JIM GERAGHTY: Ultimately, Math Ended The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

You can be like Chris Hayes, Brian Stelter, Vox, The New Republic, Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives, and choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of The Late Show is a sinister plot by spineless, cowardly corporate executives who are terrified of irking President Trump and who desperately want the Federal Communications Commission to approve the merger of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, with Skydance Media. (And, it should be noted, Colbert’s choice to  turn the show into a four-nights-a-week version of the speaker list at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention.)  That is a dramatic world, with noble heroes and dastardly villains, plotting against the interests of the public, punishing a brave comedian, smashing dissent, and bending the knee in obedience to a ruthless, vindictive, power-mad president.

Or you choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show, as the Wall Street Journal reports today. And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free.

Reuters adds, “the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.” If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem, and an indication that it isn’t a reflection of a one-year blip or temporary economic pressures.

That is a much less exciting world. In that world, Colbert’s nightly denunciation of Trump was not much of a factor in the show’s fate, other than maybe alienating roughly half the potential audience for the show.

Charles Cooke adds:

I don’t think they envisioned that there could ever be a step five. As Abe Greenwald of Commentary wrote in his newsletter yesterday:

Liberals are learning that there’s no such thing as lifetime tenure, eternal cultural dominance, and unending access audiences or the levers of power. To be honest, many of us outside the liberal establishment are learning it too. I’d become half-resigned to the endurance of the liberal Pangea. But the ground is now shaking beneath everyone’s feet.

Related: From the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday: NPR CEO Katherine Maher, Who Once Said ‘America Is Addicted to White Supremacy,’ Now Says NPR Needs Federal Funding To Support ‘Rural Communities.’

NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who once called America “addicted to white supremacy,” is warning that looming federal funding cuts to her left-wing broadcast organization will disproportionately hurt rural communities.

“The primary impact of this potential rescission is going to hurt communities where they need support most, which are rural stations—stations that serve communities that do not have access to other forms of local news, emergency reporting, emergency alerting,” Maher told CBS News on Thursday morning, just hours after the Senate voted to cut funding to public broadcasting.

“I think that the place where we’re seeing the most traction is senators who represent communities where there are large rural communities, large tribal communities,” she said Wednesday on CNN. “Broadband service is not universal, and heck, cell phone service is not universal.”

Those comments follow Maher repeatedly disparaging white Americans.

A decade ago, Rob Long wrote that Johnny Carson broadcasted in a television universe that consisted of “three big channels—and maybe an old movie on one of those fuzzy UHF stations—so if you didn’t like what was on, you were out of luck. Network television didn’t compete with cable channels or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It competed with silence.”

Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics states that “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” But I really don’t think he was envisioning the mindset of network TV and public radio executives who convinced themselves — or at the least tried to convince others — that they still worked in the mass media world of 1972.

NICK FREITAS: The NY Times Doesn’t Understand ‘Where Men Have Gone’ (Video).

The Times article that Freitas references has the subhead, “So many men have retreated from intimacy, hiding behind firewalls, filters and curated personas, dabbling and scrolling. We miss you.”

Yes, how on earth could that have happened?

Nobody wants to say this but the well-intended metoo exposés metastasized into hysterical witchhunts, creating an atmosphere of fear that altered human mating habits for a generation

TLDR we’ve been scaring the bros https://t.co/wgIOpXpFxR

— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) July 19, 2025

NEVER IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN COMEDY HAVE SO MANY CONTRIBUTED TO SO FEW LAUGHS:

Many of which presumably are his “comedy” writers. In his 2003 obit for Bob Hope, Mark Steyn wrote:

If Hope started out as the first modern comic, he quickly became the first post-modern one. Other comedians had writers, but they didn’t talk about them. Radio gobbled up your material so you needed fellows on hand to provide more. But Hope not only used writers, he made his dependence on them part of the act:

I have an earthquake emergency kit at my house. It’s got food, water and half-a-dozen writers.

As Megyn Kelly asked yesterday, if Colbert has such a large staff behind him, why do they churn out such unfunny material? How does Colbert get up in front of a studio audience and not know his material is terrible?

Exit quote: “CBS was basically running a high-production-values MSNBC late night variety show and wanted advertisers to act like it was a Magically Broadly Popular program coming off a banger prime-time lineup in 1987.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Elmo Goes Reich Edition.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Ukraine offers its front line as test bed for foreign weapons.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: The media has such a bad case of TDS that they are defending high fructose corn syrup now.

