
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">After years of flogging a dead horse dressed up as cutting-edge satire, the curtain has fallen on <em>The Late Show with Stephen Colbert</em>. Conservatives across the fruited plain cannot suppress a hearty laugh – more than the show was getting in the past.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It was better late than never for this smug, one-note Trump derangement host to ride off into the sunset of irrelevance. Yes, the Colbert left-wing fan club is talking up his future, the reality is that those who lose their major platforms tend to slip into a distant dark corner of the media world – if even that. Think Chris Cuomo, Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Joy Reid, Don Lemon, Glenn Beck and others. The odds are not in Colbert’s favor.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Those on the left – most of his audience – believe he was canned because of a conspiracy between President Trump and the new management beholding to him. That is the narrative – a spin. CBS says the show was cut because it was losing too much money – a whopping $40 million per year. Personally, I think the money was the big issue.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Viewer weariness set in long ago according to the ratings, yet the network management clung to the fantasy that endless anti-Republican rants constituted entertainment – until they did not.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Night after night, the former <em>Colbert Report</em> character—once amusing in his over-the-top conservative parody—shed the mask and revealed himself as just another sneering left-wing scold. Monologues devolved into lectures. Sketches became sermons. Guest spots turned into group therapy sessions for the anti-Trump resistance movement. Colbert’s so-called humor degraded into political feuding.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Americans tuning in for laughs encountered instead a relentless barrage of partisan propaganda. Jokes about President Trump? Predictable. Jokes about conservative policies? Tiresome. Jokes about anything outside the approved narrative? Nonexistent.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Viewer fatigue proved terminal. Ratings sagged. Who wants to stay up late for the same recycled outrage delivered with that trademark furrowed brow? Apparently not the broad American audience. They voted with their remotes, flocking instead to FOX’s Greg Gutfeld. (Although I am not a particular fan of his type of potty-obsessed humor, either).</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Colbert was not producing comedy – at least not in the tradition of really funny guys like Johnny Carson. Colbert transformed late night into a safe space for the perpetually offended, where nuance went to die and incessant mockery of the right became the soup du jour.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Then came the spectacle of the late-night stable rushing to Colbert’s defense. Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, and the rest of the fungible crew of so-called late night comedians set aside their fierce competitiveness and loyalty to their own networks to bond as political allies. They circled the wagons against the networks, the greater American audience and pragmatic economic realities.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">These alleged rivals, who battle nightly for ratings supremacy, linked arms like fraternity brothers at last call. Fallon cooed about Colbert’s sharp wit. Meyers waxed poetic about his character. Kimmel, never a class act, hurled expletives at CBS. They paraded across each other’s stages in a grotesque display of solidarity. One might call it touching if it were not so transparently self-serving.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Spare us the laments and the crocodile tears. Late night television long ago abandoned its golden era. Colbert and company turned the format into a nightly Democrat fundraiser with laugh tracks.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So farewell, Stephen. You gave it your biased best. The Republic will survive your departure since many viewers had already moved on. The only ones shedding a proverbial tear over your departure are the left-wing echo chamber dwellers who mistook their echoes for the voices of the people.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So, there ‘tis.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"></p>

Colbert is Gone … Finally
