Why do you think that is?

Yeah, I think, you know, this ties into a bigger question of why would they bring him back after he's bombed several times and was fired before that.

And I think the ultimate answer is the person in charge of Saturday Night Live who makes all of its creative decisions is Lorne Michaels, who's a guy in his 80s who has been making Saturday Night Live for 50 years with a brief five-year intermission towards the beginning.

And he likes Shane Gillis.

You know, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2024 that he thought Shane was the real thing.

He said he was angry that NBC, not him, made the call to fire Shane.

He told The Hollywood Reporter that same year that the controversy over Shane's racist and homophobic comments was an overreaction and that 200 Asian companies were going to boycott NBC if SNL didn't drop him.

So what is his position and how political and politically powerful is he?

He

certainly isn't.

And I don't think you could point to any one commentator, any one figure, any of the people I write about and say these people are responsible for the rise of fascism.

At the same time, fascism rises and has been rising.

And it has been rising due to complicated currents in our culture and our politics and American social life.

And I think everything matters, unfortunately.

Every little part matters.

It's like amazing how the things that you talk about, no one else talks about.

You're allowed to miss, you're allowed to miss.

They treat this as a assault on their civil liberties, and they sort of frame themselves as the vanguard of free speech.

They are the, you know, the, the front lines of, of speech in America, of, of liberty in America.

And so, you know, to go and perform and take money from a regime that is notoriously repressive, that, you know, locks people up and even executes people for what they say seemed a little hypocritical.

I think it's hypocritical.

But on the way here I got really ill.

And, you know, you've seen just sort of racism, levels of racism that would've been scandalous six years ago are now normal on these comedians' podcasts and sometimes in their acts.

And you don't see a lot of criticism of that from other comedians.