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Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS has been turned into “resistance porn” for the beleaguered, wild-eyed Left who still can’t believe Trump beat them twice. For THAT take, check out Richard Rushfield, who echoes the feelings of those who believe that it’s ALL TRUMP’S FAULT that Colbert was fired. As if. But let’s assume that’s true. Fox News fired Tucker Carlson under the Biden administration after an embarrassing settlement, despite Carlson being the number one cable news show, beating Colbert’s by at least a million viewers.
They were upset on the Right, to be sure. However, you didn’t see messages from major outlets about how “chilling” it was. There were no protests. Other cable news hosts didn’t rally around and screech and shriek about fascism. Tucker Carlson has moved on to podcasts and YouTube, bringing in triple the numbers. And so it will go with Colbert. So we have what, ten months of this to endure?
Will he win the Emmy? Of course. That was a given. Hollywood never misses a chance to tell the other half of the country how much they detest them with an award show. We’ve already seen this movie. We know how it ends, with a teary standing ovation and a lot of sound bites about free speech. Yeah, it’s not a free speech issue.
You know what was a free speech issue? Cancel culture, you remember that, right? The thing no one on the Left ever said one word about as hundreds of people lost their jobs and Hollywood was crippled by a climate of fear and a culture of silence? THAT has hurt Hollywood and late-night comedy more than anything else, even Trump. Not word about that for anyone who writes in the trades, not ONE WORD.
Censorship and suppression of thought and speech were so bad, Elon Musk had to buy Twitter for $45 billion just to bring free speech back to the social media app and start speaking truth to power. Stephen Colbert never did. He spoke truthiness for the powerful, becoming the very thing he once lampooned.
Here’s the truth: Rushfield once wrote brilliantly about the monoculture. That was way back in 2022, however, and it was the first time I ever heard the term. Two years later, Trump would win again. The monoculture would double down, leaving Hollywood in an impossible position: break free or stay locked inside.
Imagine that. Imagine a culture that believes itself to be separate from the rest of America and that they have the right to claim all culture for itself. They believe that they are in the right and everyone else is wrong, and that they are more than justified to mock them, lampoon them, and attack them every day. These are not two equal sides. The independent media lane has emerged out of necessity – a response to this oppressive, repellent monoculture. Surely they can understand that.
Instead, they’re falling back to their happy/miserable place, realizing that this was not a decision made by a corporation to survive the coming storm, but rather an act of authoritarianism. But that is not true. If it were, CBS News would have axed 60 Minutes, not the Colbert Show. There is no need for late-night anymore. It’s managed decline for an audience that hasn’t yet adapted to new media.
Rushfield writes:
If these were normal times, maybe we wouldn’t have to do any of that. But it isn’t. So, I’m really sorry, but chalking the firing of Stephen Colbert up to the suggestion that “the numbers just don’t add up” isn’t adequate in the face of catastrophe.
If you think I’m being alarmist about the looming “catastrophe” — getting all worked up about what’s just run-of-the-mill political hardball — all I can say is that I envy your equanimity. Until a very few years ago, I felt that way about every alarm bell of imminent doom people on either side of the aisle pulled, and I miss that feeling.
And then:
But the fact is that even if the numbers don’t add up, even if you were planning to get out of the late-night business, even if you are of the mindset that it’s just business, there has to be a line. When a bully shows up at your front door and in full view of the neighborhood says, “Give me your car/your dog/your child, so I can burn it at the stake on your front lawn” — even if you might have had it up to here with said car/dog/child — you don’t shove them out the front door and say, “You know what. I was about to get rid of them anyway!” You say, “Get off of my lawn!”
If that were true, that Trump the bully threw a fit and said FIRE STEPHEN COLBERT (again, as if he would even care at all, even a little bit, he doesn’t), then they wouldn’t be waiting until May of 2026, TEN MONTHS FROM NOW. TEN MONTHS. But hey, don’t let rational thought get in the way of doomsday freakout. There is always the option of, oh, I don’t know, diversifying the content. NAH.
