03/31/2014
Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, is a Culture War collaborator. Though he is a white male, he has built a lucrative career mocking his own. But even a cable Quisling is vulnerable to a multicultural witch-hunt, and now Colbert is being threatened by the same forces he exploited for so long. [The Campaign to “Cancel” Colbert, by Jay Caspian Kang, March 30, 2014]
Colbert was just a minor comedic celebrity until he became a key cast member on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, which achieved must-see-TV status among liberal whites and SWPLs during the presidency of George W. Bush. Stewart’s comedic technique alternately consisted of playing out-of-context clips of Republican politicians saying something stupid, or imitating President Bush with an over-the-top Southern accent. Stewart’s New York City audience loved it and it became a cliché in Main Stream Media and academic circles to proclaim that the Daily Show is better than real news.
Colbert played straight man in the midst of these hijinks. Then in 2005, he capitalized on this breakout with his own spinoff, The Colbert Report. The show was supposed to be a parody of Bill O’Reilly and other allegedly-conservative talking heads, but it actually served as a kind of inadvertent exposé of how conservatives were viewed by the political class. Colbert’s eponymous screen character was a self-important, casually racist blowhard who utilized over-the-top patriotic imagery and dismissed arguments with one-liners like “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Needless to say, O’Reilly promptly fell into Colbert’s trap — attacking him for being “French” — and the blundering of The Stupid Party ensured that Colbert never ran out of material.
Also needless to say, once Barack Obama was elected president, the MSM, in both real news shows and “satirical” news shows, quickly changed the target of its investigations from the Oval Office to random conservatives in flyover country. Both Stewart and Colbert essentially functioned as courtiers, mocking what resistance existed to the Ruling Party consensus, above all on immigration.
In 2010, Colbert actually testified before Congress, in character, about the need for foreign agricultural workers, before dropping the mask and trying to morally shame immigration patriots over migrant workers who “don’t have any power” and “suffer.” [Stephen Colbert, in GOP pundit character, testifies on immigration in D.C., by Dan Zak, Washington Post, September 25, 2010] Predictably, the agricultural businesses reliant on helot labor escaped his devastating wit.
In the Age of Obama, Stewart has tried to transition into a kind of center-left self-conscious moderate, disingenuously putting on and abandoning the mask of clown when it serves his interests.
In contrast, the more aggressive (and, in my opinion, far funnier) Colbert has doubled down on his character.
In his own words, Colbert says his character is a “well-intentioned…poorly informed, high status idiot.” [Stephen Colbert: Bill O’Reilly Inspired my character, Huffington Post, October 1, 2012] But what Colbert really provides is a White Minstrel show — a portrayal of the Middle American soul as the MSM wants to see it. His character, and the reaction to it, is less about satirizing Conservatism Inc. talking heads and more about taking shots at the type of people who watch Bill O’Reilly.
Another comedic parallel: Saturday Night Live graduate Will Ferrell, whose characters such as Ron Burgundy (who thinks “diversity” is an “old old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era”) and Ricky Bobby (a NASCAR driver sponsored by Wonder Bread, get it?) are all well-meaning but bumbling and old-fashioned white males who regularly receive their comeuppance from women or liberals.
Similarly, actors like John C. Reilly and David Koechner have built their careers around being a pasty version of Stepin Fetchit.
Naturally, Colbert, Ferrell, and all the rest are careful to break character occasionally and engage in some real world Leftist activism, lest they be associated with the “wrong kind of white people.”
Nonetheless, despite years of laughing about white dispossession, Colbert is now under attack for, you guessed it, “racism.”
Colbert aired a segment mocking Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder for announcing the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, a charity for American Indians.
Snyder’s ploy was a painfully obvious attempt by to buy off the professional minorities who are shrieking for him to dump the ‘Skins name.
Of course, there is a real insult here — to the true “original Americans,” the ones who actually built this country, starting with the settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown. If America was still a real nation, people would be outraged that settlers and pioneers are being equated to the “merciless Indian savages” that they fortunately conquered. Additionally, Snyder’s charitable cringe is futile — an act of PC posturing that will do nothing to save his team.