Remember when the MAHA agenda used to be considered a lefty agenda? Organic whole foods and crunchy lifestyles were considered hippie fads.

My, how things change.

Trump made them defend high fructose corn syrup in coke. https://t.co/zvtCwBKQoH

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) July 18, 2025

Yes, we’ve got NBC and the New York Times writing hit pieces on Coca-Cola because Trump is pushing to [checks notes] replace high fructose corn syrup with pure cane sugar.

(Also known as “Mexican Coke.”)

Which seems odd, considering their former boss’s take on it in 2007, long before his brain turned to high fructose applesauce:

APRÈS COLBERT, LE DELUGE: In his 1991 authorized biography of Woody Allen (which published about five minutes before Soon-Yi Previn became a household name), Eric Lax quoted Larry Gelbart, who adapted M*A*S*H into a TV series for CBS, and executive produced it for its first four seasons:

“A comedian is not your garden-variety-type person,” says Gelbart, who has written for nearly every major one in the past forty years.

*Given years of success and power, he’s going to get more and more bizarre. Jackie Gleason moved whole networks to other parts of the Union because he wanted to broadcast from there.” Gleason lived in Miami, from where many of his shows were broadcast. “They have more power than is really good for them and they don’t hesitate to use it.”

But Gleason could get away which such antics because his show was watched by 32 million people a week. Johnny Carson would move the Tonight Show from New York City to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, but what could NBC do? Carson simply was late night TV, as the New Yorker noted last year:

For thirty years, from October 1, 1962, to May 22, 1992, Johnny Carson presided over American popular culture from the 11:30 P.M. throne of “The Tonight Show.” At its peak, the show was regularly watched by seventeen million people. (The current late-night ratings winner, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” averages about 2.5 million viewers.)

Which is why, Ace of Spades writes, Colbert did his anti-Trump, anti-CBS freakout last week, only after CBS told him that they would be parting ways with him:

Paramount says the decision is “purely financial.”

Boy they’re not kidding.

CBS lost $40 million on Colbert’s show this year alone.

Sources inside CBS have suddenly become much more forthcoming about the sobering economics of late-night television in 2025–go figure– revealing that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has recently been running at an annual shortfall of $40 million.

If that sounds unthinkable for the #1 rated show at 11:35pm, consider this: as Matt Belloni reports today in Puck, back in 2018, all of late-night television combined generated $438 million in advertising revenue. By 2023, that number had been cut in half, and it has continued to fall.

Given that The Late Show–with its handsomely paid host and a staff of roughly 200 employees–reportedly costs CBS $100 million per year to produce, that $40 million figure becomes easier to understand.

Belloni also reports that CBS executives had been discussing the future of its Late Show franchise for months, and that Colbert’s team was informed around July Fourth that the show was in jeopardy.

Ah. As I suspected: Colbert “got brave” on July 7th and denounced his network only after the network told him they were cancelling his Regime “Comedy” propaganda hour.

(“Regime Comedy” was used by Ed Morrissey in his post.)

$40 million lost in a single year. And yet the left is OUTRAGED that one of their money-losing propagandists is losing his job.

Simpering fembots like Chris L. Hayes (an Allahpundit fave) are crying that firing their shareholder-value-destroying, no-advertisers-want-to-touch-them TV clowns means that Democracy Is Dying In Darkness.

Oh?

Skip to 5:00 if you want to see Stephen Colbert’s Regime “Comedy” in the past year.

Colbert tried to take a page out of the Smothers Brothers’ demise at CBS, and appear to go out as a brave truth teller, sticking it to the man, baby. In their 1986 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote:

[By 1968] The Smotherses became television’s symbol of dissent, and the power of their pulpit made them seem, to some, potentially galvanizing forces in that dissent; after the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago there were rumors they were being investigated by the FBI. Paranoia was fashionable then, and not always unjustified.

CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers in June of 1969, five months after Richard Nixon became President. The reason the network gave was that one of their shows had been turned in after the deadline stipulated in their contract, but Tommy Smothers, Mason Williams, Rob Reiner, and Steve Martin believe to this day the cancellation was politically motivated. “Nixon came in and we were off,” Smothers said. “We were thrown off the air because of our viewpoint on Vietnam.” They were also thrown off, Smothers adds, “because we had no ally in high places” at CBS. That was a key mistake that Lorne Michaels [creator of NBC’s Saturday Night Live], six years later, would not repeat.

