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GrabAGun Digital Holdings, an online firearms store backed by Donald Trump Jr., did not have the stock market debut that he and other shareholders had hoped for. Instead, its shares fell 23% Thursday on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The stock, which trades under the ticker PEW, was down again about 1.23% in premarket trading on Friday as of this writing. The presidents eldest son had started Wednesday with a triumphant tone. Donald Trump Jr. rang the NYSEs opening bell as people chanted USA, just one day after fellow shareholders had approved GrabAGuns merger with Colombier Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. He was joined by the SPACs CEO, Omeed Malik. Trump Jr., who owns 300,000 shares of GrabAGun, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), trumpeted the market debut of a firm that trades in firearms. In an interview with Fox Business, he stated, To be able to come back to the New York Stock Exchange and actually take a gun company public feels like such a vindication of all the insanity, all of the woke nonsense that weve been watching and facing for the last decade in America. GrabAGun raised $179 million in gross proceeds from the merger, according to the company. Malik and Trump Jr. are both also connected to 1789 Capital, as president and a partner, respectively. The decision to merge with a SPAC is an interesting one. Markets experienced a SPAC boom during the early pandemic years, but their bubble has long since burst. In its place is a long list of failed SPAC mergers andin some caseslessons learned by companies like BuzzFeed, Virgin Galactic, and 23andMe.
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If you were a teenager on America Online back then, there’s a good chance you got the email. Unlike a lot of the files floating around the early warez scene, the attachment wasnt a pirated copy of Photoshop 3.0 or a beta of Windows 95. In fact, it was being given away by its creator, a hacker who called himself Da Chronic. When you launched it, the title screen depicted the giant disembodied head of AOL CEO Steve Case floating in a sea of flames, set to a funky excerpt of Dr. Dre’s Nuthin but a G Thang. The title, rendered in 3D, spelled out just how far outside of the known, pixelated world you had come: AOHell. In 1995, AOL was how most people in America were getting online, dialing in on 14.4 or 28.8 kbps connections, 33.3 if you were lucky. What you heard after the modems hysteric screeches was Welcome!” and “Youve got mail!as if the internet was your new home. And yet, while it began offering access to the nascent World Wide Web in 1995, AOL itself wasnt technically the internet; it was more like a walled, manicured garden, with a set of cheery web-page-like brand-filled spaces known as keywords and a growing warren of official and unofficial chatrooms. This story is part of 1995 Week, where well revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago. AOHell was the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by hackers to turn this whole system upside down. Built with a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic on a rented computer, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOLs windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer, and even an Artificial Intelligence Bot. AOHell could also provide users “free” access to AOL, through a credit card generator (which fooled AOLs sign up process), and, by January 1995, a function for stealing other users’ passwords and credit card numbers. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets. Da Chronic and his friends called it fishing, or, in the style of hackers, “phishing.” The program was a form of protest, Da Chronic would tell reporters who managed to reach him at the time (through an anonymous remailer). AOL regularly cracked down on hacker chatrooms, he said, but did little about the pedophiles and child abusers who used its platform to trade GIFs and prey on young users. Outraged by the hypocrisy, he wanted to send a message to the internets first corporate overlords. As he wrote in his Read Me file, I think having 20,000+ idiots using AOHell to knock people offline, steal passwords and credit card information, and to basically annoy the hell out of everyone is a good start. But there were other reasons, too. Da Chronicwho was actually a 17-year-old in North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouchehad to hack AOL because he wanted to stay online with his friends. He didn’t want to pay the hourly fee, because he couldnt afford to, and he didnt want his friends or anyone else to pay either. He wanted everyone in, wanted any teen on AOL to feel the thrill of punking and pranking and using the system exactly how it wasnt meant to be used. Still, Rekouche wasnt really thinking about where this was going. He couldnt anticipate the fameor the fear and paranoiathat would come with being AOLs most notorious hacker. (His tools caused abuse and fraud and, AOL claimed, millions of dollars in losses.) He also could’t have imagined that his program would mark the start of automatic phishing, which would become the cornerstone of modern cybercrime. At the same time, Rekouche also didnt realize what else AOHell would come to represent: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time Rekouche left AOL in late 1995, AOHell had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenagers making their own programs, and fueled subcultures where legions of young programmers and artists got their start hacking and breaking and making things. AOHell made me want to learn to program, Steve Stonebraker, a cybersecurity expert and host of the podcast AOL Underground, told Klint Finley in 2022. It was the starting point for this whole generation. (Rekouche appeared on the podcast that year.) In 2014, Case himself acknowledged that the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us, but that some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things. That included Mark Zuckerberg, who had confessed to Case that he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]. Rekouches relationship with his creation remains complicated. Its easy to be nostalgic for the Wild West of AOL, where we were just exploring the internet for the first time and causing chaos and being delinquent and finding friends. But he tries not to dwell too much on the legacy of AOHell, or the internet that followed, with its algorithmic hellscapes where criminals and companies alike are still finding new ways to manipulate users. If he did, Rekouche jokes, I might have to go rogue and start destroying again. