The story makes its point in three paragraphs you can read, but this isn’t the the subject that what I want to address. I can't figure out if there’s more to the story behind the paywall than these three paragraphs. However the word fuck isn’t in the three paragraphs.
On their front page Daily Beast used the asterisk:
In the story title (as you see in my illustration) they spelled the word fuck, one of the four-letter words which got Lenny Bruce arrested when he used them in his stand-up act.
Tried in abstentia in Chicago, an all-Catholic jury found Bruce guilty of violating state obscenity laws after one hour of deliberations. According to prosecution evidence, Bruce had held up a picture of a naked woman and said, "God, your Jesus Christ, made these tits." He also was accused of using the words "fuck" and "smuck" and of suggesting that if we lost World War II, "they would have strung Truman up by the balls." Finally, witnesses accused Bruce of mocking the Catholic Church. In March 1963, the Chicago judge (also a Catholic) sentenced Bruce to one year in jail. He remained free on bond, however, during his appeal. (In July 1964, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed Bruce's conviction, finding his speech protected by the First Amendment.).
On April 1, 1964, four New York City vice squad officers attended Bruce's performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The officers arrested Bruce and owner Howard Solomon following Bruce's 10:00 P.M. show. Assistant District Attorney Richard Kuh presented a grand jury with a typed partial script of Bruce's performance including references to Jackie Kennedy trying to "save her ass" after her husband's assassination, Eleanor Roosevelt's "nice tits," sexual intimacy with a chicken, "pissing in the sink," the Lone Ranger sodomizing Tonto, and St. Paul giving up "fucking" for Lent. The jury indicted Bruce on the obscenity charge. The trial before a three-judge court in New York City that followed stands as a remarkable moment in the history of free speech. Both the prosecution and defense presented parades of well-known witnesses to either denounce Bruce's performance as the worst sort of gutter humor or celebrate it as a powerful and insightful social commentary. Among the witnesses testifying in support of Bruce were What's My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, sociologist Herbert Gans, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In the end, the censors won. Voting 2 to 1, the court found Bruce guilty of violating New York's obscenity laws and sentenced him to "four months in the workhouse.” Reference
The convention, if not the rule, here at Kos is that we don't use the word in our titles but are allowed to use it in the context of a story.
I wonder if it is time to put this vestige of Puritanism to rest and admit since everyone knows that the asterisk represents the missing letter U. If you Google f*ck Trump you come up with a lot of websites. Here’s a sample:
.
Amazon.com: F*ck Trump: An Adult Coloring Book (Volume 1) (9780692841853): Woman, Nasty: Books.
Jul 7, 2019 - 'F-ck Trump' Chants Interrupt Fox News World Cup Broadcast from Bar in France. The president said he would invite the team to the White House, ...
Jul 9, 2019 - Trump Rips Into Fox News After 'F*ck Trump' Chant Broadcast Live on Air. In a series of tweets, Trump attacked the network's weekend anchors ...
Selected by popular vote, F*ck Trump matte liquid lipstick is a balanced, mid-tone rosy pink. 50% of all earnings from F*ck Trump go towards helping a civil rights …
Check out our f ck trump selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our shops.
The Paperback of the F*ck Trump: An Adult Coloring Book by Nasty Woman at Barnes & Noble.
F*CK TRUMP. CRV. Follow ... Donald Trump's anti-immigration statements are diametrically opposed to the core values of entrepreneurship. And at CRV, we've ...
Esty, below, and other commercial printing websites add the “U” because they want to say, basically, Trump, this means YOU.
So dear Daily Kos readers, what do you think? Take the poll.