Instead, Colbert was whiplashed by a combination of changing demographics and technology, while performing a show that would be far better suited to MSNBC or CNN than the successor to David Letterman’s 11:30 CBS show. (Colbert could likely land at either of those cable networks.) If Colbert thought he was a permanent television institution, no matter how hard to the left his show leaned, he wasn’t alone. Abe Greenwald’s Commentary newsletter today was titled “The Lost Liberal Dominion:”

PBS and NPR have been around for about 55 years, but it felt as if they’ve existed since the dawn of broadcasting. Whatever they once were, they now function as liberal messaging platforms. There are few good arguments for taxpayers footing the bill of any media organization, let alone those with aggressive political agendas. Congress has rightly voted to cut $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nationally, PBS and NPR get most of their funding from corporate sponsors and direct individual contributions. If their supporters can keep the lights on, good for them. If not, they will have demonstrated their superfluousness.

Stephen Colbert is hardly an institution. But this week, he serves as a good stand in for one: commercial media. Since 2015, Colbert hosted The Late Show, part of the glut of late-night talk-show leftism that arose in the Trump era. These are shows aimed at creating anti-Trump social media moments instead of delivering TV entertainment. And so, TV audiences became less than entertained. Puck News reports that The Late Show was losing CBS more than $40 million a year, so the network just pulled the plug. Meanwhile, the leader of the late-night pack is Fox News’ Gutfeld!, a lighthearted comedy show that, while right wing in nature, actually strives to be funny. The end of The Late Show will surely reverberate through TV Land with interesting consequences.

Liberals are learning that there’s no such thing as lifetime tenure, eternal cultural dominance, and unending access audiences or the levers of power. To be honest, many of us outside the liberal establishment are learning it too. I’d become half-resigned to the endurance of the liberal Pangea. But the ground is now shaking beneath everyone’s feet.

“#ResistanceMedia is going bankrupt. Regime Comms are being turned off, one by one. It’s all coming crashing down, and I couldn’t be happier,” Ace concludes.

UPDATE: If not CNN, MSNBC, or a podcast, Jim Treacher, with an assist from Grok, speculates another possible gig for Colbert next year: Has the Tide Turned Yet? Quite possibly.

THINK OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS WHAT IT REALLY IS: A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL PARTY: Minnesota State Senator Nicole Mitchell found guilty of first-degree burglary, possession of burglary tools.

In April 2024, Mitchell was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary after allegedly breaking into her stepmother’s Detroit Lakes home with the intent to take items that once belonged to her late father. A second felony charge, possession of burglary or theft tools, was later added by prosecutors.

Mitchell’s trial began on Monday and featured body-camera footage, several witnesses, and the senator testifying in her own defense. On Friday, the defense rested their case and both sides made their closing arguments.

During the trial, Becker County Attorney Brian McDonald argued that Mitchell’s guilt was demonstrated by statements she made on the morning she was arrested by police.

Those statements include “I have never done anything like this,” “There were just a couple things of my dad’s I wanted to come get,” “I’m clearly not good at this,” “I know I did something bad,” and “I just wanted to get a couple of my dad’s mementos.”

Additionally, the prosecution highlighted how Mitchell entered the house through an egress window under cover of darkness, was dressed in black clothing, had a flashlight with a sock covering it, and went to great efforts not to be noticed.

McDonald argued that Mitchell was in the home with the intent to steal items. He told jurors to “trust your eyes and ears, do not get distracted, use your common sense and good judgement.” The prosecutor warned the jury that Mitchell’s testimony was “carefully crafted to protect the one person that she cares the most about in this case, herself.”

* * * * * * * * *

The convictions will have major ramifications for Mitchell personally and the state Senate. Under Minnesota law, a conviction of first-degree burglary carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, a $35,000 fine, or both. Mitchell has two young sons.

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, released a statement after Mitchell’s convictions which said “Senator Mitchell has told colleagues that she intended to resign if found guilty of this crime, and I expect her to follow through on that pledge. Our caucus remains focused on the issues that matter to Minnesotan families and communities.”

In the Senate, Democrats have a one-seat majority (34-33). With Mitchell’s conviction, the Senate is poised to be evenly split between the GOP and the DFL. In turn, a special election will likely be called to fill Mitchell’s seat with the winner determining which party controls the chamber.

The Senate seat in question, District 47, includes all of Woodbury and part of Maplewood. In 2022, Mitchell won the seat by roughly 17 points.