But we live in a “Proposition Nation” of mutually hostile tribes where people can’t buy a sandwich without a “trigger warning.” So Colbert piled on Snyder, joking he would appease offended Asians by starting the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation to Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”[ The Colbert Report Tweets Racist Joke, Twitter Users Rally to #CancelColbert, EOnline, March 28, 2014]
And this was an opening for one Suey Park, a professional parasite who devotes her life to transforming Asians from being the productive but unfashionable “Model Minority” into a part of the sexier (and more profitable) Coalition of the Oppressed. [Suey Park: Asian American women are #NotYourAsianSidekick, by Casey Capachi, Washington Post, December 17, 2013]
Park started a #CancelColbert hashtag, which was quickly spread by activists who believe that if minorities are offended by Colbert’s antics, then he is “no better than the racists.” Colbert had the tweeted riff on the skit deleted and blamed the network. It did him no good. [Stephen Colbert Denies Racist Tweet, by Lisa Respers France, CNN, March 28, 2014].
The campaign was joined by columnist Michelle Malkin, who saw an opportunity to hoist Colbert by his own petard. After all, Colbert himself has not exactly been understanding towards Republicans accused of racial insensitivity. [Stephen Colbert vs. the Hashtag Activists, by David Weigel, Slate, March 28, 2014]
True to form, most of the (largely white) press corps has been running interference for Colbert, dismissing the controversy as missing the point. [Press Runs Interference for ‘The Colbert Report’ As #CancelColbert Grows Louder, by Lisa De Moraes, Deadline, March 28, 2014] Colbert is one of their own.
But perhaps they are the ones missing the point. As Twitter rages about whether the hated “cis white males” like Colbert even have the right to make such jokes, liberal whites should consider whether their days are numbered. Regardless of how enthusiastically they heap scorn upon whites, the likes of Colbert, Ferrell, and the rest are still part of the “privileged” white race — and, in the upside-down world of contemporary racial politics, that means their opinion doesn’t count. (Salon.com: “Stephen Colbert is a white man and that means there have to be boundaries.”)
Americans may ask why our troops are not used to defend America’s borders, but are put at risk to defend the borders of Miss Park’s homeland. The answer of course is that White Minstrels have rendered white identity laughable and illegitimate — opening the door for the likes of Suey Park to come here and lecture the rest of us.
For that reason, perhaps Malkin’s tactic of piling on is the best. After all, why should White Minstrels like Colbert continue to get away with it? They have done their best to create a climate where a white person — any white person — can have their life destroyed for trivial or even fictional reasons if the wrong “social justice” crusader puts them in the crosshairs. They should reap what they have sown — and ensure everyone can see that whites are hated for being white, not for being “liberal” or “conservative.”
Colbert, Ferrell, and many others have made millions by making fools of their own people. But they are no longer needed. Nonwhites can do the job of hating whites just as well. As the loathsome Miss Park tweeted: “I used to respect and enjoy your work, @colbertreport. F*** you.”
In the pseudonymous Mikulas Kolya’s novel Men-Art-War, one short story recounts the fate of white “mouthpieces” — mostly actors — who defamed whites through their work as “weak-willed clowns fit only to be mocked and scorned.” For this, they are judged harshly by a patriot regime that later takes power. [ Preparing the Next Rebirth: Mikulas Kolya’s Men-Art-War, by F. Roger Devlin, TOQ online republished at Counter-Currents, June 18, 2008]
The historic American nation doesn’t need PC cringing from Snyder. It doesn’t need Miss Park’s Affirmative Action lectures, or for that matter her physical presence in our country. It certainly doesn’t need more scalawag clowns like Colbert who make their millions on the backs of their own people.
Instead, it needs someone who will say American whites are the real Original Americans, they alone built the country, they sustain it, and they don’t need anyone else to make it great.
Such sentiments will never be on Comedy Central or even Fox News. But the historic American nation has to wake up to them if it wants to survive.
After all, reality has a well-known racist bias.
James Kirkpatrick is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.
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