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. When did you get online? I got on AOL in early 94 when they were still on version 1.1 of Windows. It was me and my sistershe rented the computer and we shared it. AOL had a public rooms list, and then a customs rooms list where people can make their own rooms. Thats how I found the Tips and Tricks room. What was it like to be in there? I dont think Id ever been in a chatroom before, maybe once on a bulletin board. I was kind of like a loner social outcast anyway, so it was my groove. I liked it because it was social, yet you still had some distance from everyone. But I just fell in love with it, finding kids on there that were like me, that were kind of smart and nerdy and just into the things that I’m into. And it was a blast. I was just learning about computers. I didn’t knw anything about them. We had an old slow computer, and so I had to learn all kinds of tricks just to get my thing to work. What was one of the coolest tricks you learned? It was called IM stealing, and basically what you would do, on a Windows keyboard, you’d hold the alt key, and you’d type in 0 1 2 8, and then release the alt key. And that would create this special character, an eight bit Unicode character, that AOL’s backend system wasn’t built to properly filter. So you know buffer overflows? A lot of exploits on the web have to do with parsing problems, where you can insert code into a field, and if the parser doesn’t parse it right, then the code is actually executed. That’s exactly what was happening back then, in 94, except through AOL’s proprietary system. They never expected somebody to type in an eight bit unicode character like that. And what would happen was the most wild thing: apparently every IM that was sent on AOL at that particular second would get rerouted to your computer. And so as soon as you sent that character, a dozen IMs would pop up on your screen, with all these people talking to you, in the middle of their conversations. The person they were talking to, their name would turn into your name. The first time I did it, this guy’s like, You son of aI’m reporting you hackers! You did this againthis is the last time! It’s like, get off my lawn! Looking back, I think that’s what hooked me, that thrill. I was very, I wouldnt say antisocial but anti-authoritarian. I quit high school at 15. The way I looked at schoolat least the North Carolina Public School systemis that it was a prison. And my family life wasn’t great. And so, without going into a lot of personal stuff, I always had this whole anti-authoritarian attitude. So getting onto AOL and doing this stuff and seeing these tricks and finding these other mischievous kids like me, it was just a great fit. I dont know if you remember, but to get on AOL, you only had those 10 hour [floppy trial] disks. And after you spent your 10 free hours, of course you had to start paying $3.50 an hour. And to me back then, that was way too expensive. But it was like crack. I mean, I loved it so much, it became an obsession: Okay, how do I get more of these 10 hour disks? [Photo: Thiago A./Wikimedia Commons] This was before AOL started sending promo disks and then CDs to almost every home in America. So: at some point, your free hours run out. How did the more serious hacking start? As far as illicit activity in general, it started with creating an account with a false name and a fake bank account number to get free hoursyou could create an account by just putting in your routing number and your checking account number, because I hadn’t yet discovered how to generate credit cards. How did you get from there to AOHell? We stopped hanging out in Tips and Tricks and started creating our own public rooms, with various names of hackers. And TOS Advisor [the screenname for AOL administrators] would just come around and shut us down. So my friend Rizzer says, Hey, why don’t we just all agree to go into private room hack? And so we did, and all our friendsit was about 15, 20 people tops that would rotate in and out of this roomwe would have macro programs that would perform tricks for us. Mostly it was scrolling ASCII art. One day Rizzer shows me this thing that he made. It was basically a Windows form with a button on it. You enter in someones screen name and what you want the person to say, and you just hit a button. It performed text manipulation for you. And text manip was a way to talk using someone else’s name in the chat room. [Screenshot: Courtesy of Da Chronic] I’m like, Dude, this is awesome. How did you make this? And he told me it was something called Visual Basic. And so I download it, and all I can think of is: okay, all the tricks that we doText manip, ghost [a trick that cleared a chat room of all conversations], all that stuffwe need to have functions for all of it. And I want to get this out there. I want to make a cool-ass program everybody can use, and distribute it. I released AOHell 1 by myself, but I learned from Rizzers beta code. And then I’m like, Hey, why don’t we just work on AOHell together? And then we just had feature after feature. What kind of response did you get from the l33t hacker scene on AOL? There was pushback. There were people who would tell me, these are our secrets! There were people that just hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these n00bs and lamers and destroying the community. And in my eyes, that’s the exact opposite of what’s happening. Like, we’re creating a cool place and yeah, these little 14-year-olds are coming inthey’re script