On Wednesday, John Hinderaker of Power Line wrote, “Like the Balkans, Minnesota produces more news than can be consumed locally:”

One of our state’s recent scandals is the arrest for burglary of State Senator Nicole Mitchell. Mitchell was caught red-handed, burglarizing her stepmother’s house at 4:30 in the morning. The crime occurred during the 2024 legislative session, and the Democrats had a 34-33 majority in the Senate and thus needed her vote. The Senate voted on whether she would be able to vote for the remainder of the session, and Mitchell cast the deciding vote in her own favor.

When the 2024 session was over, Minnesota Democrats, including Tim Walz and now-DNC Chairman Ken Martin, belatedly demanded that Mitchell resign. But she hung tough. Her case was scheduled for trial, but the trial was continued so that she could participate in the 2025 session. Which she did, again representing the decisive vote in a chamber that was divided 44-43. Once the session began, not a single Democrat suggested that she ought to resign. Not a single reporter asked any Democrat why he had changed his tune.

As Hinderaker concludes, “This is the kind of soft corruption that permeates Minnesota politics.”

🚨 WATCH: The moment Minnesota Senator Nicole Mitchell (D) is found GUILTY on two felony counts.

The circumstances are unprecedented. With Mitchell expected to resign, the Minnesota Senate will be tied 33-33, and the House is already deadlocked 67-67. pic.twitter.com/vJEX6SyJCe

— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) July 18, 2025

(Classical reference in headline.)

GLOBAL WARMING: IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Germany: After nine underage girls sexually abused by Syrians at swimming pool, CDU mayor points to ‘hot weather.’

After underage girls were sexually assaulted in the Barbarossabad swimming pool in Gelnhausen, the CDU mayor of the area pointed out that “hot weather” makes tempers “fray.”

However, local Mayor Christian Litzinge (CDU) appeared to allude that the weather is at least partly to blame for the incident.

In a statement to Welt, he said: “Of course, it’s always high temperatures, and sometimes tempers are frayed.”

His comments were met with backlash and he has already apologized.

Gelnhausen’s FDP parliamentary group leader, Kolja Saß, told Focus magazine that failures on the part of the city should be addressed:

“When Mayor Litzinger now claims that the matter is being addressed and that the staff acted correctly, this is a mockery of the victims of the sexual assaults and must have consequences,” she said.

Saß said that sexual assaults have been occurring at the pool for a long time and no efforts were taken to prevent further assaults.

That’s not true – the Germans made signs advising frisky full-figured fräuleins (and/or zaftig ginger Vulcans) to cease molesting one-legged Somali pirates:

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Colbert’s Ouster Really Just a ‘Financial Decision?’ CBS no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Building an empire takes decades. Destroying it can take only a few years, and sometimes the vandals are in the palace, not outside the gates.

For much of the 20th century, American broadcast television revolved around three networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. William S. Paley, CBS’s longtime CEO, made sure that his company—the Columbia Broadcasting Service—was a leader among them. The network was home to Edward R. Murrow, who brought World War II in Europe home to Americans on CBS Radio; after the war, Murrow’s reporting played a pivotal role in bringing down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Walter Cronkite dominated American evenings from his perch at the Evening News. And from the days of Mike Wallace to the more recent era of Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes set the standard for long-form television reporting.

Yet CBS’s current ownership seems determined to demolish this legacy. This evening, the network announced plans to end The Late Show With Stephen Colbert when the host’s contract ends next May. Late-night personalities come and go, but usually that happens when their ratings sag. Colbert, however, has consistently led competitors in his time slot. CBS said this was “purely a financial decision,” made as traditional linear television fades.

Perhaps this is true, but the network that once made Cronkite the most trusted man in America no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.

Why does Cronkite get the benefit of the doubt, given biases his lefty biographer could spot them? Why does CTRL-F “Dan Rather” bring up zero results in the above Atlantic article?

But yes, while Colbert may have sped up his demise by railing against CBS and Trump, ultimately, the late night model is doomed, Jim Geraghty writes:

Someone out there is likely arguing, “CBS should hire Greg Gutfeld!” Indeed, Gutfeld gets about 3 million viewers per night on average, compared to Colbert’s 1.9 million. Alienating, ridiculing, and repelling the entire right-of-center audience, night after night, has not done The Late Show any favors.

But there are signs that the problem is more than just boring left-wing politics infusing the previously relatively apolitical form of entertainment. The old audience for late night just isn’t watching anymore, and younger Americans are turning elsewhere for their entertainment. (Joe Rogan has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube. That doesn’t mean that every subscriber is listening to or watching every episode, but it does give a sense of the expanse of Rogan’s potential audience for each show.)

