By Butch Freedman
This coming Thursday (May 21, 2026) will be a sad day for free speech in our country. It will also be a sad day for me personally, as a long-time dedicated watcher and appreciator of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Despite the lies of CBS that claimed it was a financial decision, Colbert has been fired because he dared to speak out against our dear leader. North Korea anyone? Well, at least he’s not being taken out and executed. We’ve still got that going for us. So far.
But any reasonably intelligent person understands that the tiny tyrant trump pushed CBS and their parent company, Paramount, to get rid of Colbert if they wanted to continue to do business. Paramount had previously agreed to pay Trump 16-million bucks in some baseless lawsuit against “60 Minutes” — another important broadcast that’s likely to soon be muzzled under the ongoing attack against the liberal press and any semblance of free speech.
CBS is a cowardly organization, bowing to the pressures of a corrupt government, and cancelling Colbert will do more to hurt their image and profits than any damage to Colbert. Stephen Colbert will no doubt find another important role to play in his career—some are even hinting at a future role in politics. President? We can only dream. But CBS will never recover from their spinelessness, their willingness to bend the knee, to slobber over the dictator in hopes that their bottom line will increase. Their greed will sink them. Even their nightly news segment, now delivered by another fawning sycophant—Tony Dokoupil—has descended into irrelevancy, yet another tool of the billionaire class.
I will miss the Colbert show. He has been both entertaining and honest, calling out every night the endless obscenities of the trump regime. He has allowed us a moment or three of respite every evening, a chance to laugh at the on-going shit show our country has become. And, in the process, Colbert has given many of us hope that it was still a country worth fighting for. Even during his endless exposures of the trump idiocy, it was clear that Colbert cared deeply about our loss of integrity and standing in the world. Colbert was the true patriot, not the sniveling coward wrapping himself up in the American flag and gold paint. A true patriot versus a malignant narcissist. And the goddamn narcissist won, because he had the bigger cards, and the cooperation of corporate fools. In the long run, they will all pay.
If anything has become clear through the morass of the last year and a half (is that really all it’s been?), it’s that those who give in, compromise, shame themselves, will lose in the long run. They will carry their dishonor for many years, and lose all standing as moral actors. ABC didn’t cave in when trump came for Jimmy Kimmel, and now his audiences are bigger than ever. Harvard University continues to stand up to the onslaught against them by the corrupt justice department—may as well call it what it is—the trump defense force. Harvard will continue on, that injustice department is already falling apart under the weight of their own incompetence, and every academic institution that caved and sold their souls will carry the stigmata of cowardice.
This is not just about Colbert bowing out (gracefully) on Thursday; it’s about the near fatal blow against America’s core values and against free speech that it represents. Each day brings a new offense against those values, and each day good people grow more restless, more worried and frightened. What happens next when a sick old man wields such insane power? How do we make it stop? Let’s follow Colbert’s example and speak the truth, no matter the consequences.
