Censor and Sensibility
The actual story of how CBS and everyone else kowtowed to the authoritarian regime
February 20, 2026
As I write this in the shadow of Mount Winchester, our somewhat elected “President,” Donald J. Trump, is on my television, my computer screen, and several other monitors, fulminating about how the Supreme Court has railroaded his plans to tariff the world. How terrible for him. The fact that the judicial branch has temporarily stopped an executive action that should have been a legislative process is the surest sign yet that the United States has descended into an authoritarian dystopia, a hellscape from which we will never emerge unless you subscribe to my Substack.
It’s no accident that the broadcast networks and YouTube and thousands of outlets and personages on social media are presenting Trump’s point of view without criticism or commentary. They know that they dare not, lest they lose their licenses, their jobs, their pets, or their lives. Only I, The Greatest Living American Writer, have the courage to tell the real story about how the media has kowtowed to the Trump Administration. Follow the trail of crumbs into my witch’s hut of truth.
This week, Stephen Colbert, an American entertainer without parallel except for maybe Will Rogers or Bette Midler, intended to air an interview with James Talarico, a very cute Texas Democratic Senate candidate who is also an heir to a chain of excellent Italian seafood restaurants. But little does the public know that the Federal Communications Commission actually owns CBS, the network that Colbert still appears on for the moment, and therefore arranged to pull the interview. Colbert put the segment on YouTube, where only 10 million people saw it, as opposed to the 150 million who watch his show on a nightly basis.
“I was told…that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert said. “My network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this because they are afraid of my ideas and because I’m a better dancer than they are.”
Talarico has the Trump Administration running scared because he is a minister who believes in Jesus, not the vengeful white Jesus of the Republican imagination, but the actual Jesus, a working-class person of color who was a nonbinary queer ally. Trump would much rather Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Congresswoman who is the great-great-great granddaughter of Davy Crockett, get the nomination. This would clear the slate for a victory for Trump’s chosen Republican candidate, Ken Paxton, a corrupt cross-eyed bridge troll who would sue his own children if they were getting in his way.
And thus, the FCC gave Stephen Colbert the finger, joining other prominent censored Americans like Jimmy Kimmel and several people who you haven’t even heard of yet, that’s how hard the Trump Administration has censored them. There is a long history of this sort of Republican darkness, going back at least 100 years, or 1000 if you considered the censorial caliphs of the Ottoman Empire to be Republicans. Which they were.
Keep in mind that I’m not a historian of Europe, though I do dabble in the Old Continent and my family owns an estate in Umbria, which we mostly rent out for upper-middle-class hen weekends. However, my knowledge of American history is second to none, since I am the ultimate American, goddammit.
A Trail of Lies
In 1926, radio journalist Walter Pillman attempted to interview Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs on The Westinghouse Tap-Dancing Variety Hour radio program. This interview proved so controversial that President Coolidge founded the FCC so it could establish the Equal Time Rule. The FCC immediately banned tap-dancing on the radio and said that for every socialist on a show, that show had to feature at least 20 non-socialists. This actually proved quite easy to do, because most people who like being on the radio aren’t socialists.
The Equal Time Rule came into play again in the 1958 when a man named Barney P. Blogpuss became a grand champion on Know Everything, a popular quiz program at the time. The problem was that Blogpuss was 4’6” and weighed 300 pounds, had warts all over his greasy face, and in addition to that was a proud member of the Communist Party. The show cast Lance Wallingford, a handsome, wealthy professor and deeply repressed homosexual from a good Republican family, because they believed he had the best chance of unseating Blogpuss from the popular imagination.
Blogpuss destroyed Wallingford so badly in the competition, five games in a row, that Wallingford quit his job and went to work as a horse groomer. CBS, the same network that decades later would put Stephen Colbert into permanent cold storage, sent Blogpuss to Moscow, where he still lives today, sitting on a stump in Gorky Park, daring all comers to challenge him in Complete World Knowledge.
Why is this not all in the history books? Because of censorship! And it’s only getting worse under Donald J. Trump’s authoritarian rule. We stand on a precipice in this country. We’re all going to fall off it together if we’re not careful. The network that brought us Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, and Trapper John, M.D. should hang its head in shame. As the pre-eminent historian of American democracy, I must take a stand. And you must join me.