Colbert Must Return
Fuck Trump for Canceling The Late Show.
I rarely admit to political sentimentality, but when the final episode of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ended, I clenched my fists, felt heat in my eyes, and heard a snarl choke up from my throat. Damn that bitch President Donald Trump. I never want to give GOP villains the opportunity to see my adrenaline burn hot, but I choose to share that experience because I think too many of my Democratic friends have repressed it.
Through the George W. Bush administration, which also seemed like an authoritarian nightmare, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report were the background noise of my every dull night, and for my whole political lifetime, Mr. Colbert has shown how to articulate the GOP’s evils and absurdity. The Colbert Report’s first episode introduced the core concept of “truthiness”:
“Truthiness. I’m sure some of the word police, the wordinistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, hey, that’s not a word. Well, anybody who knows me know that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart…. We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”
Mr. Colbert explicated in 2006 exactly how Mr. Trump would operate to The A.V. Club:
“The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for some people, like people who say ‘Listen to me, and just don’t question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine….’ But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better than authority. Because authoritarian means there’s only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies…. Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.”
Mr. Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006 was an inspiration. From that day on, I aspired to stick it to the Man to their face, instead of only ambiently. It was in that spirit that I failed in 2025 to smoke cigarettes in the smoking section of the Washington Hilton outside the WHCD.
In 2007, Mr. Colbert ran a gag presidential campaign as both a Democrat and a Republican only in South Carolina, along the way teaching the audience the mechanics of campaign finance. This led to a silly “contentious” interview on NBC’s Meet the Press:
In 2010, I attended the joint Colbert-Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. That was a strange political moment. Koch brothers-funded Tea Party rallies started showing up on television screens at evil-seeming “freak shows” led by Fox’s Glenn Beck, and the attendees seemed alien and stupid. “Get A BRAIN! MORANS” read one classic sign; another oft-ridiculed was “Get your government hands off my Medicare.” Some Tea Partiers referred to themselves as “Proud Teabaggers.”
My personal favorite: Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell ran an ad denying being a witch.
Nobody thought those were serious people. Some of them cosplayed as American Revolutionaries, too; though at the time, we giggled and thought their outfits were goofy, after a year of NO KINGS rallies, I concede that the America 1776 theming is compelling. The Tea Party did not earn it. Reforming health insurance was not as kindly as Mr. Trump’s rule-by-tweet.
The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was goaded into life by a fundraising drive pushed by Reddit users called “Restore Truthiness,” which gathered more than $500,000. Like many Obama voters, they hoped the event would be thoughtful, powerful counterprogramming to the Tea Party and insisted everybody be respectable.
“Let’s not give them a reason to belittle our crowd. The rally would be more respectable if its participants come off as such. Please be polite & clean up any trash. I am a smoker myself, but please leave the weed home or out of sight because we do not want to tarnish our image with drug arrests, pot smells & pictures of open drug use. This is not a concert & we are representing our respective communities. We should conduct ourselves like we would at any respectable gathering or public function. We have the high ground & need to act like it.”
Other commenters suggested wearing suits, because Civil Rights marchers wore suits, and we wanted to show the world we were serious and not bong-smoking hippies. There was comical handwrenching that a “LEGALIZE WEED” sign might appear at a Comedy Central event, be photographed, and convince Fox News enjoyers that, like the Tea Party, we were also not serious people.
Imagine the heartbreak among the 215,000 attendees when they learned the rally was merely a fun show, with guests including the late Ozzy Osbourne, R2-D2, the MythBusters, Cat Stevens, The Roots, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock, Tony Bennett, Sam Waterston, and others. The crowd wanted to be blessed and guided by their heroes, wanted to learn how to stop the GOP from mutating into the very nightmare it has become.
“I can’t stop the war, shelter homeless, feed the poor… I can’t change the world and make things fair. The least that I can do is care.” Kid Rock said that day in what has been called a “disempowering message,” and in the intervening years, he stopped even caring, and now Mr. Rock cheerleads cutting food stamps, unsheltering the homeless, and endless war.
https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/rally-to-restore-sanity-and-or-fear/236663
The rally kept it safe and entertaining, and the crowd left deflated. Jon Stewart said: “We live in hard times, not end times, and we can have animus and not be enemies.” That message felt meaningless when “the other side” were preparing for an apocalyptic end to the American left and center. Nobody came out to be told to “turn down the volume.” We were looking for leadership to get rowdy.
