How’s this for a political scouting report? White man in his early 60s from deep-red South Carolina. Progressive views on civil rights and a deeply held Catholic faith. Happily married to one woman for more than 30 years. Three kids. Used to teach Sunday school. Has a loyal dog that sits at his feet when he’s working in his office. Can carry a tune. Speaks from the heart about loss and grief, having lost a parent and two siblings when he was a child. Adept at cracking jokes.

I’m not suggesting that Stephen Colbert run for president. I’m merely pointing out that he embodies the phrase “paragon of decency.”

Decency: it used to be a virtue in the public square. The words that finally squelched Senator Joe McCarthy’s Commie-hunting reign of terror came from a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, who, unable to bear another moment of the senator’s evidence-free bullying, said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” Thereafter, McCarthy became a pariah, censured in the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22 and getting the silent treatment even from his fellow Republicans.

Now it is Colbert, the paragon of decency, who is getting kicked to the curb. Nominally, it’s because his parent network, CBS, decided that his show, the top-rated in late-night TV, was too expensive to sustain. Realistically, it’s because the network’s parent company, Paramount, sacrificed Colbert to appease Donald Trump when it was seeking federal approval for its merger with Larry Ellison’s Skydance. Spiritually, it’s because we live in a time of inverted norms, where the president can casually post something like “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” yet Stephen Colbert is the one castigated for being divisive.

Of late, there have been signs that inverted-norm fatigue may finally be taking hold. No one really bought the jive of the New York Post when it tried to gin up a new wave of outrage over Jimmy Kimmel, going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to reverse-engineer a joke he’d made about Melania Trump two days before the thwarted assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—“Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow”—into a veiled threat on the president.

The First Lady and the president pretended to be gravely offended, and their lackey at the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, duly ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, the parent company of Kimmel’s network, ABC. But unlike the F.C.C.’s last go-round with Kimmel, when their intimidation succeeded in getting the network to suspend the comedian over a crack he’d made about Charlie Kirk’s killer, Disney did not buckle. Notwithstanding his beer-bloated early years as a co-host of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” the latter-day Kimmel is also a conspicuously decent family man, too menschy to be sold as a dangerous inflammateur.

The F.C.C. has no regulatory oversight of social media, but if it did, Truth Social, owned by Carr’s boss, would be a far more deserving target of high dudgeon and taste-policing. The same December week that Kimmel fought back tears while discussing the recent death of his best friend and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo, the president attributed Rob Reiner’s tragic death to “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction” with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Three months later, Trump observed the passing of Robert Mueller by posting, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Still, any potential turning of the tide comes too late for Colbert. He is losing his show, as Kimmel nearly lost his, precisely because he poses a threat to indecency. It’s akin to how the authors of the Project 2025 playbook proposed to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and succeeded) in part because of its involvement in “Sesame Street,” which they described as “biased to the Left.” I wrote a book about “Sesame Street.” I can tell you that, ethos-wise, it hasn’t changed much since it premiered in 1969 with the enthusiastic support of the Nixon administration. What’s changed is that the decency it represents is an affront to the indecent people now in power.

Last month I attended a taping of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Since the start of this year, the episodes have had an elegiac feel, ever more so as the final broadcast approaches. The day I was there, Maggie Rogers, in a nod to Bette Midler’s serenade of Johnny Carson in his penultimate “Tonight Show” episode, sang a lovely rendition of “One More for My Baby (And One for the Road).”

It was a sweet moment, if of an entirely different energy than the 1992 broadcast. Midler’s choice of a Sinatra-associated saloon song came freighted with Carson’s own dark history: the cigarettes, the bad moods, the divorces, and the D.U.I.’s, all of which were as much a part of his persona as his wit and elegance. (Indeed, Dana Carvey, whose short-lived 1996 sketch show gave Colbert his first screen time, does an inspired bit in which he freestyles impersonations of Carson getting pulled over by a state trooper: “Sorry, officer, I didn’t know I was swerving. I had two Slippery Monkeys at the Hook ’n’ Crook.”)

