Common Dreams

07/19/2025

Colbert is funny.

What’s not funny is that our country’s democratic experiment is on the verge of collapse—and it has less to do with Trump than with the capitulation of corporate liberals and corporate centrist institutions to Trump.

Big universities have capitulated. Big law firms have capitulated. Big media companies have capitulated.

The lesson to be learned from today’s political reality is that big corporate institutions don’t care about democracy or free speech. They will bend the political system toward their own economic benefit—and be complicit with authoritarianism if it keeps getting them wealthier.

The conglomerates that dominate our media and our society have one and only one value: profit-maximization. This was pretty much admitted by Shari Redstone’s late father, Sumner, who built the Viacom (now Paramount) media conglomerate. Sumner Redstone was considered a liberal, a son of Massachusetts who’d been friendly with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president. But Redstone famously endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004.

As Redstone explained: “I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom… I don’t want to denigrate Kerry, but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”

I know I’m not the only progressive who has survived the Trump years with my sanity intact thanks in large part to TV comedians employed by media conglomerates: Colbert (Paramount), Jon Stewart and team (Paramount), Jimmy Kimmel (Disney), Seth Meyers (Comcast); and the best investigative journalist on mainstream TV, John Oliver (Warner Discovery).

There’s a quote usually attributed—perhaps inaccurately—to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I’ve offered a twist on this quote for the Trump era: “In a time of political craziness, keeping one’s sanity is a revolutionary act.”