Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park last night let loose a fusillade of poisoned barbs against the country’s would-be dicktator as well as skewering Paramount just after signing a $1.5 billion deal for additional episodes.
“South Park delivered the biggest beat down to Trump in history,” Adam Kinsinger responded on Threads.
Less than a day after the creators of Comedy Central’s South Park reached a reportedly $1.5 billion deal with Paramount Plus, Matt Stone and Trey Parker dropped a bombshell episode to kick off Season 27 that depicts Donald Trump with a minuscule penis and in bed with Satan.
The premiere episode arrives the week after CBS‘ abrupt decision to end The Late Show, which Stephen Colbert has hosted for a decade, in 2026. While the network claimed the cancellation was financial, it drew backlash, since the announcement came days after Colbert criticized Paramount, which owns both CBS and Comedy Central, over its decision to agree to a settlement with Trump.
In the 30-minute episode, titled “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” that likely has Paramount and Skydance Media banging their heads against a wall, Stone and Parker jab at Trump’s obsession with using lawsuits to silence media and political opponents, ChatGPT, the injection of religion into America’s public schools, government censorship, and corporations caving to pressure. (“Who the hell does the president think he is?” Eric Cartman says upon learning NPR was canceled. “The government can’t cancel a show. I mean, what show are they going to cancel next?”)
In the premiere episode, Trump sues the town of South Park for criticizing him. Their settlement includes the town producing a pro-Trump PSA. Someone’s head will explode.
With ZERO fucks to give, South Park skewering Trump over the Epstein files. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣👇 pic.twitter.com/l2nQHyvDYn
Nicholas Kristoff looked at three ways to undermine an autocrat back in May: “The first is mockery and humor — preferably salacious.” Last night’s South Park gets an “A.”
The James R. Browning U.S. Court of Appeals Building is a historic post office and courthouse building in San Francisco. Photo 2013 by Ken Lund via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Another bunch of AG Pam Bondi’s “rogue judges,” no doubt. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Wednesday declared unconstitutional Donald Trump’s executive order claiming to end birthright citizenship. They upheld a nationwide ban on its implementation. The Washington Post reports that the panel ruled 2-1 that his attempt to deny “automatic citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors” violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Trump acting in an unconstitutional manner? Shocking!
The appeals panel also affirmed a lower court’s nationwide injunction, calling the measure necessary and appropriate to protect the states from potential harm if Trump’s order took effect. The case was brought by a coalition of Democratic-led states and was first heard by a district judge in Seattle.
The decision came despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month siding with the Trump administration’s argument that several federal judges had exceeded their authority in issuing universal injunctions against the birthright citizenship order.
“The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” Judge Ronald M. Gould wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins. They were both appointed to the federal bench by former president Bill Clinton. Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented in part.
The majority found that this case fell under one of the exceptions SCOTUS left open in its universal injunctions ruling for certified class actions.
The Trump judge dissented over the universal injunction issued by the lower court and disagreed over the states’ standing to bring the case. Citing the separation of powers doctrine, Bumatay asserts that it’s important that the judiciary stay in its lane.
No comment on the president staying in his.
The 9th Circuit’s decision means that two nationwide injunctions are in effect and signals that the case could quickly return to the Supreme Court to determine whether the rulings are consistent with its order.
“The court agrees that the president cannot redefine what it means to be American with the stroke of a pen,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, whose state was among those that brought the lawsuit, said on social media. “He cannot strip away the rights, liberties, and protections of children born in our country.”
Trump’s SCOTUS majority will get another chance shortly to swat down this ruling. Stay tuned.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear had plenty to say about the culture wars that have divided his party as he laid groundwork here this week for a possible 2028 presidential run.
As some prominent Democrats warn that the party has gone too far left on trans rights, the governor from the deep-red South quoted scripture to explain why he vetoed “every single piece of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation” that GOP state lawmakers sent to his desk. As some institutions back off racial justice initiatives that have faced a fierce backlash and that Republicans call “woke,” Beshear said he was proud to make Juneteenth an executive branch holiday and remove a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky Capitol.
“I’m a proud pro-choice governor, I’m a proud pro-LGBTQ+ governor, and I’m a proud pro-diversity governor,” Beshear said at his final stop, a dinner for Democrats in conservative Georgetown County. “Now some people would tell you that a Democrat can’t win in a state like mine or yours with that resume. Yet here I am.”