Mr. Colbert opened a super PAC named “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” again using his show to demonstrate the rules and loopholes that system created—at one point, he signed over control of the super PAC to Mr. Stewart so he could run for president. Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, as a super PAC, was “forbidden from coordinating” with Mr. Colbert’s mock presidential campaign, so it was renamed the Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC. When it was eventually dissolved, money from the PAC went to Hurricane Sandy relief funds, Habitat for Humanity, Yellow Ribbon Fund, OpenSecrets, and the Campaign Legal Center. CLC even renamed a conference room the “Ham Rove Memorial Conference Room” to honor Mr. Colbert’s recurring character, a ham dressed as Karl Rove.
On an episode of The Colbert Report, as part of United Farm Workers’ “Take Our Jobs” campaign, Mr. Colbert packed corn and picked beans beside the field hands, then carried the bit to Capitol Hill on September 24, 2010, where he testified, in character, before Representative Zoe Lofgren’s immigration subcommittee. He warned that “America’s farms are presently far too dependent on immigrant labor,” and proposed that “the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables.” Then he broke character once, asked why he had taken up the cause, and said he liked “talking about people who don’t have any power,” and that migrant workers were among the most powerless people in the country.
When America needed Messrs. Colbert and Stewart most, Mr. Colbert left Comedy Central in December 2014, and Mr. Stewart retired in August 2015. When Mr. Colbert returned on The Late Show almost a year later in September 2015, it was as himself, not his persona, and he had less “bite.” He was more hospitable—he even hosted Mr. Trump once, instead of roasting him, which he regrets. (“I tried being gracious and pointed at the same time, and got almost nothing out of him…. It was actually boring, because he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Being nice to a guy who isn’t nice to other people, it doesn’t serve you that much.”)
I partly blame the state of the world on the sudden disappearance of Mr. Stewart during the 2016 election. Mr. Colbert’s post-Report persona took too long to get good, so voices that spoke to a generation no longer guided us. Polls showed they were America’s most trusted news sources, and nothing has ever been as trusted since. In their stead was a dozen nightly-or-weekly man-behind-a-desk shows, such as Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Jordan Klepper, Hasan Minhaj, Larry Wilmore, and Michelle Wolf, all a little too generic-Democrat seeming, fracturing our shared infosphere.
I never figured out how to get network television to work after the FCC phased out physical antennas, but I liked what I saw on YouTube of Mr. Colbert’s program.
I was discouraged on the 2016 election night, when Mr. Colbert mused: “We are more divided than ever as a nation… According to the Pew Research Center, more than 4 in 10 voters say the other party’s policies are so misguided they pose a threat to the nation. But you know what? Everybody feels that way. And not only that, more than half of Democrats say the Republican Party makes them afraid. While 49% of, do I have this right? Is it 49% of Republicans say the same thing about the Democratic Party? So, both sides are terrified of the other side. And I think that’s why the voting booth has a curtain, so you have some place to hide after the election’s over. So how did our politics get so poisonous? I think it’s because we overdosed, especially this year. We drank too much of the poison. You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side. And it tastes kind of good. And you like how it feels. And there’s a gentle high to the condemnation, right? And you know you’re right, right? You know you’re right.”
Motherfucker, I knew I was right, and Mr. Colbert also knew he was right. Everybody was right about Mr. Trump, except for the people who voted for him.
Mr. Colbert closed, on what was one of the worst nights in American history: “Now please, get out there. Kiss a Democrat. Go hug a Republican. Give a Libertarian a reach around. I don’t care. The election is over. You survived. Good night, and may God bless America.”
Mr. Colbert was never unaware of how dangerous a world ruled by Republicans would become. Softening it was unhelpful. “Republicans did a bad thing” was too harsh for him to say, so he said: “We have done something terrible.” But I did not, and neither did Mr. Colbert. Treating the malignancy growing in the electorate as a diffuse condition meant efforts to heal were only received by those who wanted to be well.
In 2017, Mr. Colbert visited Russia and visited the Moscow Ritz-Carlton suite where the “Trump peetape” was allegedly filmed. After confirming he was being surveilled, Mr. Colbert gestured to the bed with a bench at the end and said eerily: “You know when you’ve imagined something for so long, and then when you finally see it, it just doesn’t match what you pictured in your head? That’s not this feeling at all. No, this is—this is right on the money.”
Before getting approval for the Oracle billionaire and Trump megadonor Larry Ellison’s son David Ellison’s Skydance purchase of Paramount and CBS, CBS settled one of Mr. Trump’s bullshit lawsuits, wherein the president claimed that editing a CBS 60 Minutes segment was a crime, for $16 million. Mr. Colbert called that a “big fat bribe.” Days later, presumably in retaliation for this, CBS announced The Late Show’s cancellation. They cited cost (“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,”) but speech-hating FCC Chairman Brendan Carr gloated at CPAC: “PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership. And soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well.” Mr. Trump tweeted: “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” Whatever CBS says, the administration wants us to know it was them—in which case, it is fair to call them censorious. Fuck those bitches.
