When the news hit last week that CBS had cancelled "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," I knew that I would get at least one or two good columns out of it. The showbiz stuff is kind of in my wheelhouse, after all. What I didn't expect was that his fans, friends, and colleagues would react to the news with such an unrelenting freak show of a mental health episode that the saga would become a wellspring of material for me.
These certainly are boom times for those of us who write about the emotional unwellness of the American Left. I've already written a couple of times about the very mundane business realities that were the primary factors in Colbert's cancellation, as have many of my colleagues. Shifting cultural factors are at play too, which Kevin looks at in this VIP post.
Because they are simple, barely sentient creatures who all suffer from Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome, the proggies have boiled it all down to ORANGE MAN BAD. Yeah, that's their default for everything they don't like, but watching them torture themselves with that emo illogic over this is extra special fun for me.
When I first mentioned on X that the lefties simply weren't grasping the ever-changing nature of the television business, several of them responded to me with, "But he is Number One in the ratings!" Yeah, about that:
TV RATINGS: Fox News' @GregGutfeld continues to dominate late-night TV ratings as CBS ends Colbert's 'Late Show':
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) July 22, 2025
"Gutfeld!" is the most-watched late-night program on TV and has outdrawn Colbert for 21 straight months among total viewers and 13 months in a row among the… pic.twitter.com/VF7gMq7sUe
That's the harshest reality of all in this situation. Colbert is getting slaughtered in the ratings by a cable network show that has a fraction of the budget that "The Late Show" does. Trust me, Fox News doesn't spend a lot of money even on its hits. I won't get into the details about the size of the built-in audience that Colbert had handed to him versus the one that Greg Gutfeld had to go out and hustle for himself. I can assure you that Stevie boy had a considerable advantage.
Common sense and logic have no place in the world of the leftists, and they definitely are allergic to financial reality and other facts. With all of that in play, what we've seen in the last several days is a spectacle wherein the people who most desperately want Colbert to remain on the air are very publicly making a case for his cancellation.
Redefining "ridiculous," a parade of Democratic members of Congress immediately hit social media to soil their diapers about the announcement. Almost all had been guests on the show one or more times. Given the fact that most career politicians rank somewhere between dryer lint and toenail fungus ads on the interesting scale, that alone was reason enough for the show to get nuked.
What was really laughable, however, was seeing several of them praise Colbert's willingness to speak "truth to power," clearly indicating that they have no fundamental understanding of the concept. There is no partisanship for artists who speak truth to power. If Colbert had been a comic in the late 1960s, he would have given Lyndon Johnson a pass on Vietnam and waited until Richard Nixon got into office to become anti-war.
Colbert's colleagues are rallying around him, largely because they know that he IS the writing on the wall for their futures. My RedState colleague Nick Arama wrote about Jon Stewart's painful reminder of why we dislike him most of the time. On Monday night, Stewart joined Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers (the Margaret Cho of male comics) in the audience of "The Late Show" for more uncomfortable and inane support of Colbert. The idiotic Kumbaya moment probably had the CBS execs wondering why they didn't just buy out Colbert's contract and end the whole money pit debacle now.
This group has their fans believing that they're comedic brothers in arms, fighting the big, bad government for free speech and other freedoms. In reality, they're a one-note propaganda eunuch choir, meekly obeying a specific set of government masters. Chihuahuas in thunderstorms are braver than these guys.
Related: Trump Didn't Get Colbert Axed, but I'm Having a Blast Watching Lefties Think He Did
Impossible as it may seem, Colbert's fans are getting worse with each passing day. They're now protesting outside of the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the show is taped. Who knows? It might just work. Progressivism is such a cancer in the mainstream media that CBS execs might relent just to shut everyone up. For now, at least. That would give them a chance to prove that they're not under President Trump's thumb. Then they can have some relative peace and quiet until they get to the point where they don't renew Colbert's contract next year.
Or, they can be sane, look at how all of this is playing out and say, "Yeah, good call."
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