Beshear occupies a singular position in the early 2028 Democratic sweepstakes as a two-term governor in a state President Donald Trump won by 30 points who is pitching himself as a blueprint for the party to start winning again. As Democrats fight over whether they paid a price for moving too far left on some social issues, Beshear is using his red-state experience to argue the party need not run away from those topics
Democrats can win voters who disagree with them on those polarizing issues, Beshear argued, if they do a better job of explaining their reasoning and focus most of their energy on basic needs such as jobs, infrastructure and health care. Over two days of packed receptions and private meetings in South Carolina, he urged Democrats totalk “like normal human beings,” cut down on activist-driven jargon and show voters they are focused on bread-and-butter issues.
“Folks, this isn’t an either-or,” Beshear told a crowded reception at a Charleston law office on Thursday. “We can stick up for everything we believe in while still convincing the American people that we are going to spend every single day working on those things that lift everybody up.”
That pitch was part of a broader upbeat message that Beshear took around the state as Democrats reel from Trump’s second term, soul-search about their losses last fall and debate what they need to do differently. He pointed to his 5-point reelection victory in ruby-red Kentucky two years ago as evidence that Democrats could “win everywhere” with good governance and a determination to be “the party of common sense, common ground and getting things done.”
I just struck me as I was reading this that he is selling the same sort of unapologetic, optimistic positive message in rural America that Zohran Mamdani is selling in urban America. It does sound very fresh after all the darkness of the Trump era.
This guy too:
BREAKING: James Talarico just laid out the roadmap for how Democrats can communicate and win. This guy is the future of the party. pic.twitter.com/IC9tEU5jcH
— Democratic Wins Media (@DemocraticWins) July 23, 2025
I can believe that people are thirsting for a little bit of positivity right now. Something to think about.
On the other hand, I am not up for another round of “let’s not look in the rearview mirror, we need to move forward not backwards” bs that lets the criminals off the hook. That’s what got us to where we are today.
We don’t need vengeance. But unless there is accountability for what they’ve done, we are lost.
Axios loves Trump and can’t understand why the country is appalled at all the “winning.”
Perhaps losing our democracy isn’t the “win” they think it is. Maybe everything he’s doing to immigrants, universities, law firms, media the Department of Justice, DOGE, tariffs, Ukraine, Medicaid ALL OF IT, is HORRIFYING.
I guess it doesn’t occur to them that most people don’t want any of this bullshit.
This is Axios. They are the problem.
A new low for Trump, as the USS Donald Trump takes on a lot of water. His net approval has dropped 17 pt since January to -11 pt now.
Underwater on all major issues from immigration (-5 pt) to Epstein (-37 pt).
After years watching Hungary suffocate under the weight of its democratic collapse, I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.
Take the judiciary. I met leaders of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body in October 2022 to discuss their work. For months afterward, their faces (and mine) were plastered in the papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary. The response from other powerful judges? Silence.
Or take the private sector. Since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010, the state has awarded billions in public contracts to his son-in-law and childhood friend, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. What have Hungarian business leaders said? Nothing.
Last year, when Mr. Orban’s close associates reportedly told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, did other multinational companies speak up? They did not.
Hungarians with little power or privilege to lose would occasionally protest. But those with power remained reliably, pliably silent.
The American officials and academics who, like me, lived in Hungary during this period would often tell ourselves stories to explain this submissiveness: that docility is rooted in Hungary’s oppressive communist past, that its democracy was simply too young to withstand a strongman.
Then I returned to the United States, and what I’ve witnessed over these past months at home has exposed those stories as wishful thinking.
Here, too, powerful people are responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation, convinced that they can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.
It’s pretty terrifying. Here we are, the oldest democracy on earth and we can’t handle a petty, corrupt, 79 year old imbecile. The experiment is failing. Badly.
One of the most indelible political moments of our time took place back in 2006 at the White House Correspondent’s Association annual dinner, fatuously known as “The Nerd Prom.” The yearly ritual, featuring red carpets and celebrity guests, remains one of the most cringe institutions in DC, a relic of a time when the press and the political establishment could pretend that the country wasn’t descending rapidly into total dysfunction. By 2006, the ceremony had already outlived that dubious rationale what with the country still mired in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the people souring on President George W. Bush, so the time was ripe for an epic roast of establishment journalism and DC politics. The comedian who delivered it was one of the master parodists of our time. I speak, of course, of the great Stephen Colbert who appeared in the guise of his alter ego, a right wing pundit modeled on then Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, to zing journalism and the Bush administration as only he could.
Colbert had perfected the character on his nightly Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” where he often would often skewer Republicans and the right wing press but on this night he did it right to their faces. It caused a stir, with some commentary suggesting that perhaps Colbert had “gone too far” but nobody sued anyone or had a public tantrum.
Colbert would eventually shed his conservative character taking over the CBS Late Night show in 2015 when David Letterman retired. But his political satire remained just as sharp, especially when Donald Trump came on the scene. Trump is not known to have a sense of humor, certainly not about himself, so he was not amused. (In fact, he is said to have been motivated to enter the presidential race when he attended the 2012 White House Correspondents Dinner and was visibly upset when President Obama made fun of him.)