Whereas Carson was consumed by demons and David Letterman by self-loathing, Colbert is an anomalously wholesome and ministerial figure for late night—more Fred Rogers than Don Draper. When I interviewed him for a magazine feature four years ago, Colbert told me, with the caveat that he knew it sounded pretentious, that his program was a “show about love.” He then quoted E. E. Cummings: “Love is the every only God / who spoke this earth so glad and big.”

Being present for his guests as a good listener, he explained, was an act of love. His house band’s music was an expression of love. So, too, were his monologues, the very material that placed him in his own network’s crosshairs. “What I found after a couple of years of doing the show,” he observed, “is that we often realize we love something as we’re losing it. Many things were lost in the last five years: standards, morals, a shared reality, a shared civic engagement, a lot of friends. So by addressing loss, that’s how the show talks about love.”

Now we must prepare for the loss of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Already, the format it represents—the comforting, lavishly produced late-night talk show with a host, a band, a desk, and a couch—faces potential extinction, what with podcasts, YouTubers, and a weaselly new class of network overlords. The difference is that Colbert’s show was put down pre-emptively, like a dog in the care of Kristi Noem. That being the harsh reality, let us share, in its final days, our love for the show about love.—David Kamp for Air Mail

(The final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air on May 21.)

Photograph by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.

For many years I was prepared to claim that I was an atheist. But, as I grew older, I  gave that up in favour of being, or claiming to be, an agnostic. No, I wasn’t hedging my bets like Blaise Pascal in that infamous rationalisation with which he sought to prove that it is expedient in the end to pretend to believe even if you don’t. I was simply acknowledging that I had no more proof of the non-existence of God than I had proof of his existence. Once I realised that, it simply became arrogant to insist, as if it were an established fact, that there was no God. In all probability there isn’t, but there is no absolute certainty.

There is an arc to life when it comes to opinion. You start off, as a baby, believing that you are the centre of the world and that everything and everyone revolves around your whims. Unless you are Donald Trump, you gradually grow out of that, however, and enter a phase of absorption, where you tend to believe what you are told to believe. Hopefully you grow out of that too but many who have climbed out of the pit topple back into it, becoming conspiracy theorists or Daily Mail readers.

The arc continues. In your teens, you should rebel against what you are being told and start forming your own opinions, holding them vociferously, however stupid they are. Hopefully, though, you eventually leave that behind as you mature and learn to hold your opinions lightly and to be open to the views of others. You can discuss things without resorting to violence. (If you don’t manage that, you are doomed to be Pete Hegseth, perish the thought.)

That period should last most of the rest of your life but, sadly, as you get older, those teenage certainties make their return, only this time the intransigence with which you hold on to your views is likely to take a reactionary turn. Generally it is fear, paranoia, that fuels these prejudices but to you they are unalterable truths. You are obsessed by differences of skin colour and the way people wear their stupid hats. Finally, if you live so long, you once again begin to believe that you are the centre of your universe. You don’t give a damn about anything other than your bowel movements and your tea.

I haven’t quite reached that last stage yet but I do find myself having to fight down some depressingly repressive views. One of them is a powerful revulsion for God-botherers. I need to be clear that this feeling is wonderfully unselective. Whether it is God, Jahweh, Allah, Buddha or a giant turtle flying through space, I find myself at odds with the notion that belief in some supernatural being interested enough in us to be capable of intervening in our lives when we can attract his attention is reasonable. On the contrary, it is ludicrous and unworthy. Certainly unworthy of the level of subservience that we are expected to pay to the adherents of this self-indulgent, mindless and often dangerous nonsense. I am horrified when some lunatic in the White House presumes to tell me that “we are fighting God’s holy war” or that we should “pray” for the people he has just cynically consigned to death, and just as horrified when some bigoted twerp holding medieval sway over his people arrogates to himself the “holy” right to issue a fatwa demanding the death of someone who dares to think differently.

However you cut it, this is not God’s fault. In the first place he doesn’t exist, in the second, if he did, he wouldn’t care enough about us to take sides in our stupid feuds and in the third place, if he did, I seriously doubt whether he’d be happy about us using his name to justify killing each other.

No, the fault lies squarely with us presumptuous humans, always looking for a god to hide behind while we rape and pillage each other.

