A sobering conversation
Remaining late night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart and Seth Meyers stood up last night for suspended colleague Jimmy Kimmel. In part, with satirical fawning over the most insecure man ever to occupy the Oval Office, a man whose skin is as thin as his hands are small.
Colbert, whose show was cancelled in July, had called out his own network’s $16 million settlement with the White House over a CBS “60 Minutes” segment. It was mere conincidence that his network’s parent company had an $8 billion merger deal between Paramount Global and Skydance Media pending before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Colbert on Thursday insisted, “With an autocrat, you cannot give an inch. And if ABC thinks that this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive.”
Colbert went after FCC chair Brendan Carr, calling the Trump 2.0 administration’s strong-arming of networks. That’s because shutting down political speech is “a serious threat to our freedoms.” So said Brendan Carr 1.0 in February 2020. That was then.
“Oh, man,” said Colbert, “do not tell Brendan Carr that Brendan Carr said that or he’s going to get Brendan Carr to cancel Brendan Carr.”
Regarding free speech, a former Marine, 28, walked up to the drive-time sign protest yesterday afternoon and began playing a conservative version of evangelical “20 Questions” with the woman beside me. (Perhaps he just had an impulse to spar with the opposition, a la Charlie Kirk.*) Playing dumb, he asked me about my First Amendment-themed sign and what it meant. He wondered why I seemed so personally invested. Maybe “NEXT YOU” was exaggerating.
Maybe because I have a threat letter (similar to this one) sitting in my printer tray and sent to me in 2019 on behalf of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Only it’s dated seven weeks earlier.
Jon Stewart made a special The Daily Show appearance last night in solidarity with Kimmel. But he had as a guest Nobel Peace Prize-winner Maria Ressa from the Philippines.
It’s a sobering conversation.
* “20 Questions” is where the streetcorner evangelical asks if you’ve been “saved” and, if you say yes, they interrogate you in a game intended to expose the heretic. Because if you’re not attending their church, you must be one.
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