or are well underway for starters: The Lateness of the Hour (1960), in which a wealthy inventor relies upon robot servants to run his household; The Midnight Sun (1961), in which global warming makes the planet a literal living hell (or a dying one?); On Thursday We Leave for Home (1963), in which the Internet is introduced as a platform to teach students; From Agnes—With Love (1964), in which a computer endowed with artificial intelligence develops human feelings and blows a fuse when the programmer it fancies gets a real-life girlfriend; and The Brain Center at Whipple’s (1964), in which a factory owner replaces all the employees in his plant with machines. That’s right—The Twilight Zone foretold robotic household servants, global warming, the Internet, AI, and autonomous machinery that has completely displaced human workers in the manufacturing process, all years or decades before each fantasy or portent became a reality.

Still another farsighted augury put forth in The Twilight Zone that has come to pass has to do with culture—cancel culture to be precise. In the chilling iconic episode It’s a Good Life (1961), a preternatural six-year-old boy has the power to rain ruin upon anyone who dares to oppose or fails to exalt him in a village he has cut off from the rest of the world; young “Anthony Fremont” exacts his pound of flesh either by transforming the transgressor into a grotesquery or willing the offender to stand like a stalk in a cornfield. At a party Anthony compels the remaining townsfolk he hasn’t yet punished to attend, a man who has seen enough of the evil doings the little “monster” has perpetrated rails against him, and pleads for someone behind the boy to attack him and end his vengeful reign of terror. His outburst infuriates Anthony, and in retaliation he disfigures the man and wills him to the cornfield. There the “bad man” joins all of Anthony’s former playmates and a host of grown-ups he has similarly exiled for the crime of displeasing him. Those at the party cower after the man disappears, now more than ever frightened to say or do anything to upset the demonic youngster. In today’s parlance the man has been canceled, with the meek souls still in Anthony’s stranglehold kowtowing before him and praising him to the high heavens to avoid the same fate.

In It’s a Good Life, then, which was based on a short story that Serling adapted into a teleplay, The Twilight Zone once again foreshadowed the world to come well ahead of its arrival. Fifty-seven years would pass before in 2018, advocacy groups, political parties and social movements began to adopt cancel culture as a cudgel to castigate individuals, organizations and movements that promulgate views or engage in behavior they deem repugnant. Sometimes, as with the MeToo campaign to put heavyweight movie producer Harvey Weinstein behind bars for sexually abusing as many as eighty women, the public condemnation and outrage that are part and parcel of cancel culture were justified. Other times, meanwhile, as when the NFL blacklisted quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee to protest racial injustice and police brutality during the national anthem, the outcry came across to many as a shameful suppression of free expression. The upshot one takes away about cancel culture is that in the hands of some the censure it employs can be a force for good, while in the hands of others that censure is used as a nefarious agent of retribution and revenge. In the hands of Donald Trump, the latter is how the punitive measures of cancel culture are wielded.

Scorning, shunning, shaming and sacking join censure as the tools the cancel culture playbook calls for, and who else but Donald Trump has exploited each to its maximum extent in his overall six years as a presidential candidate and chief executive. But unlike movements such as MeToo that seek justice for victims, Trump uses the tactics in cancel culture’s arsenal to settle scores. Like the spoiled six-year-old boy in It’s a Good Life, the soon-to-be 80-year-old man slams anyone with the audacity to call him out on anything. And while he can’t dispatch the villain he perceives to a cornfield, he can and does call for the impudent detractor to go to prison. “Lock her up” was what he blustered that law enforcement authorities should do to Hilary Clinton in diatribes at multiple campaign rallies when he ran against her in 2016, a rally rant he modified to “him” when he ran against “crooked” Joe Biden in 2020, a characterization he continues to spew. The once secretary of state and first lady was a foe too towering to punish when Trump was in a position to go after Clinton in his first term, and the same goes for Biden now well into his second. But not so other less lofty enemies he longs to castigate. Most notable among these gettable nemeses are his former FBI Director James Comey and his ex-National Security Agency advisor John Bolton. Trump is going after Comey a second time (a first indictment was dismissed) for a seashell message that he pressured his acting attorney general Todd Blanche to contend posed a threat to his life. He seeks vengeance against Bolton, meanwhile, for a memoir that he pressured his ousted AG Pam Bondi to use for an indictment against the NSA counsel on the grounds that content in it compromised national security, even though those passages, as drawn from a diary Bolton kept, were unclassified.

In It’s a Good Life, the last quivering townsfolk must do more than stay on the boy monster’s good side—they must celebrate him as though he is the most magnificent being to ever walk the earth. It’s an imperative Trump’s cabinet members and executive branch advisors, Republican senators and representatives, and those running for office seeking his endorsement must follow to the hilt, especially while in his presence. Woe to anyone Trump summons to his side who doesn’t boisterously applaud and fawn at him like one of the Magi in the manger as he triumphantly holds up a bill he has signed at his Resolute Desk throne (with a pompous signature that dwarfs the one John Hancock inked on the Declaration of Independence). Even as those present hail Trump, however, one watching the spectacle from home can’t help but feel that many of them are putting on an act, that off the record they would say that the man is the world’s biggest sleazeball and imbecile.

Long before cancel culture surfaced in the real world, It’s a Good Life depicted the practice in the fictional person of a self-absorbed, vindictive boy who uses his vast power to decry and destroy his enemies. Today a real-world version of that boy occupies the White House, a grown-up in age only who uses the limited vocabulary of a child to denigrate his foes (to wit, rudimentary slurs such as “bad, dumb, slob, ugly, fat,” and “loser”), and playground bullying to intimidate those who defy his will.

Like another Twilight Zone episode (A Most Unusual Camera), in which an instant camera produces pictures of things to come, It’s a Good Life uncannily previews cancel culture decades before its emergence, as applied in its dark form by a megalomaniac (magalomaniac?) who brooks no deviation from his wishes and whims. Or as the visionary Rod Serling characterized the cruel and impetuous boy in his introduction to the far-seeing cautionary tale, a monster.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/3/800048331/community/submitted-for-your-disapproval/

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/