Above, host Stephen Colbert with dancers dressed as COVID vaccine needles in September 2021. (CBS, via YouTube)
Other guests whom Colbert lifted on his show since the 2015 election of President Donald Trump were antisemites such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, and socialists such as former Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). An interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (he/him), who maintains that God is “nonbinary” and white skin spreads the “virus” of racism, was put online after concerns about violating the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule.
During the recent NYC mayoral race, Colbert had on Hamas apologist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, along with City Comptroller Brad Lander.
Yes, the Brad Lander. What a tremendous thrill it must have been for the late-night audience to hear from a city accountant.
Though it’s not fair to say that Colbert never had on a Republican. Trump-haters, former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were also on. By one measure, the host had 176 left-leaning or Democratic guests, or 99% of his visitors.
Carson, despite perceptions, did have political guests such as Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jerry Brown, Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. The point, judging from old clips, was to show the human side of these political celebrities, not to use the show as a campaign stop.
Colbert, whose legacy Eric Deggans at NPR says was that he “distinguished truth from truthiness,” is free to feature anyone he likes on the show. He can also be out of business. The monotonous, one-sided, cringy disparagement would become painful for anyone who wasn’t obsessed with politics to watch. One of the problems is that leftists simply can’t ridicule themselves. Not really.
CHLOE MELAS: CBS was recently acquired by Skydance Media, whose owner David Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter. CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision and not related in any way to the show’s performance. But that statement doesn’t ring true to everyone. Brian Lowry is a media veteran reporter.
BRIAN LOWRY: There was a sense the studio was eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.
The Ellison MAGA rebrand is an important element in the ongoing canonization of late-night comics to Resistance™ sainthood. In Colbert’s particular case this narrative is useful inasmuch as it helps brush off the financial reality of the show as a key element of its cancellation.
Another road is if Colbert decides to launch his own talk or interview show — whether a podcast or on YouTube. The average age of a Colbert viewer is 68, which perhaps says more about CBS’ audience than it does Colbert’s, but it also makes it a bit tougher to imagine Colbert hustling viewers to “smash that like and subscribe button” on YouTube alongside MrBeast.
But there’s almost three million of them. So, perhaps the next stop for Colbert is Substack?
Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year but this is the signal that Substack wants him and it will be the death of the platform. https://t.co/qqnTqRaiQs
This is kiddie entertainment from start to finish, a parade of new creatures, mediocre CGI and cuddly characters who would make the Minions blush.
The fact that Jon Favreau (“Swingers!” “Elf!” “Iron Man!”) co-wrote and directed this slop is tragic. He gets little out of his cast. Pascal, who previously made his presence felt while behind a mask, has zero arc or character to play.
He’s Protagonist 101. That’s it.
Sigourney Weaver walks through her role as a New Republic commander. She’d be Razzie worthy if she had more screen time.
The new villains barely have a pulse, from Coyne to a crimelord (Hemky Madera) who couldn’t threaten a toddler with his theatrics.
On the other side of the big pond, the London Times’ film critic concurs, giving the movie one star and concluding, “Fold the companies, cancel the forthcoming movies and close the theme park. You wouldn’t leave a dying dog like this. But that’s what Star Wars has become. Putting it down would be a mercy killing. Oh, and Martin Scorsese provides the voice of a four-armed capuchin monkey called Hugo. So that’s nice.”
—Joe Nocera and Poppy Damon, the Free Press, today.
#DAILYFAIL:
So you guys are upset enough about this to write about it, even though you admit in the article that Halal food was available on the flight but simply not chosen by the passenger. Journalism is dead.
“For the record, Trump did not come up with ‘America first.’ ‘America first’ was the motto of Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s … Trump wasn’t Nazi-friendly until 2017,” Colbert said, before mimicking the president’s voice saying, you guessed it, “very fine people.”
No lie is too big, apparently, for the far-Left host. It’s one more reason Colbert won’t be missed on late-night TV.
