The Ellison family, poised to continue dominating the media landscape with its Warner deal, signs on an infomercial-grade comic to replace Stephen Colbert.
Byron Allen speaks at an upfront presentation for his eponymous media company at a 2023 conference in New York.(Chance Yeh/Getty Images for Allen Media Group / The Weather Channel)
While our president makes genocidal threats on social media, and wages his chaotic war in Iran (the first world leader to see the “fog of war” as a feature, not a bug), you can be forgiven for overlooking the ongoing news that the war Donald Trump is winning is the culture war. A glance through recent entertainment coverage readily confirms that the brutality and ugliness Trump has sought to normalize over the past decade is now just the standard by which the culture industry operates.
This weekend, Trump Oval Office fanboy and sometimes Nazi Kanye West sold out Inglewood, California’s SoFi Center and took in a reported $33 million less than a year since he released a song called “Heil Hitler.” West even introduced Trump to fellow Nazi enthusiast Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago. Still, West’s apology for his antisemitism in the Wall Street Journal was evidently enough for his LA fans, and no doubt some went because of the antisemitism. But the UK, which has a slightly more critical view of Nazis than the United States does these days, saw things differently. The Home Office banned West from entering the country on the basis of his antisemitic views. He was booked to headline the Wireless Fest, which began hemorrhaging corporate sponsors like Pepsi and Rockstar Energy Drinks as soon as West’s appearance was announced. The festival has since been cancelled, even if its headliner has not.
A few days before West’s LA shows, Netflix announced that Louis CK would headline the Hollywood Bowl as part of its “Netflix Is a Joke” comedy festival, nine years after CK admitted that he had masturbated in front of several women without their consent. Netflix’s corporate leaders have evidently determined that he had completed his penance—even though CK’s nominal cancellation included a wildly successful interim live tour and the release of his first novel. If CK got a pass from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the thinking seems to go in LA, why should the United States be any different?
It’s true that you can’t ban a man from working for the rest of his life for trash behavior—but you also don’t need to partner with him. Unless, of course, you’ve determined that there won’t be any consequences, that people just do not care. The West and CK news also followed a series of interviews with actor John Lithgow where he shakily fended off questions about why he has agreed to take the central role of Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter television series, which will further enrich the author behind the Potter franchise, the transphobic JK Rowling.
Accommodating Nazis, sexual abuse, and transphobia were once the MAGA brand, but it’s very much mainstream culture now. Central in the long-term culture offensive is the planned Skydance-Paramount buyout of Warner Bros.-Discovery. That takeover would seal the Trump-aligned Ellison family’s status as anointed MAGA culture barons—something Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth openly longed for as he derided press coverage of the Iran war. Paramount-Skydance has already agreed to distribute disgraced director Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 4 at the request of Ratner’s friend, President Trump.
This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 20 percent of the funding behind Skydance’s $111 billion deal—some $24 billion—is coming from three sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East: Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia. Trump and Hegseth no doubt welcomed that news, since Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is reportedly pushing Trump to stay the course in Iran.
If the Warner deal goes through, the Skydance-Paramount corporation will own both CNN and CBS. And it’s certain that this foreign buy-in will come with a price. When foreign powers like China control a substantial slice of the revenue stream of major media companies, they expect American corporations to censor themselves. China’s control of the Chinese film market has silenced any and all criticism of China in American film and TV, and it’s not hard to see Saudi Arabia’s normalization campaign with the West getting new life in such a deal.
Meanwhile, the Ellisons had more cleanup work to do on the Trump culture front. After securing the cancellation of Trump critic Stephen Colbert and his Late Show on the eve of Skydance’s final acquisition of CBS, the network announced Monday it found his replacement. Colbert’s 11:30 pm slot and the hour after it will be filled by media investor and stand-up comic Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed. The show initially starred Allen in syndication from 2006-2016, and then he brought it back when CBS needed to fill in some late night programming gaps. The show will debut in May.
The good news for Trump’s culture allies is that Allen doesn’t fit the broader template of recent MAGA culture-war winners. He can’t be lumped in with Louis CK, Kanye West, or JK Rowling. He has not alienated millions of people worldwide with stupid, morally bankrupt behavior. He’s always been a likable public personality who has never ruffled a feather. And that’s likely why CBS wants him in that spot.
Allen’s media company has been in business with Sinclair Broadcasting—the powerful right-wing local broadcasting empire that lobbied so hard to get ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired last year for a monologue about Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Allen is perfectly aligned with their goals. In the past, he has told comedians on Comics Unleashed, “I don’t want to hear any political humor. Just be funny, family-friendly and advertiser-friendly.”
If Allen isn’t leashing the comics, he’s certainly muzzling them. In the Trump 2.0 era, Allen is the ideal host for CBS. He may not be a bad person, but the people who hired him are—or rather, the person calling the culture-war shots in the White House is. Allen got the gig in what’s known as a “time buy.” His production company puts up the money to lease the time slot from CBS for his show—which will then be followed by a game show he also owns. It’s a common marketing strategy for 3 am infomercials and religious broadcasters. The company leasing the airtime makes money up front with little or no investment, and buyers like Allen make their money on the commercials and products they sell. In the past, Allen has split the commercial sales revenue with CBS.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Allen’s hire is the equivalent of bringing Bari Weiss into run CBS News or what the Washington Post and LA Times have become after killing off their planned endorsements of Kamala Harris in 2024. Allen’s show likewise represents a scaled down, cheaper, far less ambitious media product. It’s designed not to cost much and not to offend. And if past history is much if a guide, it won’t attract much of an audience.
Allen’s time-buying arrangement also furnishes a window on the Ellisons’ underwater business model at Paramount-CBS. When Skydance bought Paramount, it took on an enormous debt load, which will only get worse after the prospective Warner deal goes through. Ballooning debt was also a factor the decision to ditch Colbert—together with the animus of his Hater in Chief, Trump. One hundred and eleven billion dollars is a mountain of money to anyone, and it’s clear that if Paramount-Skydance is going to absorb Warner Bros.’ many media properties without going under, the newly merged media leviathan will be airing the kind of filler product that Byron Allen provides.
If Colbert’s show cost too much, and if the late night talk show model is dying, that still does not excuse CBS for its sad lack of creativity in replacing that model. Like the comebacks of West, CK, and Rowling, handing Colbert’s time slot over to the affable Allen is peak enshittification. It’s another step back into the degraded culture and values that normalize Trump’s own garbage behavior.
Ben SchwartzTwitterBen Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other publications. His Bluesky address is @benschwartz.bluesky.social.