May 20, 2026

TEN YEARS GONE: Stephen Colbert Shook Up Late-Night Twice, but His Push Into Politics Could Have Ultimately Hurt the Format.

The sense that late-night plays to a particular type of audience wasn’t supposed to be part of the mix. Johnny Carson made fun of politicians, but mostly their public goofs, not their policies. Leno rarely became political. And Letterman, often irascible, feuded with politicians but not over what they did in Washington.  John McCain became a Letterman target because the former U.S. Senator canceled a 2008 appearance on “Late Show” in favor of talking to Katie Couric. When Letterman squabbled with former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it was because of a demeaning remark he made about Palin’s teenage daughter.

Late-night shows in 2026 are a wholly different creation. “These shows were built to be vaudeville in the box in your living room,” says Young. “They were a place to watch jugglers and clowns and funny people doing impressions. They were not made for this.”

Colbert wasn’t looking to alienate crowds. He was simply following what had already made him successful. This is, after all, an improv comedian and writer who got his big break working for Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” at a time when Stewart was presiding over a cable program that asked its young viewers to look harder at media and politics. Colbert did the unthinkable when he launched “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central in 200, playing a fictional character for nearly a decade who was meant to satirize conservative TV pundits.

So entrenched was the character in viewers’ minds that Colbert spent several sketches after he moved to CBS trying to separate himself from the creation he once played. Indeed, his former employer, Viacom, made outreach asking whether such use of intellectual property was fair. It didn’t help, of course, that the character shared Colbert’s name.

“Colbert never shook his ‘Colbert Report’ persona. That show was groundbreaking,” says Marx. “And he really brought some of that savvy audience with him from Comedy Central.”

Comedy Central’s fortunes rose and ebbed over how many younger male viewers it could reach. CBS’ hinged on the network’s ability to draw the biggest, broadest crowds. The challenge: The biggest crowd CBS could get was a cohort composed largely of people who wanted to see Colbert zing the powers-that-be. And maybe some hate-watchers, too.

Even as CBS won the ratings, the group of people watching late-night became less heterogenous. And as other hosts adopted a similar stance, more of midnight-TV viewership developed in the same way.

In which Variety either rewrites or stumbles upon the same observation that Robert Tracinski made in 2017 at The Federalist: “What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.”

Like Conan O’Brien, Colbert will in short order reinvent himself as a podcaster and/or YouTuber. Or perhaps he’ll host a show on CNN or M-SNOW, albeit one with a far smaller budget.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOMELESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: “No one getting paid $26,153.85 every 2 weeks to solve the homeless problem is going to solve the homeless problem.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPENCER FOR HIRE:

If you notice, the clips don’t come with the usual disclaimer at the end: “I’m Spencer Pratt, and I approve this message.” That’s because his campaign isn’t producing them. These are “fan” videos, made by filmmaker Charlie Curran.

This is something new—videos that look like and do the work of political advertising but that aren’t paid for by a campaign or political action committee and don’t feature any footage or audio from the candidate himself. The Federal Election Commission regulates political advertising, largely by requiring disclosures and enforcing funding limits and coordination rules. Does any of that apply here? Hard to tell. Mr. Curran has free speech, after all.

In the predigital world, campaigns were limited by what they could afford. The typical candidate’s fundraising pitch is built around the need for money to put commercials on TV. Nobody can say for sure how much a 60-second AI-generated spot costs to make. But it’s radically less expensive than hiring a film crew to produce cinematic ads like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” or Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy.”

Mr. Pratt may not ultimately win, and his approach may not work for every outsider looking to make a quick splash on the cheap. But his campaign is proving that AI and social media are enough to make the right candidate competitive in the right circumstances. Campaign consultants have gotten rich for decades by selling the idea that a strong spot at an opportune time can determine the outcome of a race.

What will they sell now?

The promise that they and only they know the magic coding sequence to prompt the AI. Or that “nobody reads Facebook and X” in the local market that a candidate is running in, so it’s still necessary to set millions of dollars alight to buy traditional TV commercials.

