That being said, I want to be clear. The victims of this administration are not comedians. We are the visible manifestation of certain things, but victims are victims: people who struggle to speak their minds and are forcibly removed from the streets by hooded agents. These are the victims of the current administration.
I'm not sure Hitler cared about satirists, but I think this guy did. I don't think he likes being laughed at.
Trump doesn't like being laughed at?
No.
I'm going to tell you something and I'm going to go out on a limb: I'm starting to get frustrated with this presidency. [Laughter.]
Brave.
You know me, I was all in, ten toes, man.
You say that's not the point. But I remember when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. First of all, he filmed a satirical program about politics called “Hoods“, “Puppets” went off the air. And people said, “Oh, he took the puppets off the air.” A couple of weeks later, the film was uncensored news was taken off the air.
Right.
Is it not possible that this political attack, no matter how harsh and violent it may be, amounts to something else?
Certainly. Are we comedians, as I said earlier, like a banana peel in a coal mine? I think it's possible. And it, of course, can go there.
I will say: When seven million people come to America on a weekend with anything—and I mean, honestly, anything—you know something is going on. And they are trying to instill, I think, a foreign culture into this country. We are not Russia with its history of autocracy or dictatorship. This is a foreign culture for us, and it is uncomfortable, and this discomfort can be our salvation. I don't think we'll run around that well.
That doesn't mean we're not going to be in some kind of soft autocracy where the news is controlled. But we have many different directions. And oppression creates opportunity, and a population hungry for inspiration, leadership, morality, honesty, and a lack of corruption is fertile ground for those opportunities. No matter how bad it is – and this damn bad . . .
Yeah. Do you know how bad this is? David Ellison—
This is my new boss.
— just bought by Paramount.
Yes.
He not only, forgive me, owns your enterprise, but can also influence it. And he just hired Bari Weiss to run CBS News. So tell me what it means.
This is not an accident. It started with Richard Viguerie sending out letters trying to convince people to be conservative. It started with people buying AM radio stations and turning them into conservative talk radio. It started with Roger Ailes and the Nixon White House saying, “We will never let this happen to a Republican politician again.”
All the institutions – education, media, news, academia and all those things that we relied on as a strong tent with which to build a decent society – they said, “Yes, no.” They have created a parallel universe of think tanks, education and media to flip a switch at some point and set us on this path.
Because what do these institutions have? They are the starting point for our decisions. What are you doing? You quote, “Well, there's research,” and you use data and the scientific method and other things to try to make as informed a decision as possible. But if you represent a political movement that believes that giving power to these institutions is contrary to your cause, the best thing you can do is to create organizations that either undermine trust in these institutions or you create your own.
But, with respect, John, this is different. It's noticeably different. It was one thing to have the Brookings Institution, which was kind of liberal, and then to have the American Enterprise Institute. It's one thing to have a liberal newspaper and then a conservative newspaper. Great. In fact, in some ways it's even better.
Mm.
What's happening now is different. And you're potentially facing this with Paramount and The Daily Show.