In the months leading to his cancellation, whenever I remembered the Trump administration pushed Mr. Colbert out of his job, I got so angry I forgot that I was sad to see him go, until I heard his final episode’s opening monologue: “Anyone can read the news to you. I promised to feel the news at you… feel the news with you.”
Mr. Colbert’s last show was a goodbye to the Ed Sullivan Theater, not his audience. It was Sir Paul McCartney of The Beatles who threw the switch that shut down the stage, and the show closed out to “Hello, Goodbye” (“I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.”) He never claimed he was going away, and the next day (an “excruciating 23 hours” later), he appeared on a public access station in Monroe County, Michigan.
There was some confusion about CBS’s response to Mr. Colbert’s appearance on Only in Monroe after the ending of his show. CBS claims that they paid to produce the episode, that their staff, crew, and resources were used. I take them at their word on this. But as a result, they took that to mean that this piece of public-access television was theirs, and so they sent DMCA takedown notices to Mr. Colbert’s fans hosting or reposting their favorite clips. Most people presume public-access television is the public’s, and not CBS’s. This was interpreted as CBS going to war with Mr. Colbert the day after his show ended. So, CBS did not engage in a widespread censorship campaign against Mr. Colbert’s public-access television stunt—they funded it as a cute throwback to Mr. Colbert’s first appearance on Only in Monroe in 2015 before he began The Late Show.
So, CBS thought they were doing a kindness. But content creators really fucking hate getting copyright struck, and from a company like Paramount, it is the equivalent of having Goliath come up into David’s house to smack the breakfast burrito from his hand.
CBS fêted the administration, which notoriously hates the media, at a private reception before the WHCD, and, of course, canceled Mr. Colbert.
CBS buried the 60 Minutes report on the inhumane conditions of CECOT before it could air—the Salvadoran prison where the administration was sending immigrants without trial, a prison that President Nayib Bukakke (the “world’s coolest dictator,” he styles himself; the cunt) says nobody shall ever return from. It leaked anyway, and here is the report they did not want you to watch:
Why treat this as good faith? In the shakeup that followed, CBS fired the correspondent who reported that segment, Sharyn Alfonsi, and purged most of the show’s senior production ranks, including executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, and producers Matthew Polevoy and Guy Campanile; lost the beloved Gray Fox, Anderson Cooper; and handed the executive producer’s chair to Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter. American Kingpin is a good book—I often wish I could read it again for the first time!—but nothing in it suggests the man would make a fine executive producer of a flagship weekly news program.
And also: the Ellisons are not regarded well after having acquired TikTok, Paramount, and soon Warner Bros.; having laid off thousands of employees; and having seemingly censored criticism of Israel and Mr. Trump on TikTok. Who would give them the benefit of the doubt in a drama they caused? The Messrs. Ellison are regarded as agents of Mr. Trump, not supplicants, canny billionaires who cut a few deals and get ahead, but as state media, subordinate to the executive branch. They did that shit to themselves.
As someone in the talks-shit-about-politicians space, the freedom of speech to do that is very important to me. Mr. Colbert was strong, supported by every type of American elite, and still had the whole Late Show institution demolished to hurt him. If someone tried to take my humble blog, I would give them my lunch money, too. Mr. Colbert can comfortably “hang up his hat,” if he likes, but then the rest of us will surely fall.
Mr. Colbert is co-writing the J.R.R. Tolkien movie Shadow of the Past, which covers the events of the Fellowship of the Ring that were omitted from the overlong Peter Jackson movie. This means Tom Bombadil, that merry fellow. I wish I could be happy for his opportunity, but it is a WB movie—which means after the corrupt Paramount-WB buyout occurs, then Mr. Colbert will be again working for the Ellisons.
Paramount-CBS is mad at him, too. CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, The Free Press founder and general shill the Ellisons installed atop the newsroom, was pissed about a Colbert bit that mocked her and CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, showing Mr. Dokoupil covering Mr. Trump’s China trip from “the wrong China,” marooned in Taiwan because he failed to sort his visa. He was depicted with his head jammed in a pumpkin while Ms. Weiss swung a tiny mallet at it. Sucks to suck. CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, by Puck’s account, issued a “specific directive” that CBS Mornings ignore the finale of its own flagship late-night program.
It is not, exactly, that I think Mr. Colbert alone can stop this evil bullshit. Even if there were a One Ring whose destruction would end this age of evil, one comic cannot take the task alone. He is not The Hobbit. In this metaphor, that is the American People.