Because otherwise, the future is now:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PORTION CONTROL? Why meat-eating dinosaurs like T. rex evolved tiny arms. “The researchers suggested that the increasing size of prey, in the form of gigantic sauropods (long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters) and other large herbivores, may have resulted in a shift to hunting using jaws and head instead of claws.”

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH CUBA:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE ARE NOT THE SAME:

Still, that’s one bitterly funny post.

Posted at 4:39 pm by Stephen Green

UH-OH! WATCHDOG CAUGHT IN FLAGRANT FOIA VIOLATION: Hans Bader offers an illuminating illustration of how the Council on Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) flagrantly violated the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The violations by CIGIE — representing the 72 statutory internal government watchdogs — are so obvious that they illustrate why no federal employee has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA.

Posted at 4:27 pm by Mark Tapscott

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Kyle Smith on “Al Gore’s Long and of Persistent Record of Miserable Failure.”

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”

It’s been a “few decades.” How is Mr. Gore’s prophecy working out? Did he even get the direction right?

Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.

Yet there is a greater chance that all of them will be eaten by gators by next Friday than there is of Mr. Gore issuing an “Oops.” Hey, he was merely saying, “According to some predictions,” right? Maybe he was quoting a soothsayer he met in Reno. Maybe he did some research at the local facility for the criminally insane.

Maybe he was quoting that legendary soothsayer, Dan Rather, in 1982:

Rather was pivoting from another legendary soothsayer, Walter Cronkite, during the previous decade:

 

And now Gore is pivoting back! Al Gore invokes disaster film, warns of ice age within 25 years.

Former Vice President Al Gore warned a Hollywood audience Thursday that a Gulf Stream collapse could occur within 25 years, remarks that came 20 years after his climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” drew criticism for predictions that did not bear out.

Mr. Gore, 78, appeared at the inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance at Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. He participated in a keynote conversation with actor Bradley Whitford of “The West Wing,” timed to the 20th anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth.”

According to a Breitbart account of the event, Mr. Gore invoked the scenario depicted in the 2004 disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow” — though he repeatedly referred to it as “The Day After,” the title of a separate 1983 television film about nuclear war — saying a shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, commonly called the Gulf Stream, is “a very real threat within the next 25 years.”

“That movie that I mentioned, ’The Day After’ about the Gulf Stream shutting down, well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.

Mr. Whitford raised a more compressed timeline, suggesting that a Gulf Stream collapse could put the world “in an ice age in, like, 10 years.” Mr. Gore pushed back, saying such a scenario would unfold more slowly, while acknowledging the consequences would be severe.

“It would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond our, anything we can compare it to today,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.

Exit quote from Smith: “But as the tone on climate change adjusts to reality, he risks joining Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich to go down in intellectual history as one of the Three Stooges of man-caused global disaster.”

But that sweet, sweet Qatari money doesn’t spend itself, you know.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOT ACCORDING TO THEIR ALLIES IN THE PRESS, THEY DON’T:

Posted at 4:05 pm by Stephen Green

YEAH, MASSIE TURNED INTO A COMPLETE DISAPPOINTMENT:

Posted at 4:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds

14 CALIFORNIA COUNTIES WITH GROWING POPULATIONS: There are 58 counties in the Golden State, and 44 of them have been losing population for years. But 14 of them are actually gaining new residents. Pacific Research Institute’s John Merline dug into the data to find out why those 14 counties have growing populations at the same time California leads the 50 states in net-out-migration.

Posted at 3:53 pm by Mark Tapscott

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Goodbye, Stephen Colbert: The End of ‘Cheap Fakes’ Lie.

Late-night partisans like Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Jimmy Fallon ignored Biden’s decline. Sure, they told their fair share of “Biden’s old” jokes, but that’s where it stopped.

He’s ancient but “sharp as a tack.”

Stephen Colbert of “The Late Show” fame was a huge part of that misinformation campaign. Until, one day, he had to tell the truth.

Finally. Why?

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

CHANGE:

Posted at 3:34 pm by Stephen Green