A plague on all their houses, you might say. Well, almost. Because, you will be pleased to hear, I am at last coming to my point.

Blame allocation is not a new phenomenon. We English have been burning, killing and exiling Jews for centuries, usually at the behest of some king or other authoritarian who owes them money. And when it wasn’t the Jews it was some other minority that we had exploited and now conveniently wanted rid of. And we are not alone in that. There is hardly a country in the world that hasn’t engaged in persecution of some group or another, on some pretext or another. But that it should still be going on is something I cannot begin to condone.

It doesn’t matter whether it is two Jews in London, a Christian Nun in France, Muslims going to prayer, Palestinians in Gaza, a woman in a headscarf, a man in a turban, a Protestant in a Catholic community or a Catholic in a Protestant community, or whoever. There can be no justification whatsoever, for making an attempt on their lives. It doesn’t matter to me what religion they espouse. It is all one. And it is all one because, in my book, there are only people, people just trying to live their lives. And no-one has the right to take those lives away.

I have heard the “justifications”: that they are fair targets because of what others “of their kind” are doing somewhere else. That, frankly, is balls.

The Old Testament appears to condone “an eye for an eye”, and that idea has been used by some to justify – to give “God’s blessing” to - what they like to see as righteous retribution: if you kill one of us, we will kill one of you. But in fact “an eye for an eye” was an attempt to limit retribution not to vindicate it. It was meant to constrain revenge not encourage it.

When the New Testament came on stream, the instruction had changed radically. It was now “Turn the other cheek”, “Love thine enemy as thyself”. Ironically, they crucified Jesus for saying things like that.

Turning the other cheek is not an easy thing to do. It can readily descend into appeasement and deliver a win for the bully and his accomplices. But I don’t think you need to go that far. You just need to hold on to respect for human life. Ask yourself the question, “does this individual deserve to die?” And if the best answer you can come up with is that he or she is just a cypher for something you disapprove of then I have no hesitation in telling you that you have no business taking, or even threatening, his or her life because of it.

Killing innocent people because they happen to believe in something you don’t, or don’t believe in something that you do, can never be justified. It is the antithesis of human decency. It is, always, indecent. And don’t try to rationalise it by saying there are no innocents. The watchword, my friend, is DO NO HARM. It’s that simple.

So, yes, you can condemn the atrocities being committed in Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan. And yes, you are absolutely entitled to say so. But don’t let me hear you try to say that, because of them, you are entitled to exact retribution on people who are not committing them. This is not a balancing act. There is no “moral equivalence”. It is not “but look what they are doing over there”. Each life is sacred in its own right. Hold to that.

Tucker Carlson insis that no decent person would ever mock another person's faith. Carlson's claim leads to some obvious absurdities.

Derek Penwell 

[I got home two days ago from a visit with family in central Mexico. This is my attempt to say what I couldn't say clearly enough while I was still standing in front of them.]

To those of us who may have forgotten why the world used to respect us:

As is always the case when I go to Mexico, everyone was kind to me. Like, pointedly kind … in a way that felt like a gift I didn't entirely deserve, given the state of the country from which I hail. But again and again, people found me in the middle of afternoon meals or sitting on the patio in the evening and asked some version of the same question:

“How did this happen to the United States? How did y'all allow what’s going on?”

Let me be quick to say, they weren't throwing accusations; they were genuinely baffled. But underneath the bewilderment was something harder to sit with.

It felt like … disappointment.

The thing people kept bringing up?

They said they'd always respected the idea that you could go to the United States, work hard, raise your kids, and over time, your family would be accepted as Americans. Not with an asterisk. Not provisional. Just Americans. (Note: I’m aware of the distinction between “US citizens” and “Americans,” because Americans are actually anyone from North, Central, or South America. I’m simply employing my family’s terminology: “los Americanos.”)

"That doesn't happen here," my cousin told me.

Turns out, in Mexico, people don’t easily stop being from someplace else. Even after decades in Mexico City, for instance, a family from Oaxaca or Canada might still be seen, by themselves or by their neighbors, as Oaxacan or Canadian in important ways. And even when they get to the point where they don’t understand themselves that way any longer, their neighbors often still will.

