Media observers shocked by the demise of late-night titans Colbert and Kimmel at the hands of corporations sucking up to Trump to get their multi-billon-dollar mergers approved—with more on the chopping block, if Trump gets his way—should have seen this coming years ago. This includes both economic censorship—private employers firing popular purveyors of satire because they annoy the wealthy and powerful elites, and refusing to hire them in the first place—as well as the medieval-style government suppression currently in the news, supposedly prohibited by the First Amendment, in which a president and his pet regulator order the elites to get rid of comedic wimps like Colbert and Kimmel over the most banal of utterances. Also like the Niemöller trope, resistance to earlier instances of high-profile censorship both public and private might have prevented America from descending to its present bleak state, in which Trump’s random masked goons kidnap random Americans off the street and raising the possibility that a douchebag may still have been a douchebag even if gets assassinated can get the safest of watered-down stand-up comics terminated.
Author: Ted Rall Substack
Published at: 2025-09-21 18:22:39
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