If CBS has concluded The Late Show doesn’t make financial sense with any host, you have to wonder what the long-term outlook is for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, or Jimmy Kimmel Live.

As Christian Toto wrote last night, “Last year, Jimmy Kimmel predicted the late-night TV format might have only 10 years left. Today’s shocking announcement suggests that the timeframe could be cut in half. Maybe two-thirds.”

No doubt, the Federation will be calling in the President of United Earth to investigate what went wrong:

UPDATE: “Late Show has been losing more than $40 million a year for CBS (though that doesn’t include some ancillary revenue). While the show still garners an average of 2.47 million viewers a night, leads its 11:35 rivals in total audience, and just this week was nominated for its ninth consecutive Emmy for outstanding talk/variety series, its ad revenue has plummeted precipitously since the 2021-22 season:”

Linear ratings are down everywhere, of course, and as the Times reported, the network late-night shows took in $439 million combined in ad revenue in 2018. By last year, though, that figure had dropped by 50 percent. Measure that against the more than $100 million per season it costs to produce Late Show. By contrast, the CBS primetime and daytime dayparts are still profitable, and that programming is supported by robust license fees for streaming and other off-network viewing. Late Show, with its topical humor and celebrity interviews pegged to specific projects, has struggled on Paramount+. And of the three network late-night shows, Late Show has by far the smallest digital footprint on YouTube and other platforms.

So from a business perspective, the cancellation makes sense, and Cheeks and his underlings said in a carefully worded press release that “it is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” But… nothing is just business these days, right? Only three days ago, Colbert unleashed on his parent company for paying a $16 million “big fat bribe” to settle the Trump 60 Minutes litigation. And Colbert, who initially struggled on CBS before rising to first place after he positioned Late Show as a key voice of the Trump 1.0 resistance, regularly attacks the president and often hosts fire-breathing left-wing guests like Sen. Adam Schiff and the Pod Save America guys. If Trump has an enemies list, Colbert is on it.

* * * * * * * *

I’ve sensed that the networks have all been reluctant to be the first to pull the trigger on a cancellation in the historic time slot. CBS has now fired the opening shot, and it’s reasonable to suspect that NBC and ABC will follow. So no, I wouldn’t sleep well tonight if I were Kimmel or Fallon, though both have larger digital footprints and do a lot more for their respective networks. Fallon and Meyers have also been protected by Lorne Michaels, who produces both their shows, though I wonder if even Lorne might recognize that the 12:30 slot is increasingly not viable, and the sacred cows of television are being slaughtered, one by one.

Faster, please.

MORE:

The only people claiming Colbert was cancelled over his politics are the ones who would cancel you over yours.

— Clifton Duncan (@cliftonaduncan) July 18, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD OF DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE: The boxed water hoax: When green marketing turns toxic.

Once upon a time, choosing paper over plastic felt like a personal environmental victory. It turns out, however, that most of our early information on responsible packaging was wrong.

Plastic bags are greener when you consider all the environmental impacts of both products through a “life cycle analysis.” Measuring and comparing the total impact from production, transportation and disposal are the major determinants when comparing environmental impacts.

Enter boxed water, perhaps the greatest example of eco-theater in modern marketing. Alas, it’s mostly fiction.

These boxes are not simply made of paper. They are constructed from paperboard fused with a thin layer of aluminum to prevent leakage. That thin aluminum layer is the problem, and the lie.

To recycle the box, the paper must be separated from the aluminum. The volume of boxed water consumption is so small that most municipal recycling programs don’t find it worthwhile to employ the technology to separate the materials. In eco-conscious California, that technology is found in not one recycling facility. Zero.

A spokesperson at the uber-environment-focused Natural Resources Defense Council suggested that “it’s a little bit ludicrous to put your water in a carton and claim that that is more sustainable than putting it in a plastic bottle, which is, in fact, more readily recyclable.” The scientists at the Danish Ministry of Environment and researchers at the international consulting firm McKinsey & Co. agree that paper boxes are clear losers for the environment when compared with easily recycled plastic bottles.

The marketing of boxed water as more environmentally sound than plastic is simply false. A class-action lawsuit alleges that cartons are misleading consumers with false claims about recyclability. Here’s where the story goes from deceptive to absurd: To back up its claims, a major boxed water brand sought to justify its marketing claims through a third party. Did it turn to independent scientists or peer-reviewed environmental assessments? No. While in litigation, it agreed to rely on an analysis by the Better Business Bureau, the same organization that had been exposed for selling high ratings to small businesses.