Remember on the original Star Trek, there were maybe a dozen shots of the USS Enterprise flying in space that were repeated over and over and over again throughout the series? In 1960s Hollywood, those shots were expensive to produce, and Desilu/Paramount wanted to squeeze every last drop out of them. The SPLC production expenses to manufacture Charlottesville were similarly costly to produce. But like the 1960s TV franchise eventually running in perpetuity in its various forms, the initial investment was equally profitable in the long run:
SPLC got better returns than Nancy Pelosi and inverse Cramer combined! https://t.co/4AcSXEWLuo
If [The Mandalorian and Grogu] does underperform – “flop” is a bit strong – then questions will be asked of Filoni’s judgement. Whether next summer’s Ryan Gosling-starring Star Wars: Starfighter is similarly doomed – and if audiences are weary of a series that has been systematically exploited and therefore ruined for years. With the more than honorable exception of the excellent Andor – which, if rumors are to be believed, Filoni was bewildered by – there hasn’t been anything any good in the Star Wars universe since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney for $4 billion back in 2012.
It isn’t hard to see why not. Regardless of whether you are an especially big fan of Star Wars or not, there is no denying the way that the first film completely reshaped the American cinematic landscape when it emerged in 1977. Becoming an even bigger hit than Spielberg’s Jaws two years before and laying the groundwork for virtually every big-budget science-fiction fantasy that followed ever since. Its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, is justifiably believed to be one of the seminal films ever made, introducing elements of moral ambiguity and genuine wit into the series.
Yet when Disney paid the big bucks for Lucasfilm, they were not thinking about moral ambiguity or wit, but instead as to how they could monetize the franchise for all that it was worth.
And then Kathleen Kennedy alienated the male half of the entire original fanbase. This is the point in a Critical Drinker video where he pastes in the obligatory clip of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark saying, “Not a good plan:”
What’s hilarious about this whole fiasco is that Disney specifically bought Star Wars because they lacked a brand that appealed to boys. They had tons of merch sales to girls but had almost nothing for boys. So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it… https://t.co/nodAbbidl0
But seriously, it’s sub kiddie level storytelling that’s so afraid of itself it vomits up nonstop action rather than share Netflix dialogue that repeats key themes
One of the most dangerous things about @spencerpratt is that if he wins he will clean up Los Angeles and show that it can be done in New York, Chicago, Seattle, etc. None of our cities have to be like this.
I'm just absolutely amazed at the gall of someone who had never once lived in Los Angeles, moved there in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Fucking Thirteen for a city government job, founded a "homeless outreach" "non profit" in 2017, ran for city council in 2019 on a "fix…
Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”
People generally nod their head in agreement that there exists a Military Industrial Complex with a financial interest in endless wars. At this point we should also agree there's a Homeless Industrial Complex with deep financial interests in perpetuating homelessness
PEAK M-SNOW: “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator?”
"What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator… Is this him putting God above the Declaration of Independence?"
God talk is SO foreign to MS NOW. Katy Tur: What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence? McKay Coppins: I… pic.twitter.com/sfpykN5bYc
The New York City Mayor’s Office gave coveted press badges to a trio of “journalists” who celebrated the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson outside a court hearing for his accused killer, Luigi Mangione, on Monday.
The women, sporting city-issued press badges, called Thompson a “murderer” and “terrorist” outside a hearing held ahead of Mangione’s upcoming trial. Mangione, who is accused of fatally shooting Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024, has become a cause célèbre of left-wing activists and journalists. Hasan Piker, the far-left podcast host who rubs shoulders with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), said in a recent New York Timesinterview that Thompson was guilty of “social murder.”
“F— Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying f— he died,” Ashley Rojas, one of the credentialed journalists, said outside the court hearing. Rojas was joined by two other “Mangionistas,” Lena Weissbrot and Abril Rios. The trio do not appear to work for any publication.
Mangione’s attorney is asking his fan girls to dial their squeeing back a notch or twenty:
The far-left is so evil and depraved that even a murderer is like, “Woah, calm down.” https://t.co/RQKtxtehcK
As Noah Blum adds, “Luigi fangirls tanking his defense would be the ultimate hilarity.”
