Sunny Hostin claims Stephen Colbert’s show cancellation is an instance of the “dismantling of our democracy.” An X commentator wrote, “Democracy is when Colbert is on television.” Sunny must have fallen off Venus and is unused to Earth gravity—or she’s just a host on The View. She epitomizes the overreaction that has overtaken rational thought and replaced political discourse in America.
As background for those who have not fallen with Sunny, Stephen Colbert is a political shouter who has been a fixture on late night TV for decades, starting out on The Daily Show, then his own satire show The Colbert Report, and now The Late Show. Democracy in America predates Colbert by some 200 years. Things came to an unfunny conclusion of sorts in July when parent company CBS announced Colbert would go off the air next year for financial reasons. That last thing is what set off the Venusians.
Colbert was a Trump critic. That is to say whatever Trump did or said on any particular day, later that night Colbert would mock, ridicule, and otherwise shout hatred toward, in front of a woke audience pre-triggered to bray for more blood. It wasn’t funny and didn’t even try to be funny; it was just the Two Minutes of Hate each night. As Orwell wrote, this forced expression of negativity was a key mechanism for maintaining social control, reinforcing the Party’s ideology and preventing independent thought. It is a baseline for processing information. So it was with Colbert—plus a musical guest.
Nobody among his audience, or for that matter apparently anybody who voted Democrat, thought the reason for Colbert’s demise was “financial reasons.” Every X post, every statement issued by a hip Democratic senator said the same thing: Colbert was canceled because he criticized Trump, often characterized as “the regime” or something Hitler-esque. We have gotten to the point, said one Facebook meme, “where those who make fun of the Dear Leader are disappeared.” They all seemed to believe it, and “I Stand with Colbert” signs appeared at the usual protests. On air Colbert told CBS to “F**k off,” while his mentor Jon Stewart composed an entire musical number consisting of the words “F**k off” to CBS. Biting satire.
It was several late nights of this until little bits of “truthiness” (a Colbert term) came out. The Late Show’s ad revenue had plummeted after the pandemic. Gutfeld! beat The Late Show in the ratings for 21 straight months. Rational sources explained the Colbert show loses $40 million for CBS every year. Of the network late night shows, Colbert’s had the smallest footprint on social media. The format of late-night television, wrote the Guardian, “was a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11:30 pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden, and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement.” Ad revenue for the genre as a whole was down 50 percent from Trump 1.0 and the Covid years.
“It’s long been assumed,” continued the Guardian, “the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.” And if Paramount axed Colbert because the White House didn’t like it, why did they give $1.5 billion to South Park, which literally the next day attacked the president harder than Colbert ever has (it portrayed Trump begging for sex from Satan)? That night Colbert riffed off South Park to make a micropenis “joke” about Trump.
Colbert actually was canceled for financial reasons. None of that mattered, because the Orange Man had scuttled another piece of democracy and we were one step closer to fascism. Everybody said so. If Trump supported it, the left must oppose it. If the left opposed it, it must be part of America’s creep toward fascism. Nothing is just a problem, a disagreement, a fact anymore. Everything is life or death, at least until the next meme spikes the bloodstream of the mainstream media and social media to call the left again to arms. It should be seen as the kind of biting satire The Daily Show used to be capable of before it started to view itself as the last gasping voice of freedom (plus commercials.)
As with Colbert, the overreaction compulsion finds leftists getting tangled up supporting the most bizarre things.
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For example, Robert F. Kennedy’s plan to make it impossible to buy soft drinks with food stamps, SNAP, seemed a no-brainer. SNAP is designed as last-chance nutritional assistance, to buff up the poor diets of people too poor to afford healthy meals. To keep SNAP users on track, certain things, such as prepared foods, cannot be bought with food stamps. Unsurprisingly, the American Beverage Association, which includes Coca-Cola, strongly opposes restricting soda purchases by food stamp recipients. Why? SNAP recipients spend from $1.7 to $2.1 billion annually for sugar-sweetened beverages. Thanks to this lobby, soft drinks were always somehow allowed for SNAP, even though they have no nutritional value. A Department of Agriculture survey found SNAP households waste about 5 percent of their food budget on soda. Yet when Kennedy proposed banning soft drinks, the New York Times had to run an article asking if the move wasn’t an “overreach that penalizes poor people” and “just increases the stigma for people who are trying to make ends meet.” Colorado is the only state under Democratic control to support excluding soda in 2025. But to cap things off the NYT still has to conclude, “Academics are unsure if removing soda from SNAP would improve public health.”
It is the same with cane sugar in Coke (Trump likes it, so the media finds reason to oppose it), and of course illegal immigration. The latter is particularly sad. Somehow millions of Americans support (because Trump opposes) illegal immigration, those who jump the visa lines, and go on to commit crimes ranging from immigration, Social Security, and welfare fraud to child abuse and murder. But they pick our tomatoes on the cheap, bleat some—seemingly twisting to support a grotesque form of capitalist near-slavery, an odd point of view for avowed socialists. Someone should tell AOC.
It’s exhausting to live on the edge every day as the left does, bouncing from death knell to death knell, with everything being the decisive blow. Too bad they can’t relax by watching some TV.
