DON’T CRY FOR STEPHEN COLBERT. CRY FOR THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Late Night Is Dying. Free Speech Is Dying. And the People Killing It Call Themselves Patriots.

When I was a little kid growing up in Baton Rouge, I used to hog the television to watch Johnny Carson. My sisters would get so mad at me. I dared them to change the channel. Eventually they stopped fighting me for the remote because they started to like it too.

The Tonight Show was my jam. Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue made me want to do what I do. I would sit there as a little boy dreaming about having a platform like that one day. A place to talk. A place to ask questions. A place to tell the truth in front of people.I have been chasing that dream my entire career.

Tonight Stephen Colbert does his last show. And I have a lot of feelings about it. Some of them surprised me.

I appeared on Colbert’s show several times over the years. And I appeared on the Colbert Report more than a decade ago, before he ever went to the Late Show. He had seen me interviewing someone on CNN who called himself a vampire, and he brought me on to do a bit about it. It was funny. It was sharp. It was a glimpse of what that man’s mind could do. He is brilliant. Wickedly funny. Fiercely competitive. A little prickly if we’re being honest. But one of the smartest people I have ever sat across from on television.

And the Colbert Report itself was genuinely before its time. For years he played a character who was essentially Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and every MAGA pundit rolled into one bombastic, flag-waving, fact-free performance. He was doing satire of conservative media before most of America understood what conservative media was going to become. He saw it coming. He put on the costume and showed you exactly who was inside it.

He was the canary in the coal mine.

I know something about that.

On January 18th of this year I was in St. Paul, Minnesota, covering an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church as an independent journalist. I livestreamed it. I interviewed protesters and churchgoers. I did my job. Eleven days later, at approximately midnight on January 29th, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations arrested me in Beverly Hills. I was in Los Angeles covering the lead-up to the Grammy Awards. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the arrests were made “at my direction.” I was charged with conspiracy against religious freedom and interfering with the exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship. Up to ten years. For journalism.

A federal judge denied the government’s request for a $100,000 bond and travel restrictions. She found no evidence of criminal behavior. I pleaded not guilty. My attorney Abbe Lowell said it plainly: “The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.”

Shortly after, I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Jimmy gave me a platform when a lot of people were watching to see who would. I told him I was doing okay. I told him I wasn’t going to let them steal my joy. And I meant it. But I also said this is very serious. Because it is.

And I said something else that night that I keep coming back to. I was the canary in the coal mine. Not just for what happened to me personally, but for what was coming for all of us.

The networks didn’t like me asking conservatives hard questions. CNN didn’t like the mirror I was holding up every night. So they pushed me out. And I thought: if it happened to me it will happen to others. It will trickle down. Or up. Depending on how you look at it.

Now it has trickled all the way to late night television.

CBS says The Late Show was cancelled because it was losing $40 to $50 million a year. That may be true. The traditional late night model is genuinely under financial pressure. The way people consume media has changed. I have lived that change. I built my entire second act on it, right here on this platform and on YouTube and Twitch and everywhere the audience actually is.

But here is what is also true. The cancellation was announced two days after Colbert publicly criticized Trump’s settlement with Paramount, CBS’s parent company, over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Colbert called himself, on air, “a martyr of free speech.” He was not performing. He believed it. And I believe him.

I am of two minds about all of it. I want to say that clearly. Both things can be true at once. The economics of late night television may no longer support a show at this scale. And there may also have been pressure applied in exactly the right place at the right time by the right people who were tired of being made to look ridiculous every single night.

Because that is what Colbert did. What Kimmel does. What Meyers does. What Fallon does in his milder way. They hold up a mirror. Every night. And in that mirror you see Donald Trump as he actually is. Not the strong man. Not the dealmaker. Not the savior. A small, insecure, thin-skinned, desperately needy man who cannot stand to be laughed at. And his allies cannot stand it either.

