See B.S.: The fall of independent media

You don't cancel a profitable show with high ratings. Period.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll trumpet it again like a drunk town crier at a hanging:

Donald J. Trump can take a beating. But he cannot—under any circumstances—take a punch.

Let the mobs gather. Let the air fill with screeches of “tyrant” and “traitor” and “two-bit Mussolini in a red golf hat.” Let academia host yet another solemn panel on the “Authoritarian Turn in American Life.” He slurps it all down like a golden retriever licking spilled gravy off the linoleum.

The grievance fuels him. The spectacle delights him. He is never happier than when the national mood is one tick shy of riot.

“Fake news!” he hollers, posturing like a jaundiced chimp throwing his own filth at the zoo glass. “Libtards! Witch hunt! I still have my base, my rally crowd, my low-rent Rasputins whispering sweet nothings into my greasy ear!”

But make fun of his hands?

He goes full Ophelia-in-the-riverbank.

Mock his sclerotic gait? Imply his waistline begins somewhere around Kansas?

He short-circuits.

Dare to suggest, however delicately, that he is not—objectively speaking—the most beloved figure since Jesus Christ and Colonel Sanders?

You receive, in short order: a lawsuit, a subpoena, a terminal IRS audit, or a rant on Truth Social typed in ALL CAPS by a man whose thumbs appear to be attached by boiled string.

This is the operating principle:
He can weather mass hatred the way a hog weathers rain.
But prick his vanity—just once—and he detonates like a North Korean firework factory.

The Cult of the “Big Dick Boy”

Trump is not a man so much as a mood: a strange cocktail of petulance, performance, and pathological need. His identity is a papier-mâché colossus built from high school locker room fantasies—every woman swooning, every man seething with envy at the sheer alpha wattage radiating from his ill-fitting suit.

Puncture that illusion, even accidentally, and the whole scaffolding collapses.

Call him corrupt? He grins.

Call him senile? He shrugs.

But call him uncool—call him a loser, a joke, a sweaty relic clinging to relevance like a moth to a tanning bed—and you’ve declared jihad on the Golden Calf of Queens.

I’m frankly astonished he hasn’t had Adam Kinzinger renditioned to a Lithuanian meat-processing facility. The man publicly likened Trump’s scent to “a fetid slurry of Big Mac rot, underboob sweat, and bowel failure.”

That’s not just insult. That’s blasphemy.

And in the Holy Church of the Ochre Ogre, blasphemers must burn.

From Cronkite to Colbert: The CBS Kowtow

There was a time—admittedly sepia-toned and mythologized—when CBS meant something.
When Walter Cronkite sat, square-jawed and slow-tongued, and told the republic what was happening in the world without sounding like a manic labradoodle on Adderall.

Today?

CBS has chosen the path of cowardice in its final, quivering hour. They did not merely fire Stephen Colbert. They offered him up, like some late-night Iphigenia, in the hopes that the orange gods of Mar-a-Lago would grant favorable weather for their corporate merger.

This is not “business.” This is bootlicking of the highest and most acrobatic order.

I haven’t seen this much head since a keg party in the Phi Kappa basement.

The network is engaged in strategic auto-fellatio, desperate to placate the whims of a man whose grasp of media criticism begins and ends with shouting at the television like a dementia patient in a padded cell.

They hope, if they prostrate themselves far enough, Trump will not unleash his henchwoman—Pam “Human Lawsuit” Bondi—to sink their deal under a slurry of orange bile.

And so:

He can take a beating. But he can’t take a punch.

And now, America’s so-called guardians of truth and satire and public discourse are too terrified to even throw one.

Why Should We Care?

Ah.

There’s the rub.

We should care because this—this entire repugnant spectacle—tells us something essential about the state of the republic, the integrity of its institutions, and the collective cowardice of those who still imagine themselves stewards of truth.

But more on that—next.

When the Joke Stops, So Does the Republic

Authoritarianism rarely kicks down the front door in jackboots.
No. It slips in the back, grinning politely, while the guests are still complimenting the hors d'oeuvres.

The first thing it strangles isn’t dissent.
It’s humor.

Because humor, you see, is the final mirror.
A system can survive protest. It can survive outrage.
But it cannot survive mockery—because mockery punctures myth.

And authoritarianism runs on myth the way a drunk runs on gin.

So when Trump leans on CBS, when executives panic and euthanize satire under the guise of “restructuring” or “brand alignment,” understand what you are seeing:

This is not about Stephen Colbert.
This is about who gets to tell the joke—and who decides when it ends.

Once a regime controls the punchline, it controls the narrative.
And once it controls the narrative, it controls the boundary between truth and fiction.
That is the crucible of totalitarian power: not the suppression of speech, but the redefinition of reality.

The Corporate Vichy Class

Now let’s be honest: CBS didn’t resist.
They didn’t fight back.
They didn’t even whimper.

They dropped to their knees with the practiced reflex of a courtier in Versailles.

Because today’s media barons aren’t journalists.
They are middle managers with press credentials, whose primary job is to protect shareholder value and avoid mean tweets from whichever aspiring caudillo happens to be polling above 35%.

This is the real genius of the modern American strongman:
He doesn’t need a Ministry of Propaganda.
He just needs scared executives, leveraged balance sheets, and a Rolodex of fixers in Florida.

You don’t need to jail the press if you can buy the building and fire the host.

You don’t need tanks when cowardice does the job of cannon fire.

What This Really Means

When a government starts hunting leakers, jailing whistleblowers, suing comedians, and weaponizing the FCC to punish unfavorable coverage, the goal is never just silence.

The goal is compliance.

What dies first isn’t freedom.
What dies first is the imagination of freedom—the idea that someone, somewhere, might still speak truth and survive it.

That’s why it matters when CBS folds.
Not because Colbert was a saint.
But because his survival—or lack thereof—tells every other newsroom what’s off limits.

The republic doesn’t vanish in a flash.
It dissolves one scared memo, one neutered joke, one canceled show at a time—until all that remains is the droning hum of state-approved enthusiasm.

And somewhere in the center of it all, the Ochre Ogre watches… and grins.

And Then What?

You think it stops at Colbert?

Once power learns it can silence a comedian, it starts looking for who else will bend.
A school board. A publisher. A judge. A social platform. You.

And it won’t need laws or troops or tribunals.

Just a whisper from the right donor, a memo from the boardroom, a warning from Legal.

That’s how it works. Not with a bang, but with a corporate policy update.

He can’t take a punch. But he doesn’t have to.
Because now, no one dares to throw one.

And that’s the way it was…

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Build Your Exit While You Still Can

🛂 What happens when your government stops protecting you and becomes predatory?

Borderless Living is for those who understand that Plan A is collapsing, and Plan B needs to be built now. We cover second citizenship, relocation, offshore structuring, and how to maintain your sovereignty in a country that no longer guarantees it.

If you're ready to think like a sovereign instead of a subject, this is where we begin.

Because when the regime decides you can’t get free information, free speech, and free debate, it’s already too late to start Googling Portugal.