Stephen Colbert took Nation editor-at-large Chris Hayes to task Thursday night, holding up a copy Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.

“You’re a media elite. Is this a cry for help?” Colbert asked.

He later prodded Hayes for allowing himself to be called “something of a populist,” reading a line from his book that includes the phrases “building a transideological coalition,” “marshal insurrectionist sentiment,” and “succumbing to nihilism.”

“It doesn’t get any more populist than that,” Colbert said.

—Zoë Schlanger