Republicans love to call themselves free speech absolutists. First Amendment warriors. They say it constantly. They built entire political careers on it. And every time someone says something they don’t like, every time a comedian lands a joke that stings, every time a journalist asks a question they cannot answer, they find a way to make it stop. They cancel shows. They pressure networks. They arrest journalists at protests. They are the biggest snowflakes in American public life, wrapping themselves in the language of free speech while working every day to eliminate it for anyone who disagrees with them.

They only want free speech if the speech flatters them.

Now let me get surgical about something. Because this is personal and it deserves to be said clearly.

The world that produced The Late Show, the world of legacy media, cable news, and network television, has long had a problem nobody wanted to name out loud. It is a world that has been extraordinarily good to a very specific kind of person. White men who fail spectacularly and are promoted for it. White men who make catastrophic decisions and are handed bigger offices for it. White men who are visibly, demonstrably unqualified and are given more power anyway. I have watched it for thirty years. I have been managed by it. I have been undone by it.

The executive producer who ran The Late Show for years eventually left. And somehow landed in my world. That same person, from that same television orbit, eventually became my boss at CNN. And fired me. I won’t name him. I don’t need to. But I will say this: it was one of the most spectacular examples of a white man failing up that I have witnessed in this industry. Profoundly unqualified. Visibly incompetent. Elevated anyway. Because that is how that world protects certain people and discards others. And the people it discards are almost always the ones making the powerful uncomfortable.

I don’t blame Stephen Colbert for any of that. Colbert is a brilliant man and I believe he operated with integrity until the very last night. But I do wonder whether the man I just described, the one who failed up from that world into my professional life and eventually fired me, had more to do with the end of that show than anyone wants to say out loud. Maybe losing tens of millions of dollars a year wasn’t just about the economics of late night. Maybe it was about who was running the building.

But enough about him.

What I know is this. The late night landscape that ends tonight was not just entertainment. It was a nightly act of democratic resistance. Johnny Carson made us laugh. David Letterman made us think. And then the world changed and Colbert and Kimmel and the others did something different and necessary. They told us the truth through comedy because the truth had become so surreal that comedy was the only container large enough to hold it. They were journalists in clown shoes. And they were essential.

I have been mourning the old late night for a long time. Since Johnny left, really. It has never quite been the same. And tonight it gets a little smaller.

But here is what I know about canaries.

When the canary stops singing in the coal mine, the miners don’t mourn the bird and go back to work. The silence is the warning.

I was a warning. My arrest was a warning. Colbert’s cancellation is a warning. The question is whether anyone is paying attention to what all of these silences have in common.

Don’t cry for Stephen Colbert. He is brilliant and he will be absolutely fine. He will be more successful in his next chapter, professionally, financially, and personally, than most people will be in a lifetime. He has talent that no network can cancel and no administration can arrest.

Cry for the First Amendment.

Cry for the journalists who are being forced to make room for right wing extremists on their platforms. People who come on television only to lie, deny, and mislead. People who stand in front of cameras and tell you with a straight face that January 6th was not an insurrection. That the 2020 election was stolen. That the most secure election in American history was somehow rigged. Cry for the journalists who are told to give false equivalence where there is no equivalence at all. Where one side has facts and the other side has talking points and they are presented to you as equals. Cry for the journalists who are forced to fill panels with people arguing just for the spectacle of it. Not because the argument is real. Not because both sides have merit. But because conflict gets clicks and rage gets ratings and the truth gets lost somewhere in the middle of a screaming match nobody wins. That is not journalism. That is theater. And it is destroying the thing it claims to serve.

Cry for the journalist arrested in Beverly Hills at midnight for covering a protest at a church.

Cry for the comedian cancelled two days after he criticized the wrong corporation’s deal with the wrong president.

Cry for every voice that has gone quiet while we debated whether the economics made sense.

And then do something about it. Because here is what they never seem to learn. Every time they silence someone they think they have won. Every time they fire someone, cancel someone, arrest someone, they believe they have made that voice smaller.

They fired me. I built something bigger.

They will cancel Colbert. Watch what he builds next.

It never works the way they think it will. And they never learn.

Show up.