Life in Activism Special: Practice Your Fear to Avoid the Hazards of “Purely Financial” Decisions
This is a free edition of my weekly Life in Activism column. Every Tuesday, I offer paid subscribers of Wolves and Sheep and Bowers News Media advice from my 21 years in politics about how to keep a cool head and make better decisions no matter what is happening in the world, so that you can enjoy your life and stay engaged in political activism over the long run. If that is of interest to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
On Thursday, CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026. Further, in what they characterized as “purely a financial decision,” no one will replace Colbert as host. Instead, CBS will shutter the Late Show and exit the late night talk show business entirely.
Notably, Colbert had publicly criticized CBS's parent company, Paramount, for a $16 million settlement it recently agreed to in a likely frivolous lawsuit that Donald Trump had brought against the network:
He [Colbert] condemned the Paramount settlement on air, likening it to a “big fat bribe,” and he joked that his new mustache would protect him from the corporation: “Okay, okay, but how are they going to put pressure on Stephen Colbert… if they can’t find him?”
Administration critics like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) condemned Paramount's settlement of the lawsuit over concerns that the company may have settled in order to grease the wheels of its pending merger with production company Skydance. That merger, worth billions of dollars, is imminently facing final review from the Federal Communications Commission.
It certainly raises eyebrows for a company in Paramount's situation to settle a lawsuit with the President of the United States. It also raises eyebrows when, shortly thereafter, the company proceeds to announce the end of one of its most prominent and long running programs, a program which just happens to star one of the nation's most vocal critics of the current President of the United States. Finally, when the President of the United States then publicly celebrates all of this taking place, there is likely to be a shortage of un-raised eyebrows.
All of that said, it actually strikes me as possible that Paramount and CBS are being entirely truthful when they characterize their decision to end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as “purely a financial decision.” This is because even the critics of Paramount and CBS would argue that the actions of the two companies in this whole affair are financially based—and that is the whole problem. Instead of defending the first amendment rights of the journalists and comedians who are employed by CBS, Paramount gave in to political pressure because it is only concerned with money and not with rights and freedoms.
We shouldn't be surprised. Large companies, even ones that are coded blue because they operate in left-leaning spaces like the entertainment industry, do in fact pretty much only care about money. So, when faced with a choice between money and principles, they are just going to choose the dollar signs. We can tell this is true, because Trump isn't even the first would-be dictator that many of them have given in to. Conservatives have long complained about how many media and tech companies, including Paramount, give in to censorship demands from the People's Republic of China. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump, and a lot of his closest advisors, took note of this, and concluded that it wasn't all that difficult to coerce large media companies into paying something akin to government protection money.
There is an important personal lesson in all of this for political activists, especially in the event that you rise in prominence and/or land full-time employment in the political space. When your public position starts to really matter to you in politics, or when you become financially dependent on the income you earn from politics, it becomes possible for you to be influenced by threats, both direct and indirect, to your social or economic well-being. Even if you entered into politics for all the right reasons, if you haven't prepared yourself for these threats, then before long you could find yourself supporting policies or candidates contrary to your values because you fear the loss of your public standing or employment.
One way to prevent this from happening to you is to practice your fears. This is exactly what I did before I left my job of 14 years to launch my own venture at Bowers News Media, and to team up with Matt Kerbel here at Wolves and Sheep.
While I had been thinking about starting my own pro-Democratic and pro-democracy media and activism organization since 2017, to be perfectly honest I was scared to do it because of how much was at stake. Specifically, as the sole breadwinner for my family, I was worried about leaving a job—managing the email and activism program at Daily Kos—that I could never replace.
Instead of just worrying, I decided to find a way to overcome this fear. So, in October 2023, borrowing an idea from Stoicism, I decided to practice my fear of having a drastically reduced income and see how it felt.
One week while my spouse was out of town, I took care of my son and myself while spending as little money as I possibly could. For food, I bought enough groceries for the two of us for the week for only $140. All seven days, I completed my chores and errands entirely on foot. For entertainment by myself, I walked around the neighborhood and listened to Great Courses lectures. For fun with my kid, I bought a cheap bag of Halloween candy, read to him a lot, and played a bunch of board games and video games that we already owned. In total, I spent less than $150, and felt kinda great. Most importantly, my fear of a drastically reduced income went away, as I realized the outcome was not as scary as I thought it would be.
That week really had a powerful effect on my life. While I am aware this wasn't a real test of having a drastically lower income, as I could stop the test anytime I wanted, I still found it an illuminating practice. For better or for worse, it actually made me a lot less afraid of experiencing a significant drop in my income. This was instrumental in giving me the strength I needed to finally follow my dream of starting my own media and activism operation.
Beyond giving me the strength to strike out on my own, losing my fear of living on a lower income has prepared me to stand fast to my principles in the event that I experience pressure to support policies or candidates that I don't like. While that pressure would likely to be of a far milder sort than having the federal government turn its sights on me, the fear of losing subscribers, business relationships, or access to certain platforms can most definitely wreck havoc on any political activist's ability to act in ways that they believe and support.
A company like Paramount cannot practice its fear of losing money, because large companies don't really have any purpose other than making money. However, as individuals, we can practice our fears and overcome them in the process, because we are driven by more than just financial interests. By practicing our fears, we can prepare ourselves to handle pressure to compromise our values and act in direct opposition to them. In that way, we can avoid making decisions with only financial interests in mind, as Paramount did.
Thank you, Chris, as always your insights are appreciated.
And if I may digress: it's my understanding that Colbert's contract expired in 2026 anyway. He'd renewed for one more year. I've felt his courage to call out Paramount was based on the fact that he has other outlets for his wit and talents. He has a podcast, youtube, he's written books. He's been seeding the ground for his departure for some time. Turning the Colbert situation into another political football is a distraction IMHO. Late night TV is going the way of the dinosaurs. That Trumpers think they've "owned the libs" by cancelling the Colbert show are grasping at straws. And it would seem they need all the straws they can grasp this week!
Your account of owning/living/facing your fear of losing the comfort/ease and privileges of whatever your financial status quo had been was wonderfully direct and cut to the bone of our current condition. Most of us have lived lives of relative comfort; courtesy of improved technology, stable incomes and predictability of our economy. Yet, when we think about it, we have known that we are on thin and vulnerable ice...and dread learning how we'd manage if the ice really cracked. To discover what really makes for survival and our ability to still enjoy meaningful living...more simply and with less...is a true gift. You gave yourself that gift, as we all could do...and be much more free to pursue deeper meaning, free of financial fear. Most of us can remember being OK while living with far less when we were young...and even enjoyed the making-do creativity we shared with others then. There's no reason we still don't have those skills. They just need some practice, again. Interesting that Trump's tool for intimidation is to threaten or take away financial stability. Will we discover that there's more to it than money, even as we fight the mean tunnel vision of "money as the measure of everything" value system of corporate power in capitalist America?