Victor Laszlo printed scandal sheets in a cellar. Today’s bloggers do it on Substack. The mission, however, might not be so different.

Source: Casablanca

Owning The Future

There’s a line of dialogue in the film Casablanca that deserves more attention in the age of algorithmic discourse. “Victor Laszlo published the foulest lies in the Prague newspapers until the very day we marched in, and even after that he continued to print scandal sheets in a cellar.” It’s meant to be an indictment—delivered by a Nazi officer—but it reads, today, like something closer to a badge of honor.

Because what Laszlo was doing wasn’t scandal, it was dissent. And dissent has always been framed as scandal by the people who need it silenced.

Who was Victor Laszlo? Victor Laszlo escaped from a concentration camp. Twice. And when he appears in Casablanca, it’s not as a broken man, but as one who walks through a room like he still owns the future.

Fast forward to now, and the romanticism of the resistance press has been replaced by a more chaotic, democratized medium: the blogger. They don’t operate from cellars; they post from coffee shops, bedrooms, airport lounges. But like Laszlo, many of them write because they have to. Because there’s something happening they refuse to let go unchallenged.

We often dismiss the modern blogger as narcissistic, reactive, or amateurish—a pale imitation of the journalist-activist of old. And it’s true, the digital ecosystem rewards speed over accuracy, heat over light. But it also provides something Laszlo would have killed for: reach. The power to distribute counter-narratives instantly, before they’re buried or banned.

Source: Squarespace/ Unsplash

What’s The Motive?

Laszlo wrote under threat of death. Bloggers today are more likely to face demonetization, doxxing, or coordinated smear campaigns. Different scale, but not entirely different tactics. Those in power still want dissent classified as misinformation, and expression policed as instability.

Bloggers and independent writers—especially those operating on the margins of mainstream media—occupy a strange, sometimes contradictory space. Some push conspiracy. Some peddle clickbait. But others are doing the necessary work of cultural and political agitation. They are, whether knowingly or not, inheritors of Laszlo’s legacy: writing to resist, publishing to disrupt, agitating when silence would be safer.

In a world where state propaganda can look like press releases and cable news blurs into corporate interest, the blogger—armed only with a domain name and a conviction—can still punch above their weight. They’re not printing scandal sheets in cellars. They’re posting them online. And while the tools have changed, the threat they pose to boardrooms, executives, and government leaders, remains the same.