And the thing is, my cousin wasn't complaining. In fact, he was pointing out what he saw as something genuinely different about the United States, a version of belonging not locked to blood or soil.

"But now..." he said. And stopped.

He didn't need to finish. What else is he going to say? He didn’t want to risk offending me, I’m sure.

And frankly, I don’t think their disappointment in us is naïve. It feels more like the disappointment of people who saw something real in who we aspired to be, even when the reality kept falling abysmally short.

The welcome mat was always conditional, and they knew it. But there was at least a stated commitment, written into the founding documents and marched for in the streets. We said that part of what makes us the people we are is that we agreed, at least in theory, that the circle was supposed to keep getting bigger.

So, what’s being dismantled now in this country isn't just policy, but the original aspiration itself.

And as much as I’d like to blame the “other side,” I know I’m wrapped up in the whole mess in ways that are often too easy to hide from myself.

I grew up in a version of America where the question "Are you really American?" was never something I had to worry about. I’d have been gobsmacked if somebody’d asked me. But even though it never occurred to me to think about it explicitly, I’ve lived most of my life with the quiet confidence of the person who's never had to prove they belong. Just took it for granted.

But what I didn't notice for a long time was how much of my own comfort depended on other people being kept behind the rope line, denied entry to the club.

So when people in Mexico ask me, "How did you let this happen?" what am I supposed to say? I don't have a simple answer. I figured out pretty quickly that something was turning sour in the cultural vegetable crisper.

So, I wrote, I protested, and I even ran for office. But I also just kept living my life, sitting by while the machinery was being built that got us into this mess.

I’m not innocent, okay? None of us who had the ability to look away because we could get to claim innocence now.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though:

The broken promise that belonging doesn’t require a bloodline and that a stranger can become a neighbor isn’t just an American notion. It’s in the book.

It runs through the Torah like a spine. “You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” It appears in some form around thirty-six times in the Hebrew scriptures, more than almost any other commandment, including the command to love God.

To a certain extent, US policy aspirations about welcoming everyone else’s “tired, their poor, yearning to breathe free” borrowed that vision without giving God credit for it. And now, in a delicious twist of irony, some of the people most loudly claiming to speak for God are the same ones most actively working to dismantle not only the apparatus of hospitality to strangers, but even the empathic impulse behind it.

But that’s the thing about false gods: they can’t support the weight of what we ask them to bear on their hollow shoulders. Which means that what we’re watching isn’t just a political dumpster fire, but the collapse of an idol.

So, the fact that so many people are grieving right now, not just angry but actually grieving, means that people are tuned in. Because the presence of grief means we’ve lost something real.

If you’re one of the people who’ve made that journey and were welcomed, or thought you would be, and now find yourself being told your belonging was always provisional, I want to suggest that it meant something to believe in our offer of welcome. That promise was pointing somewhere worth going. Most of us know that the people working to destroy that promise of hospitality aren’t the last word on what this country is capable of being.

Neither are they the last word on what God is doing in the world.

I got on that plane home carrying this much, at least: the shame of knowing that people outside this country still believed in a version of us that too many inside have been busy trying to kill.

And maybe that’s the clearest way I know to say it now: what’s at stake isn’t just policy. It’s whether we still believe a human being can belong without having to prove they were born from the right people, in the right place, under the right flag.

We’ve never really kept that promise the way we’ve tended to idealize it. But that promise was holy anyway, a heritage we should never back away from or apologize for.

And if we let the fearful and the cruel destroy that promise now, then we won’t just have betrayed our neighbors. We’ll have betrayed one of the few genuinely decent things we ever dared to say about ourselves.

May God save us from that.

And may God make us the kind of people the stranger was right to trust in the first place.

Be gentle and brave,

“Have you ever thought, Holmes, all we are Is one long tube around which are attached As very mixed a cluster of bizarre Accessories as ever were mis-matched To move about to gain the wherewithal To hunt and gather what it needs to eat From things that grow or swim or fly or crawl, And change them into matter to excrete?” “Certainly, dear Watson — that’s a trope That humankind has puzzled over,…