CBS announced on July 17, 2025 that it is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with the final episode set for May 21, 2026. The stated reason: the show was losing money — reportedly $40–50 million per year. Add Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement with President Trump over the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and the Paramount-Skydance merger now approved by the Trump administration, and you have a network under serious financial and political pressure. My read: the trend is our friend, and this week proved it.
Politics Is Downstream From Culture — Andrew Breitbart Was Right
Andrew Breitbart’s foundational insight was that politics flows downstream from culture. I’ve believed that for years, and this week is exhibit A. The Second Amendment does not live or die only in courtrooms — it lives or dies in the broader culture. When the loudest megaphones of the anti-gun left go dark, that matters for our rights just as much as a favorable circuit ruling.
Stephen Colbert was not a neutral entertainer. He was arguably the most influential anti-gun voice in American late-night television. He used that platform relentlessly. He pushed the 1994–2004 Federal Assault Weapons Ban as settled gospel, claimed that ban reduced mass-shooting deaths by 70%, and called for banning AR-15s. He mocked legislation that would have eased suppressor regulations under the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act — dismissing the Hearing Protection Act as a punchline rather than engaging with the actual Second Amendment arguments. That was the show CBS just cancelled. I am not going to pretend otherwise: good riddance.
How Legacy Media Shapes the Gun Debate
It is worth explaining exactly why a show like this mattered so much to the anti-gun movement, because understanding the mechanism helps us appreciate what we’re gaining.
Legacy media shapes the gun debate in three ways. First, story selection: networks run an endless loop of mass-shooting coverage while barely touching the 500,000 to 3 million defensive gun uses that occur every year in the United States. I wrote about this dynamic in my book First They Came for the Gun Owners — the deliberate omission of defensive gun use from the national narrative is one of the most consequential forms of bias in American media. Second, sourcing: it is never a serious Second Amendment scholar on the panel — it is another off-the-shelf liberal law professor. Third, framing: even when a nominally conservative voice appears, the questions and context are constructed to marginalize the argument. CBS’s 60 Minutes has been doing this for decades.
Colbert’s show was the entertainment arm of that machine. When CBS absorbed $40–50 million a year in losses running it and still would not cancel until a merger forced the issue, that tells you how ideologically motivated the commitment was.
NPR, PBS, and the Defunding of the Anti-Gun Propaganda Apparatus
The Colbert cancellation did not happen in isolation. This same week, Congress passed and President Trump signed a rescission package cutting $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — effectively defunding NPR and PBS through fiscal year 2027. CPB has begun winding down operations.
NPR and PBS are no friends to traditional American values or the Second Amendment. The proof is in their story selection, their guest lists, and the angle of every firearms-related segment they have ever aired. Defunding them is something conservatives have argued for literally decades, and this administration finally delivered. These three events together — the Colbert cancellation, the NPR defunding, the PBS defunding — represent a genuine inflection point in the American media landscape. The institutional infrastructure of the anti-gun left is contracting.
The Ascendance of Pro-2A Independent Media
Here is the other side of the ledger, and it is just as important. While Colbert’s ratings bled out and CBS absorbed the losses, something remarkable was happening in independent media. Colion Noir built a YouTube channel to over 3.2 million subscribers teaching Americans about their constitutional rights. Tom Gresham has run Gun Talk Radio on 300-plus stations for more than thirty years and expanded into YouTube. William Kirk at Washington Gun Law, Jared Yanis at Guns & Gadgets 2nd Amendment News, Armed Attorneys, Armed Scholar — this ecosystem of pro-2A voices now delivers more substantive Second Amendment education than CBS, NPR, and PBS combined have ever offered.
ZeroHedge put it well in their coverage of the Colbert cancellation: “Whatever the case, Stephen Colbert’s exit heralds the end of the progressive late night era of fake news veiled in bad comedy.” Mother Jones — hardly a right-wing source — acknowledged in their own coverage that “the end of the Colbert era marks a dark new chapter.” They mean dark for them. I consider it a restoration.
The Trend Is Our Friend
I want to be clear about what this moment is and is not. It is not the end of the fight for the Second Amendment — the anti-gun movement still has institutional money, well-funded litigation groups, and sympathetic judges. But culture shapes what is politically possible, and right now the culture is moving our way. Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2024. The shows and broadcasters that spent years working against our constitutional rights are losing their audiences and their funding at the same time.
The Second Amendment community built something real in the meantime. It happened because Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms stopped waiting for legacy media to represent them and built their own platforms. This week, the scoreboard reflects that work.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.