It’s been said that you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can think of no phrase more apt to describe what’s happened to late night comedy in the US.
I’ve bewailed the horrors of “Propaganda Comedy” for over a year now. It’s a field where the acolytes of Jon Stewart entrain their audiences with state-sponsored talking points masquerading as jokes. The antics of Stephen Colbert in particular, a man I once idolized are particularly oppressive. Today, his audience is screamed at nightly and browbeaten into submitting to his CIA-scripted barbs in what passes for an opening monologue.
The many denizens of late night comedy, from Trevor Noah to Seth Meyers are no longer the Little Guy speaking truth to power. They’ve morphed into tools of the very despots they think they’re fighting, as they coerce their viewers into holding technocrat-approved views about the news of the day.
The discredited Fusion GPS “Pee-Pee Dossier” had no greater champion than Colbert. What on Earth happened to him in the 11 years since his brilliant performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Decades of Neoliberalist policies combined with a Republican Party that is demographically doomed have shifted the Deep State apparachiks to the Democrat side, making that party the Establishment of today and the US has a President who the CIA wants to remove, to the greatest extent since JFK.
The young creator of this clip charts the rise of the 24-hour cable TV news format, which Jon Stewart’s brand of news satire originally set out to lampoon. It shows how the arc of the news satire format has mirrored perfectly that of the cable TV news echo chamber, itself.