Colbert has been extremely successful in the role, usually winning the time slot. But this past week he was let go by the parent company of CBS, Paramount in the wake of their settlement of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the company for $16 million. (Apparently, he’s already received it and it’s burning a hole in his pocket.)The suit was based upon the contention that CBS had edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris last fall, which Trump absurdly claimed was election interference. No one expected the suit to prevail but Trump essentially extorted Paramount into settling with a promise to obstruct a big merger for which they needed government approval if they didn’t. Within days of the settlement they announced that they would be ending The Late Show altogether, insisting that it was purely a financial decision having nothing to do with the settlement, which no one believes.
It’s hard to know which would be worse: if Trump demanded that Colbert be fired and they agreed to do it or if they fired him as a little gesture of good will to please the president. It’s horrific, either way. But it is par for the course these days ad one institution after another caves to the most serious threat to free speech since the Red Scare in the 1950s.
It’s easy to shrug this off — it’s only a comedian losing a job. Big deal. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it:
Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is ecstatic as you can see in this Truth Social post, and clearly is prepared to go even farther:
Paramount issued a statement saying the agreement “does not include PSAs or anything related to PSAs” but Skydance, the company that’s buying Paramount, didn’t comment fuelling speculation that this “side-deal” may have come from their side. The New York Post and Fox News both reported that the company is happy to set aside the time “in support of conservative causes” in the future.
If that’s true, Skydance has agreed to become a full-fledged propaganda arm of the Trump administration which may seem somewhat quaint considering that Fox News already fills that role. But this takes it to a whole new level, following the playbook of the modern authoritarian states like Russia and Hungary. The question is whether the rest of the media companies will follow.
If you refuse to see what is happening, the cancellation of the Colbert show should open your eyes.
I want to explain to you what a censorship state looks like – where a corrupt government gives favors to media that suppresses criticism of the regime. pic.twitter.com/qxWJ7hqBsE
It remains to be seen if they too will find a way to “settle” and make Trump feel like a big winner, therefore buying themselves some good will from the administration. That seems to be how this works. But it’s still startling to realize that Trump’s paeans to free speech and all the pro-Trump free speech warriors who called for the fainting couch over the Biden administration’s requests that the social media companies monitor COVID disinformation are now completely forgotten.
This isn’t the only example of Trump and his henchmen cracking down on free expression. They are arresting and detaining people based upon their writings in student newspapers. They are demanding that private institutions like universities, corporations and law firms ban any discussion of diversity and inclusion or face losing vital funding and civil rights lawsuits from the Department of Justice. Trump even threatened to pull support for a new football stadium in Washington DC unless the team reinstates the racist “Redskins” name.
The U.S. government is openly censoring anyone with whom it disagrees and demanding that others spread its propaganda, all under threat of blocking their ability to do business or removing their funding. It’s blackmail, pure and simple. Unfortunately, it appears that most of our institutions are too craven or too frightened to defend their own freedom. I guess it’s going to be up to the comedians to fight the power if nobody else will.
Where does the time go when a neighbor retired from the NIH is telling you about more staff cuts on the way (and the fate of friends) at his agency? So this will be brief.
James Greenberg summarizes the decades-long campaign to destroy iour democracy. He begins:
Democracies don’t collapse in silence. They collapse in stories—told over decades, repeated until they feel like common sense. In the United States, the Far-right didn’t just attack public institutions. They replaced the very idea of the public with a narrative of betrayal.
The Far-right didn’t just defund, deregulate, and dismantle. They redefined legitimacy. What they couldn’t capture, they undermined. What they couldn’t dismantle, they discredited. And they always gave people a story.
And hoo-boy, this sounds like Orwell:
The story they told was simple: the real America—the hard-working, God-fearing, taxpaying heartland—was being stolen. Government no longer served the people, but elites, foreigners, and freeloaders. Public schools indoctrinated. Taxes funded tyranny. Regulation strangled freedom. Elections were rigged. Only a strongman could set things right.
Truth was beside the point. Familiarity gave the story power. For decades, right-wing media had laid the groundwork—portraying public workers as parasites, government as wasteful, and collective programs as theft. What began as neoliberal suspicion of the state became a populist assault on the very idea of the common good. Public discourse turned performative. Trust became weakness. Outrage became truth.
Ignorance is Strength, of course, and they bred it in Petri dishes of right-wing think tanks, talk radio, and Murdoch media.
The capital-L left needs the tell a better story. And as my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio insists, “If you want people to come to your party, you gotta throw a better party.”
