For Comedians Around the World, the Laughs Often End as Democracy Fades

Satire needs independent grass roots funding. If the satirist you love costs $10M per year, well, people who love satire better be putting $10M per year on the table to pay for that, because if it's just (for example) a Disney product then to Disney $10M of satire which annoys the God Emperor is a bad deal, lets buy $10M of police procedural or whatever instead.

To be clear: It is very possible that an independently funded satirist just means in six months or six years God Emperor Trump decides he's entitled to shut that down and they do get arrested or whatever, this is not a magic solution, but I think a critical weakness in the US is that so much of this is actually funded by giant corporations and thus psychopaths. It's choosing to fight with one arm tied behind your back.

There is no authoritarian line he can cross that turns away his apologists. They pretend that Biden or Obama were somehow worse (which, even if true, is an illogical argument for democratic norms), pretend that these are private decisions not coerced by the state power, or cheer for "retribution" against their idealogical opponents while embracing a diminishing of democratic freedoms. They have no red lines for Trump. He can deny established science; deny access to life saving vaccines; control the media; accept billions in personal investments from foreign governments in return for US policy; kill people in international waters without oversight... that's just this month's list!

It's not a phenomena I could have truly internalized without experiencing it first hand. It has changed me even as a late-middled-aged adult. I wonder what it must be like for those younger, who are assembling the foundations of their political and social opinions.

What I did hear was some "facts" that did not seem to line up with things I heard in the news. I just assumed he ignored his staff of "fact checkers" -- see Kimmel's comments when he had the dust up with Aaron Rogers -- and was just on another of his anti-Trump rants.

While his show isn't all that bad, his monologues are political and have gotten old. Stick to jokes.

"Laughter is a power that even the world's most powerful figures must bow down to"

...is that so, after all?!

Now that we are here, we need bipartisan cool heads to establish good rules.