I would assume that the vast majority of America’s top water sommeliers would simply roll their eyes towards Gaia if a customer ever dared to order an infra dig boxed water to pair with their meal.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Shocked Astronomer CEO’s stunned words as he was caught on Coldplay kisscam cuddling his HR director.

UPDATE:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Bye, Rian. No More Star Wars For You.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Guest Seems To Suggest Trump Might Not Have Been Shot.

The entire situation was caught on video, and everyone with a brain can clearly see what happened. Well, CNN guest Toure seems to think the official story and events captured on film might not be so clear.

“He supposedly got shot in the ear. We never heard from his doctors on that…When did we hear from his doctors,” Toure said Thursday night on CNN.

When asked again if Trump was shot in Butler, he refused to acknowledge a basic fact.

“I wasn’t there. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Toure further said.

Complete stupidity.

Watch the mind-boggling moment unfold below…:

On the one-year anniversary of Butler, I sat next to a real-life "ear truther" tonight on CNN. Wild. You won’t believe it 👀 pic.twitter.com/ycWewcflGQ

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) July 18, 2025

For the record, a common conspiracy theory pushed at the time was that Trump was struck by glass from a teleprompter.

That, of course, is complete nonsense for one very simple reason. The teleprompters remained intact during the event.

They would have shattered if a bullet had hit either of the two on the stage. You can see the teleprompters in the photo below.

It’s Toure Neblett. No wonder CNN is so deeply underwater these days:

RIP: Felix Baumgartner, 56, the first skydiver to fall faster than the speed of sound, dies in crash in Italy.

RIP, NPR: The broadcaster that thought emojis were racist.

Since the announcement of the funding pull, X has been awash in people celebrating with their favorite woke and otherwise ridiculous NPR moments. My personal favorite is the tweet that NPR put out in 2022 saying that people were being subconsciously racist if they used the wrong color thumbs-up emoji. There was also its segment about the LGBTQ+ community’s battle for the dinosaur emoji. But there are so many other choices.

On Wednesday, journalist Matt Taibbi started a delicious thread on X with the prompt: “What’s everyone’s favorite ridiculous NPR story?”

Examples poured down. The COVID era was NPR’s definite nadir, with daily shrieking about the need for social distancing and the shunning of vaccine deniers. Tweeters pointed out stories like NPR’s advocating for a permanent ban on handshakes. “I remember a host shaming and ridiculing a guest for advocating for schools to re-open for in-person learning,” someone wrote. Several chimed in with the NPR tweet that “a new poll finds 40 percent of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China.”

There were plenty of moments where NPR backed the Steele Dossier or said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fiction. But the funniest examples involved not important and highly-politicized news stories, but ridiculous cultural agenda reporting that mattered to almost no one. NPR has claimed, over the years, that country music has an implicit racial bias, that dieting is racist, and gave a lot of airtime to the woman who wrote the book “In Defense of Looting,” very relatable to the average listener.

Ordinary dull Americana fills NPR with a horror of being alive. An X user posted “one of our Massachusetts NPR hosts told an anecdote on air where her weekend ski trip was besmirched when one of the video games in the lodge arcade had gun controllers and “I don’t want to hear a machine gun when I’m out.” Another highlighted a feature on the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, “when the best players in the two leagues that comprise professional baseball play a game between each other.”

No word yet if NPR has ever brought on Randolph and Mortimer Duke to explain that they are commodities brokers. “Now, what are commodities? Commodities are agricultural products — like coffee that you had for breakfast. Wheat, which is used to make bread. Pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a ‘bacon, lettuce and tomato’ sandwich.”

SECRET MEETING OPENS DOCUMENT FLOODGATES ON TRUMP/RUSSIA HOAX:

The floodgates holding back long-buried classified documents exposing government efforts to claim Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election might finally be opening.

Trump administration officials held an urgent meeting Sunday to discuss “new information on Russiagate,” which they might use to build a criminal conspiracy case against Obama and Biden administration political appointees who allegedly weaponized the government against Trump, two Trump administration officials told RealClearInvestigations.

The documents are said to contain long-classified information, including a secret 200-page congressional audit that reveals details about how an intelligence community assessment on Russia ordered by President Obama after the 2016 election was framed in a way that portrayed Trump as being beholden to the Kremlin.

Read the whole thing.

SHOCK: CBS Will Cancel Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show In May 2026.