Ridicule and fun have been integral to every anti-authoritarian movement across place and time.If you want people to come to your party, you gotta throw a better party. If you want people to have the courage to stand up to their justified fear of the leader, you must make said leader look small.
The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”
You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.
So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule.
I don’t have a tee shirt. I’m going kinetic at another of our weekly drive-time sign protests tomorrow. My signs are 3’x1′, Freeway Blogger style, printed in big, black letters meant to be read not just seen. I rotate them overhead so drivers coming from each direction can see each side. Drivers honk, wave, give thumbs-up, and feel a sense that they are not alone. We’re out there having a party they might want to join. Some do. Get out from behind your keyboards some, okay?
American: We have freedom of speech in my country. I’m free to criticize my president as much as I want.
Russian: But is true in Soviet Union! I too am free to criticize your president as much as I want.
Let’s get serious. Because this is getting serious. It started with law firms that defended Donald Trump’s enemies caving to his threats. There are his attacks on universities. His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal. CBS announced last week it would cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” next year. Colbert, long a Trump critic, had just skewered his Paramount bosses’ decision to pay a $16m settlement over Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” Paramount is trying to convince Trump’s Federal Communications Commission to approve the $8 billion sale of CBS to Skydance. Colbert told his audience it amounted to a “big fat bribe.”
And that’s just the prominent and powerful. Trump threatens to arrest enemies, harassesU.S. citizens, attacks judges, and extorts other countries with tariffs he has no legitimate power to levy.
Then there is the arresting of anyone who looks to ICE’s Craigslist new-hires like an undocumented immigrant. And deporting them to a gulag with no due process. But not before Trump’s agents warehouse them in its Everglades concentration camp. Or strips them of their humanity and makes shackled men eat like animals from plates set on chairs in front of them.
See photos above for where this is heading. The U.S. has done it before in this century. Don’t think it won’t again.
Of appeasers and crocodiles
David Pressman, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, issues a stark warning based on what he witnessed there under Viktor Orban (free link):
Take the judiciary. I met leaders of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body in October 2022 to discuss their work. For months afterward, their faces (and mine) were plastered in the papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary. The response from other powerful judges? Silence.
Or take the private sector. Since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010, the state has awarded billions in public contracts to his son-in-law and childhood friend, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. What have Hungarian business leaders said? Nothing.
Last year, when Mr. Orban’s close associates reportedly told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, did other multinational companies speak up? They did not.
Hungarians with little power or privilege to lose would occasionally protest. But those with power remained reliably, pliably silent.
Americans explained it away as Hungary’s democratic traditions being too shallowly rooted to resist a strongman. What Pressman sees here at home under Trump is the same appeasement and delusional thinking that if Americans give a little they “can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.”
Hungarian judges, investors, executives, entire business sectors, made deals. Writes Pressman, “Going along is what did them in.” Like Orban, Trump believes everyone has a price. Prominent American businesses and institutions are proving him right.
To the stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: Don’t dupe yourselves. The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters.
It’d be nice if we saw more of it.
Most of the rest of us are keeping our heads down like good little peasants.
“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”
Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.
Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”
Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.
She torched Trump’s order as “reckless,” claiming that it directly “goes against” what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.
Say it ain’t so! Trump is stabbing you in the back? That’s so unlike him.
Still:
Under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.
I’m fairly sure Murkowski knew this would probably happen. She agreed to give Susan Collins the free vote since she’s up for election in ’26 out of some misplaced loyalty to the GOP and made the calculation that it would be forgotten by the time she’s up in ’28. None of this has anything to do with actual governance. It’s just power.
He’s desperate to change the subject. He even coached the Republicans in Congress to say that Obama stole the election every time someone brings up Epstein.
[Trump]spent the weekend suggesting prominent Democrats should be prosecuted over bogus right-wing conspiracy theories, and on Tuesday he said it outright.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Trump was asked which Democratic figures the Justice Department should target specifically in light of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent call for Obama administration officials to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” over claims that they “manufactured” intelligence to allege Russia worked to get Trump elected in 2016.
“It would be President Obama, he started it,” Trump replied. “The leader of the gang was President Obama. Barack Hussein Obama, have you heard of him?” he continued. “He’s guilty, it’s not a question. This was treason. This was every word you could think of. They tried to steal the election.”
“This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup,” Trump said later. “It was with Hillary Clinton, with all of these other people, but Obama headed it up. … This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”
Donald Trump, July 2018: "I accept our intelligence community's conclusion that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place." pic.twitter.com/11sWLsZ1Br
Then-Senator Marco Rubio described Russia’s interference as a deliberate campaign of “active measures taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to influence and to potentially manipulate American public opinion.”
