Does Stephen Colbert deserve an Emmy?
Who knows? Who cares? The last time anything interesting happened in a Hollywood awards show was when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, and that was pretty boring. It lowered my opinion of Will Smith–an actor I genuinely enjoy watching and generally like–by exposing me to the fact that he caters to his wife’s arrogant abuse.
I didn’t care about the slap–if his wife were worth defending, I would applaud–but that he turned out to be whipped.
But the now near-certainty that Stephen Colbert will get awarded an Emmy this year IS interesting, not because of the award, but because it is a great example of just how the cultural elite thinks.
Column: This year’s Emmys are on CBS. A Stephen Colbert win would be sweet revenge https://t.co/FvSMlaQaU9
— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) July 30, 2025
These awards purport to be about the quality of the entertainment provided by the entertainment industry. What a great show! That performance was amazing! Your lifetime achievement was worth recognizing!
But of course, none of that is remotely true anymore. As with everything else, these shows are about social signaling among the elites. And much or most of it is about politics, although there is plenty of “my outrageousness is more shocking than yours” competition.
Awards shows have always been about social signaling to some extent, of course. All groups speak their own private language and reward certain behaviors in ways that are opaque to others. But it used to be about rewarding “serious”–read rarely entertaining–movies with Best Picture. Actors look for Oscar-winning roles to seal the deal for their peers’ acclaim.
But now? It’s all politics all the time, not just some of the time. Is the actor transgender? Ugly? Beautiful played ugly? Anti-Trump? Into climate hysteria?
Colbert, apparently, has not won an Emmy in the past. This is ironic because he was the best-rated nighttime comedy show for years.
Now that he is being canceled, though, it’s time to stick it to CBS. CBS, you see, will broadcast the Emmys this year, so it would be fun to see the suits cringe, right?
The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held Sept. 14 at the Peacock Theater. The ceremony rotates among the four broadcast networks, and this year that broadcast partner happens to be CBS, whose parent company, Paramount Global, just landed Federal Communications Commission approval for its $8-billion merger with Skydance Media. That FCC thumbs-up came less than a month after Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News and a few days after CBS canceled Colbert (again, “purely a financial decision”).
This means that when (not if) “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” wins the talk series Emmy, Colbert will take the stage with his team and, one would presume, have something interesting to say.
Nobody in the cultural elite wants to confront the fact that nighttime talk shows are dead, and that’s why Colbert was canceled. He lost CBS gobs of money. Trump had nothing to do with the cancellation, and we know that for sure since the same company that owns CBS just spent $1.5 billion to broadcast South Park, and it just ran an episode where Trump was having a homosexual affair with Satan.
Beat that, Colbert.
But being oppressed is in, and Colbert is basking in the glow of being oppressed by a fascist. And the rest of the cultural elite loves the Narrative.
Colbert gets Best Performance for being a victim carted off to the camps. Bravo!
As people move to streaming, podcasts skyrocket in popularity, and media institutions as large as Disney stumble, the elite comfort themselves by believing their growing irrelevance is a result of oppression.
If they can’t be winners, they can be victims and award each other with the “Most Oppressed” award.
During the campaign, many of these people openly worried that Trump would have them arrested and put in camps. Many of us joked that this was yet another reason to vote for Trump–a way of poking fun at their self-importance.
It’s not the camps, though, that they worry about. It’s humiliation.
-
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
Help us continue to expose their left-wing bias by reading news you can trust. Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