Mr. Colbert’s power, used well or weakly, is like that of the wizard Gandalf, who bore Narya, the ruby-set Ring of Fire given to him by Círdan the Shipwright, who said it would “rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill.” Gandalf brought that ring to dying nations, like Gondor, Rohan, and Dale, and gave them the courage to defy the tyrant Sauron.
Why gas a man up by comparing him to a magical principality? Because that warmth, that human hearth Mr. Colbert offered, was stolen. Reactionaries liberally use the phrase: “Remember what they took from you” to refer to everything from the nuclear family to their favorite cartoon breasts, but if they credit themselves for canceling Mr. Colbert, then they should suffer an appropriate measure of resentment.
No matter how many BuzzBallz I smash to numb the pain of change—of losing a television host I like. The gentleness and gentility Mr. Colbert possessed alongside the restrained power to drive critical blows are virtues I struggle to share. Unlike Mr. Colbert, I cannot abstain from calling Mr. Trump a bitch at every sunrise and sunset.
I hope the next coming of Mr. Colbert avoids working contracted to the so-called mainstream media, where Messrs. Trump and Carr can try to fuck him again. In my fantasies, Mr. Colbert gathers the misfits, such as Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, and Terry Moran, everybody exiled from the television at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, and assembles like a Voltron his own media giant that cannot be bought and sold. Maybe. Or perhaps a podcast or YouTube channel, but that seems beneath the moment. He will return. I only worry if he returns in a form insufficient, though I confess I cannot identify exactly what would be equal to his potential.
In a recent interview, former President Barack Obama barely quirked a brow when Mr. Colbert floated a presidential bid of his own for 2028. Mr. Obama even entertained the idea as well within the current range of possibilities and suggested Mr. Colbert could do “significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen.”
Mr. Colbert, horrified, then argued against his own candidacy. It was always the blogosphere fantasy that either he or Mr. Stewart would run. Mr. Stewart has disparaged the idea for years, and Mr. Colbert obviously does not lust for power either. Yet I think he would concede, as the cliché goes, that lacking a lust for power is a qualifier for honorably bearing it.
My preference is for a traditional candidate to make America fucking normal again. But after two terms of a reality television president, with multiple other television hosts and contestants employed in our government, obviously there is a pipeline of content creator to politician becoming a terrible tradition of our age. At least as far as stars go, Mr. Colbert is one of the kindest. It may not only be a talking point that traditional politicians are now unviable for the presidency. And to be fair, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had his own television show, Servant of the People, in which he played a high-school history teacher swept into the presidency after a viral classroom rant against corruption, before he proved that a comedian may be exactly as sharp as the role demands.
The benefits of an actual insult comic should not be understated. Mr. Trump thinks his jokes and nicknames were the keys to his success. And former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie brags his brutal debate takedown of then-Senator Marco Rubio’s “memorized 25-second speech” sent Little Marco to the wilderness. Vice President Jim Dave Vance is a fast talker. If he is the 2028 Republican nominee, it would be advantageous if he faces a Democrat who will not be flabbergasted by his lies or flummoxed by his shape-shifting logic to respond smoothly.
I wanted badly to say, “Colbert Must Return” without invoking the phrase “Return of the King,” because I, like Mr. Colbert, celebrate NO KINGS days. I am not suggesting that I think he should be president, nor any other specific job. But America needs him as the leader he has tried not to make himself.
Is it odd to feel disconcerted watching someone so powerful still be at the mercy of an authoritarian regime? It is. Stephen Fry played a late-night host in WB’s V for Vendetta who was murdered for airing a vaudeville routine mocking his country’s leader. Mr. Colbert only had his show ended, but if the end result is not as grisly, the intent is the same: to criticize the regime is to be targeted by it. Worse, Messrs. Trump and Carr no longer cloak that despotic instinct in excuses. They want to claim the scalp in public. They need the public to see them victorious. Which is why Mr. Colbert must return. If he slips into the bowels of Middle Earth and leaves us to fly on, how could our hearts and spirits not be heavy? If the regime can claim victory over so great an ally, what hope have we?
Should Mr. Colbert appear clad in white, ready to articulate this GOP’s evil once more, it disproves that they have the power to shape the American forum, or that they ever could. Each time that is disproven, when they fail to subjugate a foe, the sum of their strength seems weaker, and waning. Eventually, like the Dark Lord Sauron, this regime and its ideologies will discorporate, like a mean show, but the horrors they wrought will scar the United States; some things lost now may be restored, and others will not.
The final line of The Lord of the Rings is: “Well, I’m back.” Pray we are not kept waiting too long.