He was the epitome of the downfall of late night comedy into what could be called late night clapter, where the applauding of conservative misfortunes replaced wit or cleverness. Under Colbert, The Late Show became an avenue for liberals to vent their frustration at conservatives through cathartic booing.

Colbert was the most likely of all the permanent late night hosts to bring on liberal guests. His show would have been a must-visit place for 2028 Democratic hopefuls. Even on this Thursday, Colbert is scheduled to have Sen. Adam Schiff on.

The future of light night is bleak. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel has mused about retiring next year and is pessimistic about the state of the industry, a sentiment shared by NBC’s Seth Meyers. The death of late night was caused by many things, including increased competition that comes from streaming platforms and YouTube, but Colbert-like liberals also played a role. You can’t just write off half the country and expect a 30+ year-old institution to survive forever.

Of course not, but maybe focusing so hard on an audience of homogeneous leftists kept the late night shows on the air for at least a decade after their freshness dates had expired.

Related: Colbert, who made his bones playing a parody of Bill O’Reilly, had the chance to do real journalism in 2018 and decided he’d better quickly change the subject instead:

Sad @colbertlateshow is cancelled. I'll miss moments like this, where Claire Danes is talking about "the intelligence community allying itself with journalists" & Colbert abruptly changes the subject! pic.twitter.com/yVWoHMFFyu

— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) July 18, 2025

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK:

New Yorkers are excited about Rikers being emptied into Manhattan. https://t.co/eusSm9TrkH

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 18, 2025

Bane smiles under his mask:

Related: Mamdani’s anti-cop zealotry means crime and chaos for NYC — it’s all in his agenda.

Zohran Mamdani is one smooth talker.

He claims he “no longer believes,” as he did just five years ago, that the New York City Police Department is a “wicked and corrupt” institution that must be “defunded” and “dismantled.”

He says he really didn’t mean it when he blamed “the police themselves” for “perpetrating an enormous amount” of violent crime, “especially with regard to sexual violence.”

He insists he was misunderstood when he tweeted, “The NYPD is racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.”

Bull. Mamdani will be a disaster for public safety in New York City if he becomes our mayor.

This was Kamala Harris’ strategy last year to try to disavow all the crazy stuff she said in the past without ever actually disavowing it. Despite a supine media allowing her to get away with her flip/flops, it ultimately blew up in her face. (“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”) But with three other candidates splitting the rest of voting, Mamdani could well sail through, despite (because of?) his radical past and concomitant bonkers statements.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Liberal Goes Back In Time To Kill Hitler (Video).

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: CBS cancels The Late Show, Stephen Colbert to end program in May 2026.

“‘THE LATE SHOW with STEPHEN COLBERT’ will end its historic run in May 2026 at the end of the broadcast season,” CBS said in a statement. “We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘THE LATE SHOW’ franchise at that time. We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television.”

CBS said it was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” adding, “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

“I found out just last night, next year will be our last season,” host Stephen Colbert told his studio audience in a video posted on Instagram. “The network will be ending ‘The Late Show’ in May.”

“It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” Colbert continued.

* * * * * * * * *

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Colbert’s Thursday night guest, reacted on X, “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”

The above sentence may be a clue as to why Colbert is being fired:

"Sir Colbert is costing us millions and the ratings keep hemorrhaging. Should we consider moving on?"

"Let's see, who does he have on tonight?"

"Well, Senator Adam Schiff…"

"No, like the lead guest? You know the big actor or comedian?"

"It's just Schiff sir."

"Cancel it." https://t.co/GL9QFFinIG

— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) July 18, 2025

Next stop CNN?

https://t.co/DNBIjH0Iv8 pic.twitter.com/MCmQXVG7WJ

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 18, 2025

Related: Past performance was no guarantee of future results with Colbert:

In the summer of 2020 Stephen Colbert aired a sketch warning people to be skeptical of vaccines and Big Pharma.

Eleven months later Colbert was dancing for the vaccine.

Goodbye shameless shill.pic.twitter.com/uUR5e3klm9

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 17, 2025

UPDATE: Colbert’s not a good enough actor to hide his anger over being told by CBS that he’s being axed:

I mean, I laughed. https://t.co/QUt1B6PzuP

— Anthony Bialy (@AnthonyBialy) July 18, 2025

MORE: Here’s Clay Travis discussing Colbert’s next gig, and how he lost his current one:

Stephen Colbert’s “comedy” show has been canceled. I discussed this heartbreaking news with @JesseBWatters: pic.twitter.com/WvFWIM4mWX

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 18, 2025

RIP: Connie Francis, ‘Where the Boys Are’ Singer and Actress, Dies at 87.