kiddies, but so what? We were in their shoes a couple years ago and one of these little fuckers is going to end up creating something cool anyway. And then there was my original core group of friends from AOL who didn’t give a shit about AOHell at all, because they just basically moved on to IRC and other things. And ironically, those are the people that I ended up putting in the greets of AOHell [laughs]. So, after they all basically migrated to IRC, I would have my social life there, and then on AOL my whole idea there was just to build this tool. Where you were already a legend. Once you start getting, like, fameeverybody knew who I wasthen you start getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. I couldn’t be myself. I couldn’t even identify myself. If I go into a chat room with my name, first of all, nobody would believe me. Second of all, if they did, it would just be a bunch of chaos. The media was starting to write about it, too. I subscribed to PC World and I remember getting the magazine in the mail and them having a short article on AOHell. And when I saw that physically in print for the first time, that’s really when it hit me. But it was all surreal. It was wild, dude. Were you concerned that AOL was going to come after you at some point? I became more paranoid about that later, as things really got big, and I realized just what the hell I had done. But at first, not so much. I just didn’t give a shit. Like: what do I have to lose? I didn’t have any prospects of doing much anyway. Well, you were learning so much at the time. What was that like? The very first coding stuff I picked up from Rizzer, and then I would download books and try to read the help files. It was mostly a trial and error process. I was not one of these types that sat down and learned how to program and then learned all the proper formalities, and then go and try to tackle a problem. I came at it from the reverse end where, Okay, this is a problem, or I want to do this particular really cool thing. How do I do that in this code? Let’s experiment. And then I had to learn error handling and certain things like that. But it’s like spaghetti: I understand kind of what this does; let’s throw some shit together and see what happens. But it worked. There were people making high level programs that were on the scene at the same time as me, and they would look at my code and snicker. But the thing with me was, I didn’t give a shit. Because it only mattered what the end user sees. Does this feature work? Is it cool as fuck to look at? Yes. Does it take two seconds longer to function because I’m a shitty programmer? Yes. But does that matter in the long run? Does the 14-year-old on the other side of the screen give a shit, because he’s able to flood all his friends offline and act like a God? Yes, it took two seconds longer because I’m not an efficient programmer, but I came up with this cool idea, and made it work, and this kid’s a God in front of his friend’s eyesor whatever kids get off on. Thats the way I looked at it, at least. [Screenshot: Courtesy of Da Chronic] What was your favorite part of AOHell? I didn’t really use it that much. I was just into developing it. The thing I used was the Phisher. Obviously, that was a tool that I needed for myself first and foremost. The other stuff, to be honest with you, the whole spamming of chat rooms, doing the ghost tricks and all that stuff, that was over for me. I cared about creating a tool to do it and getting people on it, and getting people to like it and finding out new cool things to do. The ability to modify your online experience, to have freedom and control in a place like this, that was revelatory. And yet on the internet now, that feels so . . . distant. I can’t imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today. Theyll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That’s totally not allowed. How did you guys get into phishing? My friend Dave, who was like me, a high school dropout. He was using a 286 computer and the DOS version of AOL because he couldn’t even afford the Windows version. He’s like, dude, this is how you can get online for free. You just send these new members, this IM telling them you need your, their, you need their password for X, X, X, Y, and Z. And then I’m like, what? <Laugh> and oh, that totally makes sense. Because they have no experience online. [Screenshot: Courtesy of Da Chronic] When you were using the Phisher, and you would go into the new member rooms, how many passwords could you get in one night? I want to say I’d open up the text file and see about 50 of ’em in there. That’s a busy night. [laughs]. I mean, it’s not like today, where everybody knows what phishing is, unless you’re really naive. Yeah, though some phishing has grown really sophisticated. And now of course you got the AI stuff, and that is putting a wrench in the mix too. True. You also had an Artificial Intelligence Bot in AOHell, right? I mean, it’s not a large language model. It’s a kind of classic AI that Marvin Minsky talked about in the sixties at MIT, where you tried to get certain computer automation happening. That was my favorite part of AOHell actually. That was the most complicated, and the one I put the most time into. And it was probably the least used and buggiest feature of the whole thing! How did it work? It was a system that would read the chat room and read your IMs, then perform functions based on events. An event could be Bob41 IMs you. When that event happens, you can send him an IM back, you can send an email, you can send something to the chat room, ou have three or four different options. So it was programmable in a way, where you get dozens and dozens of different combinations of things that could happen. That was inspired by the scripts on IRC. IRC was very much automated like that, so that if somebody comes into the chat room, they could be auto greeted, you could send the person a file automatically with a script, stuff like that. But there was absolutely nothing like that for AOL, of course. I’m sure it was buggy because it was pretty complicated. There