Growing Fascism: Canceling Stephen Colbert

Update:  New reporting suggests the Felon's FCC chair demanded Colbert's termination.

Hitler came to power he and his Nazi goons sought to silence critics and either coerced news outlets into complicity through threats and dangling financial rewards or shut the down.   Then, as is seemingly the case now in 2025 America, many rich industrialist and media titans decided it was better to go along with the Nazi regime than to support resistance. Ultimately Germany and the millions of Germans who had their homes destroyed or lost their lives in WWII paid a horrific price.  This lesson from history is lost on the powers that be at CBS and it's parent, Paramount, who have capitulated the Felon by settling a lawsuit that could have been won and lining the Felon's pockets and have now decided to terminate Stephen Colbert's late night show. Why, because the Felon, like Hitler cannot tolerate criticism, and disliked Colbert's all too accurate criticism and mockery.  Of course, CBS and Paramount are not the only targets of the Felon's ire - the Wall Street Journal and its parent company have just been sued for libel by the Felon for reporting on the likely true story of a birthday card the Felon gave to Jeffrey Epstein.  Ironically, the Felon has boasted that he can't wait to depose Rupert Murdock, forgetting that he himself will now be subject to being deposed by Murdock and his companies.  I suspect that refusing to answer questions under oath will do little to end the ongoing focus on Epstein and his purported "client list" that many believe includes the felon.  A column in the New York Times looks at CBS and Paramount's self-prostitution to the felon and the dangers such behavior poses. Here are excerpts:

This week, Stephen Colbert announced that CBS is canceling his late-night show, days after he spoke out against the network’s owner for settling a lawsuit with President Trump for $16 million — a lawsuit it would probably have won. The Colbert news was yet another dark moment for an American media company seemingly bowing and scraping to Mr. Trump, obeying in advance, hoping to make a deal.

Barry Diller explained the willingness to settle to Maureen Dowd as needing to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.” Of course, the “guillotine” was maybe not being able to do the corporate deal you wanted — Paramount, CBS’s parent company, is in the midst of closing a merger with Skydance that requires approval from the Trump administration — which is not the same as having your head cut off. But maybe to a billionaire, not getting your money is the same as being decapitated. This is not the first time Paramount and its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, have been accused of going along to get along.

Stephen Colbert went to CBS in a more innocent era, in 2015, before Donald Trump won the presidency the first time. He’d gotten the gig, to replace the not particularly political ironist David Letterman, after spending nine years doing “The Colbert Report,” a show in which he parodied a Fox News host — playing a character largely based on Bill O’Reilly, with all of his huffy bluster. In taking the bigger stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Colbert toned his politics down at first, but it wasn’t until he became a full-throated critic of the new administration that he found his footing. People liked his mostly gentle truth-telling, night after night. They still do; his is the No. 1 show on an admittedly contracting late-night schedule.

Viewers still want political content, but they are not provided with it as they were in Mr. Trump’s first term. #Resistance was good business. . . . this time around, as he [the Felon] has done with everything else that once stood in his way, from Harvard to fancy law firms to the Federal Reserve, he is determined to crush any dissent using any tools he has available. So just the mere possibility of a holdup on a media deal, which could undermine the vast wealth of a media heiress, seems as if it could be enough to end an impertinent TV show.

This has happened before. . . . members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee declined to give records of their organization to the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1947 were convicted of contempt of Congress. Like Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Trump is not a fan of antifascism.

In 1950, Grandpa ended up in Mill Point Federal Prison in West Virginia. Later, my brother and I would agree that the stint (and the year of media attention) was most likely a huge boon to his writing career. But at the time, in the years after he was imprisoned, the family existed in a state of terror, with Grandpa and his family deciding to live in Mexico for a while because they couldn’t get passports to go elsewhere.

But I never thought I would someday live in an America that looked quite so much like my grandfather’s Cold War nightmare. Maybe this is in some ways worse, since there isn’t even a Soviet Union we’re supposedly battling. It’s just to glorify this man who really doesn’t like to be made fun of.

CBS said that its decision was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” And maybe that’s true. But maybe it was the “guillotine at your head.” Many people in America didn’t need to actually get blacklisted to change their behavior, to turn their friends in, to go along to get along. That’s the point of authoritarian coercion: It’s a motivator.

I grew up soft on episodes of “Murphy Brown” and “The West Wing.” I believed that the arc of history bent toward Barack Obama, and technology solving the world’s problems, not causing them. I thought if we could laugh at MAGA hard enough, maybe Mr. Trump would go away, ashamed. But we should realize that under this administration, being funny and famous will not protect you. Even being rich won’t.

We’ll never be able to mock Mr. Trump into submission. Maybe that was our mistake. A quarter-century ago, there was once a very popular satirical TV show in Russia, too, called “Kukly” (“Puppets”). Vladimir Putin didn’t like being made fun of, either. It was off the air by the end of 2002, and the once-spunky Russian media industry was brought under control by his allies. Mr. Colbert ran a TV show, which is primarily a machine to attract viewers and sell advertising to play for that audience — neither of which it, or any TV show, does as well as it once did — not to change the world. We’ll have to do that ourselves, and we can’t count on the help of the timid billionaires, not when they have money at stake.