New Yorkers rose as one this weekend in protest of late-night philosopher king Stephen Colbert being forced off the air (eventually, someday) by Orange Man Literally Hitler™ in his latest crushing of dissent and our democracy.
Or perhaps not.
The "We're With Colbert" protest garnered 20 mostly bored-looking protestors — and only briefly. One masked defender of democracy carried a homemade sign that read "Go F*** Yourself" above a Photoshop collage of three different black church choirs. I suppose they were supposed to be singing her catchy slogan in their Sunday best.
So... um... there was that.
Even on social media — where it's basically free for bots to drum up fake-but-passable support for any cause du jour — "We're With Colbert" was a bust. My not-so-brief scroll through X's search results revealed a seemingly endless stream of links to the same New York Post write-up of the non-event, plus the occasional cruel comments from amused Righties.
In all my scrolling, I was able to find exactly one lefty getting all hot and bothered over Colbert. Naturally, it was an unverified account with almost no followers. Or punctuation:
@POTUS @CBS CBS you are cowards and I'm done with your network I didn't watch it much to begin with the only thing I did watch was Stephen Colbert and now I don't have a reason to tune into your channel at all. I am poor everybody to boycott CBS #boycotcbs
— kim howell (@kimhowe68600254) July 28, 2025
To their credit, the protestors on average appeared to be younger than is the new normal for the Left these days. Only one of them appeared to be freshly exhumed.
Watch the video:
A small group of “We’re with Colbert” protesters outside of CBS Studios in NYC demanding that Stephen Colbert be reinstated. pic.twitter.com/aqtQ2voDIS
— NJEG Media (@NJEGmedia) July 27, 2025
I try not to reflexively make fun of people who still wear masks, even the useless, ill-fitting paper ones. Try reminding yourself on occasion that those folks might not be up on the latest science, maybe they suffer from a comorbidity that you know nothing about, or the very real chance that they have some kind of serious brain injury. You just never know.
Joyous mocking aside, there’s a real story buried in the non-event of the “We’re With Colbert” flop.
Where are the protestors?
I don't just mean on a drizzly Sunday afternoon for a largely unloved and completely unfunny overpriced host of an under-watched program in a dying format.
We've had ten years of Orange Man Literally Hitler™ imposing fascism on a once-free nation — at least to hear the lefties tell it — and they can't even rouse themselves to the streets in protest. At least, not in enough numbers that anyone would bother counting.
If there's any truth in one protestor's awkward slogan about CBS being the equivalent of the Nazi press, where are the protestors?
I'm reminded of the 35-year-old P.J. O'Rourke bit from "Parliament of Whores" that you see pop up from time to time over at Instapundit:
Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration.
“How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”
“We have jobs,” said Andy.
So here's the relevant question in the era of Trump 2.0, the DGAF Edition: What happens when protesting is their job — but the paychecks aren't what they used to be?
Elon Musk's DOGE Boys and Data Republican (small-r) exposed USAID as a left-wing money machine and how your tax dollars are freely intermingling with partisan causes.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but the timing of USAID's demise aligns with a noticeable dip in the scale and energy of left-wing protests. If they really believed their own slogans, they’d be out every day, breaking windows and blocking roads to make the country ungovernable until Orange Man Literally Hitler™ was gone.
And yet the latest assault on free speech — to hear them tell it — was met with fewer than two dozen protestors in America's largest city that just happens to be overwhelmingly Democrat.
I'm also reminded of this scene from revolutionary-era Cuba in "The Godfather, Part II."
Michael Corleone: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: They could win.
Every revolution requires masses of true believers who are in it for everything but the money.
Where are the Left's?
If they won't even metaphorically storm the Bastille without getting Venmo'd first, it's fair to conclude they don't believe in anything but the money.
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