CBS REPORTER CLAIMS HE GOT ‘PTSD’ AFTER TRUMP ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT – The Reason Is Mind-Boggling:

CBS News Capitol Hill correspondent Scott MacFarlane made a rather remarkable claim during an interview with former “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd on Wednesday.

MacFarlane and Todd were discussing the discipline doled out in recent days to multiple Secret Service agents over their response to the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The CBS reporter somehow found a way to make the trauma his own, not because of the actual shooting that nearly killed the President, but because MAGA supporters were going to kill him.

“For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America,” the melodramatic guest recalled. “And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck.”

“I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because I think of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us,” MacFarlane continued to quiver. “If he didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.”

Edward R. Murrow, who covered the Blitz while reporting on location from London during WWII left the broadcasting booth a long time ago. But I’m sure MacFarlane considers Trump and his supporters to be the modern day equivalent of the people who were dropping the bombs on England back then.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: And Just Like That, 16-Year-Olds Can Vote in the Next British General Election.

In one of the ultimate nanny states on Earth, which is seriously looking at implementing a complete social media ban on 16-year-olds and younger because they are too immature to handle the pressures online…

A possible ban on social media for under-16s in the UK is “on the table”, the technology secretary Peter Kyle has told the BBC.

Speaking on the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, he said he would “do what it takes” to keep people and in particular children safe online.

…they will now also be given the right to vote during a national general election, ergo determining the direction and future of the country.

U.K. government: ban 15 year olds from social media because they’re not responsible…

U.K. government: give 16 year olds the vote because they’re responsible…

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE@beverleyturner @AllisonPearson @bbclaurak @UnityNewsNet https://t.co/PAH8D5DlS1 pic.twitter.com/MKqIanQw1L

— TruthSeeker73 (@13orangesbc) July 17, 2025

That might not go the way that Labour expects, however:

excellent performance by the German youth in EU elections.

Greens totally rejected, AfD heavily up. pic.twitter.com/f7mt1g75A9

— Leo Caesaris (@leo_caesaris) June 9, 2024

A similar result could happen in Old Blighty, James Hanson writes at the Spectator: Britain’s votes for teenagers ruse will backfire.

I have long suspected that Labour’s real reason for wanting votes at 16 is to further its own electoral interests. But this, too, is wrong on a number of levels. Firstly, no constitutional change should ever happen for party political reasons. Secondly, it is deeply naive to assume that 16 and 17-year-olds are more likely to be attracted to Starmer’s technocratic government than to the radicalism of Reform or a new left-wing party led by Jeremy Corbyn.

There is a reason Nigel Farage is by some distance the most followed British politician on TikTok. As unlikely as it may seem, the tweed-clad former City boy connects with younger voters in a way the Labour leadership simply doesn’t. If the bright sparks in Downing Street think this teenage voting ruse will help Starmer’s prospects at the next election, they should be careful what they wish for.

In any case, the newest chapters of Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain continue to write themselves.

URI BERLINER: Happy Independence Day, NPR.

The Senate voted this morning to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. Pending final approval in the House, the federal government will, after more than half a century, no longer be in the business of supporting NPR.

The vote is a victory for Republicans who have long had National Public Radio (NPR) in their sights. But it is also a victory for those of any political stripe who believe the government has no business funding the media.

I didn’t use to count myself among them. But over the past year, under the leadership of a divisive new CEO, instead of taking criticisms of its coverage to heart, NPR instead doubled down on agenda-driven journalism. So, as someone who had spent most of his career at the network, I didn’t support defunding. I instead suggested that NPR could build back credibility by voluntarily giving up federal support. Obviously that didn’t happen.

NPR has said President Donald Trump’s push for defunding is an attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. While defunding is a harsh rebuke to NPR, it’s not fatal. A relatively small portion of its budget—some 5 to 10 percent depending on how you do the math—comes from direct and indirect federal funding. But for small public radio stations that rely more on federal support, the repercussions could be severe. While Republicans cast the votes to defund, NPR also has itself to blame for the outcome.

It’s a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.

I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it. I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public.

I explained how over time, as NPR became a boutique product for a well-heeled audience clustered around coastal cities and college towns, it shed moderate and conservative listeners.

Fortunately for leftists, thanks to their long march through the institutions, a surfeit of socialist-friendly content remains available, including obscure niche outlets such as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.