Including those old enough to know better:
This is one of our most decorated authors. And, in her mind, the evil part is corporate America. Not, ya know, the bit about the cold-blooded murder. These people are dangerous lunatics. https://t.co/5icl9WTsEa
One particularly jarring moment in the first chapter comes not when we find that left-wing violence has become hugely prevalent in modern American life, but that we have all become—to some degree—numb to this left-wing violence. Even the most avid political enthusiast will likely have forgotten—under the weight of sheer frequency—at least one example of violence that should be once-in-a-generation, but is now more once-in-an-afternoon. Even as a conservative reader whose career focuses on the battle against antisemitism in the West—making the notion of political violence far from imaginary—I was astonished by how normal this constant onslaught of violence has become, with the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of just a few years ago feeling more like a long-forgotten dream.
One of the reasons these periods of violence eventually become “long forgotten dreams” is that media gatekeepers are “unexpectedly” simpatico with leftist violence. In response to Posobiec’s tweet, Hollywood has made two movies about this period — one was directed by Sydney Lumet, and the other by Robert Redford. And both films sympathized with the bombers.
More:
Democrat pitch to billionaires: “We are going to kill you and take your stuff.”
Republican pitch to billionaires: “Just please stop hiring foreign labor over Americans.”
New polling data reveals that a surprisingly large portion of Democrats either believe the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were staged or aren’t sure they were real. It’s a hard thing for many of us to wrap our heads around, and I think it’s worth asking why so many refuse to acknowledge those assassination attempts for what they were.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents in a Newsguard survey said they believed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting “event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans.”
So, a third of Democrats are entertaining what amounts to a wildly implausible conspiracy theory. The numbers skew even higher among younger respondents: Americans between 18 and 29 were more likely than older people to believe the incidents were fabricated.
When I was in college I was kicked out of TPUSA for being a "fascist" because I viewed Teddy Roosevelt as the ideal.
I knew countless kids that got kicked out across the country for questioning black crime rates, for saying it's not just "the culture", for being… https://t.co/kLmlBmWcRX
Conservative* podcaster Candace Owens, a longtime critic of former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, is set to sit down with the ex-president’s son to cover a litany of topics, including the infamous laptop saga.
Owens, who has frequently criticized Hunter Biden and his family over his business dealings, drug addiction, and the controversy surrounding his laptop, previewed a wide-ranging discussion touching on addiction, politics, faith, and Washington’s political culture.
“Hunter Biden, welcome to the Candace Owens Show,” Owens said in a promo clip previewing the interview.
During the interview, Hunter Biden openly addresses his past struggles with addiction, acknowledging the personal destruction it caused in his life. “I was a crackhead,” Hunter Biden said, reflecting on how his addiction contributed to the collapse of his marriage and sent him into what he described as a “really, really dark cycle.”
Readers: we’re sorry. On May 13, 2026, we covered the story of Eileen Wang, the California mayor who confessed to working as a Chinese foreign agent, and in doing so, we made a grave error — we failed to acknowledge that accurately reporting on CCP spies running entire American towns was, in fact… racist. You see, NBC News published an article last week explaining the real problem with the Chinese spy mayor story was that it has “reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination,” which totally doesn’t read like a Norm Macdonald joke come to life, and definitely serves as a helpful reminder that words, even accurate ones about bombshell espionage scandals, can carry violence. The next time an American mayor is caught working for the PRC? We urge you to sit your racist ass down and instead reflect upon what you can do to Stop Asian Hate.
“It’s everyone’s right in a free country to be Antisemitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel, or Zionism or Netanyahu,” Maher said. “[If you think] when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places.”
“That’s how you know it’s antisemitism. It’s the inconsistency,” he added.
Maher brought up The New York Times getting cozy with Hasan Piker, a rabid progressive who has compared Zionists to neo-Nazis.
Yes, Maher both-sided the matter, but there is fault on both sides.
It’s hard to even quantify where Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens currently fall on the Left/Right divide*, but the anti-Israel fury isn’t confined to the new Left.
Maher brought some receipts there, too.
“The meathead manosphere and Code Pink people are on the same page,” he said. “They both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.”