Believe it or not, I, too, feel sad for changing times that are itching to move on from the monoculture. I feel sorry for people who were once influential but are no longer so. It is a tragedy, and it’s hard to watch, but not everything is a sign that Hitler is in power. For one thing, Hitler is only in power because he won the popular vote. People voted for him. That’s democracy. The real Hitler won in an election, I realize that, but Trump won a second time. That makes this very different.
Yes, he won it even AFTER the doomsday clock hit midnight every single day for ten years. He won it after two impeachments, four indictments, raiding Mar-a-Lago, a conviction, a mug shot, two assassination attempts, accusations that he’s a racist, a fascist, a dictator, a criminal, a felon, a pedophile, fat, old, and in cognitive decline. Imagine being on the side with all of the power, throwing all of it at one man and he wins again?
The public that used to matter. Why was Johnny Carson’s show so good? Because people watched it. Why were movies so good? They had to be. The public had to matter because ratings and box office mattered. Now, movies are forgettable, as Critical Drinker lays out so well:
He lays out at the beginning all the movie lines we remember. I could list 100 more. There’s a reason The Godfather always comes up in conversations, even now. Movies used to embed because they were a collective, not singular, experience. Movies for the monoculture suck BY DESIGN. They are built so as not offend, lest everyone be booted out of utopia. The same can be said across the board, up one side and down the other, but nothing has been hit quite as hard as late-night “comedy” where all we hear is Resistance Twitter come to life. They are a joke in the real comedy world. Comedian Bridget Phetasy is right when she says politics is what kept Colbert on the air, not what took him off of it.
I do not personally think Colbert was fired because of the upcoming deal or the settlement, but because CBS News wants out. He was a liability, not because he made Trump mad (Trump did not care, did not tune in, etc) but because it was a drain on their finances.
The show lost CBS $40 million per year. They knew they would eventually have to fire him. Doing so on the heels of the settlement turns him into a martyr, wins him an Emmy, and gives him an easy launch for a podcast. Best of all, it puts the dying animal out of its misery.
The people who run our culture don’t seem to have understood that the country has moved on without them. They have never adjusted to the changing America that would put Trump in power a second time. Now, they must grapple with the more complicated truth that it really isn’t Trump they hate as much as the people who voted for him. They hate that the public is no longer interested in them. And that is depressing, But that’s YOUR JOB, to make culture for everyone, not the select few.
What is doing well now is authenticity. It’s the counterculture reaction to the monoculture. It’s Critical Drinker. It’s Theo Von. It’s podcasters who have the freedom to tell their listeners the truth. The internet has freed them up so they don’t have to sit at home and watch network television.
The monoculture is stifling, limiting and rooted in manufactured narratives. It’s all about what they want to be true rather than what is true. Those who truly speak truth to power, like Ricky Gervais, have been banished from utopia for being too truthful and too confrontational.
When Hollywood was too fragile for Ricky Gervais, it was all over but the shouting.
The Oscars already know the writing on the wall
If network television is on the outs, then we know what’s coming next for the Oscars. They aren’t as insular and propagandistic as the Colbert Show, but they’re not far off. They appeal to the same shrinking minority of the ruling elite. The Oscars do better than MSNBC or late-night “comedy” by now, much, much better. If sports will still be a draw for event viewing, then the Oscars could remain so, as long as they move away from the Doomsday Bunker and find their way into the real world with the rest of us.
I think they can do that. I hope they can. It would be great if major studios and networks factored in the whole country. We all need stories and culture. We need to be able to unite, even if for one night. Is that even possible now amid our Virtual Civil War? I don’t know. But I do know that a movement united in hatred, as the Left now is, will never be able to do anything but tell the same story over and over again.
That story is that you, America, are the oppressor. And we, the ruling class, are the oppressed. If you no longer love us, that is your fault. We have nothing to offer you that you want, and that’s your fault too. You have to like what we want you to like, or else we will call you Nazis. You will never be forgiven for humiliating us when you voted for Trump so we’re done with you too.
For all of it to survive and thrive, it really is time to turn the page.
