Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Rall

Revolution, in Rall's telling, starts not with pitchforks but with punchlines. The image of "stringing the boss up from a lamppost" is deliberately lurid, pulled from the historical iconography of mob justice and labor unrest, then snapped into focus by something almost petty: calling the boss a moron. The joke is the escalation. The point is the pipeline.

Rall, a cartoonist, understands that delegitimization is a visual medium as much as a rhetorical one. "Moron" is doing heavy work here: it's not a policy critique, it's an attack on competence and, by extension, on deservingness. If the boss isn't merely wrong but stupid, then hierarchy begins to look like an administrative error, not a social contract. Violence becomes thinkable only after authority becomes laughable.

The quote also carries a warning about how casually contempt circulates. Workplace resentment is one of the most socially acceptable forms of class anger, and modern culture loves to narrate bosses as idiots: in sitcoms, in office memes, in viral stories about managerial incompetence. Rall is needling that fantasy. He implies that cruelty doesn't arrive announcing itself; it arrives dressed as common sense and bonding humor, as the shared smirk that turns a person into a type.

Subtextually, it's about how speech primes action: the first step is always linguistic. Not because words magically cause violence, but because they lower the moral cost of imagining it. By making the leap from insult to lynching feel uncomfortably short, Rall exposes how quickly "just venting" can become a politics of dehumanization.