"I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes. There are very few things that have been around for as long as 60 Minutes has and maintained the quality that it has…" https://t.co/8C6oQFmwYT
CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter routinely trashes President Trump for sticking to “his safe space” and doing interviews on Fox News. But on his show on Sunday, he provided the safest of spaces to 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Both on CNN and in his 22-minute podcast, Stelter discussed the history of the CBS magazoine show without once mentioning Dan Rather or his phony-documents fiasco attacking President George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II in 2004.
Stelter often invokes the importance of truth and facts in his run-up to bringing on Rather, whose reputation was shattered for ignoring those things in the defining episode of his career.
Rather reported on documents in 2004 purporting to show George W. Bush had been derelict in his duties and gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. The documents were almost immediately revealed to be forgeries. CBS and Rather initially stood by the report, but Rather was eventually forced to apologize, and the 60 Minutes producers of the segment were fired. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair in 2005.
However, Rather has long insisted his team was correct and reported the truth about Bush avoiding Vietnam service and shirking his responsibilities with the National Guard. He’s even gotten assistance from Hollywood in what came to be known as “Rathergate.”
A 2015movie based on producer Mary Mapes’s memoir of the affair, called Truth, starred Robert Redford as Rather, portraying him and Mapes as flawed but heroic in their journalistic pursuits. It was a box office flop and tepidly received by critics, some of whom panned it as didactic, simplistic, and one-sided. The Atlantic called it a “terrible, terrible movie about journalism.”
60 Minutes’ quality control has been uniformly terrible, but as long as it leans hard in Stelter’s direction, all is well in his world.
The Chinese will look at you with a straight face and say “we think in centuries” as they plunge into a demographic crisis caused by one-child policy https://t.co/MX7qLtD4Dd
The Spencer Pratt campaign is on fire. I don’t know who does all of these, it’s several people, but they’re profoundly impactful. This one is so LA it hits hard! pic.twitter.com/mURcjRqKAT
This @spencerpratt ad exposes how the threat of social and career ostracization silences most "tolerant" and affluent West LA liberals. They'd rather watch homeless camps, crime, failing schools, and decay swallow their city than risk the mob turning on them. That's how the Left… https://t.co/0PIbf3meIi
Steele’s Tweet continues, “That’s how the Left rules by fear while its politicians and elites pray the value of their million dollar homes doesn’t fall.”
I think that’s spot-on, but there’s an uncanny valley aspect to this AI video that may work against it. In the earlier videos by Pratt’s supporters, the use of AI didn’t matter, because they were depicting Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Gavin Newsom as amped-up cartoon supervillians, and Pratt as “Prattman,” here to rid Gotham City Los Angeles of its greediest and most venal criminals. Will AI, in its current form, still work as well depicting yoga moms who want to vote for Pratt?
Think of the ’84 Reagan campaign’s “Morning in America” ad:
We know everyone in it is an actor (Reagan’s former career), but by the time the above commercial came along, Americans had been going to the movies and watching TV for decades, and there’s enough “suspension of disbelief” to accept that we’re watching actors underscored by folksy music and warm cinematography to sell the message. “Morning in America” would feel like Soviet or North Korean propaganda if created using AI, and because of its use, I’m wondering if Pratt’s new ad is working against its message.
A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.
It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”
* * * * * * * *
“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”
Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and recently began discussing plans to use them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West, Fla., 90 miles north of Havana, according to classified intelligence shared with Axios.
Why it matters: The intelligence — which could become a pretext for U.S. military action — shows the degree to which the Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana, a senior U.S. official said.
“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning,” the official said.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED, Or Where Does Old Blighty Stand After a Half-Century of Oikophobia?
Because he speaks for millions of voters also treated as marginal cranks by arrogant liberals (who have learnt zero humility in the meantime). https://t.co/95vsIDtlqJ
Farage was never a marginal crank. If you compare positions he held with the opinions of the British people as shown in polls & attitude surveys, he was comfortably in the mainstream. The same surveys showed both Labour and Tory MPs were BOTH to the left of their supporters. https://t.co/AGXqfLnrV8
This the term used to describe people who are Islamosceptic – that is, people who are doubtful about the merits of a religion that demands child marriage, the beating of women, and death to all who oppose it
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