was a mass mailer too, for sharing warez. That worked on the same kind of technology. Basically, you could advertise what files you had to people in the chat room, and then somebody could say, I want such and such. And then AOHell would go into your email and send those files to each person in the queue. That was really freaking complicated, and it was buggy as shit, but it did work for the most part. I built the proof of concept, but it was something that other people perfected, because the whole warez community relied on that kind of thing. Have you tried using generative AI? A little bit, including for coding. There’s a lot of stuff that’s coming out where I think, I should look at this like I looked at Visual Basic. Visual Basic, back in 93 and 94, was really a game changer. If you didn’t write a Windows program in VB, before that it was visual C ++. And there’s no way I would’ve ever been able to build anything with visual C ++, with my level of understanding of computers back then. So when I see these AI coding tools, I think, this might be like today’s Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work. And as you said, large language models are making phishing easier, too. I was looking into a little bit of that, how you can basically use an LLM with an add-on a search function add-on to be able to crawl the web and pick up, I guess we call it open-source intelligence, and then use that data to craft dynamic phishing emails. Oh wow. But of course. It’s weird, because you have to understand psychology and you have to understand how computers work fairly well to build something that does that. It’s hard to really profile the kind of person that’s going to build something like this, because who was I? I was just some dropout high school kid, you know, on a computer that I couldn’t even afford. I didn’t have any qualifications or anything like that. So you don’t know who your adversary is going to be, who’s going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who’s going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit. [Screenshot: Courtesy of Da Chronic] This social engineering ability: what is that? I think people have certain knacks for it. I was basically raised by two women: my mom, who was a social worker who knew a lot about psychology, and my sister, who was seven years older than me, and very smart. Growing up, there was a lot of acrimony and stuff in my family, and me being so young. My cousins were a decade older than me, my sister’s seven years older than me, and we’re all attacking each other, and Im trying to survive. Plus, my mom would have these psychology books on her bookshelf. And I remember being like 10 years old, picking them out and reading them. I didn’t understand everything obviously, but I understood, I think a fair amount of it. Also I remember being about 8 years old, and my mom telling me things like, you know that boy at school, who’s picking on you? Theyre doing that because they feel bad about themselves. They have a self-image problem. And so I was always kind of reading into things in the background. How did that impact how you perceived people? As a matter of fact, Id say a lot of my life has been spent in self-discovery and figuring out who I am, what happened, why I became the way I was, who I really am, how I stand in, in contrast to what, what I was, what I experienced. Let’s face it, what I did with AOHell, there’s obviously some psychological shit going on with somebody who writes something like that, and releases it to everybody. Like, I didn’t have all my moral ducks in line, so to speak. How did you end up leaving AOL? I released the last beta of version three in September of 95. And I was already getting burned out by it. And my life was changing in other ways. You gotta remember, I started in November of 94, and I stopped the following September. So for 11 full months, this was my life. And I knew it was getting too big. When I started, it was the only program, and then I built on it, and then AOL just started growing and growing so fast. And suddenly within a few months, there’s like a hundred different programs and all these people in the community. AOL was also starting to crack down on the community, too. The month you left, the hacker Happy Hardcorewho would soon be arrested and convicted for authoring his own Mac program, AOL4FREEreleased an internal AOL email indicating that the company was working with federal law enforcement to find you. I didn’t even see that until years later. In ’98 or ’99 I ended up going to California and meeting this kid who was into the AOL scene. He was the first one to tell me about Happy Hardcore and that he got busted. And he had a scan of the $50,000 check that his dad had to write for him. And I’m like, whoa, I had no idea about any of that. I was just tripping balls. I was just grateful that I wasn’t busted like that, because we didn’t have any $50,000 to pay. [laughs] But for awhile after I left AOL, it was scary. In some ways, it became just too much. Im like, this is beyond reality. And I can’t talk about it in real life. And none of the people I know in real life know about it, for the most part. So it’s like a separate world that I had to keep compartmentalized in a certain area of my brain. And it was like a hot stove. Going there brings up some shit. It also sounds lke you found a way to understand and accept that part of your life. I’d already gotten over a lot of it. And then around 2009 I discover: holy shit, this is where phishing comes from? What do I do now? I proverbially shit my pants. How do you explain that? There’s so many different dimensions to it. I do a lot of self study, and I understood the gravity of it, and how big this was. And yet, you know, I’m just little old me. I was also concerned with how I was going to come out with it, and how people I had relationships with were going to react to it. And most importantly, how the intelligence services of the United States were going to react to itHomeland Security, NSA, whatever. I had all this weighing on my mind, and it was not small. How did you get through that? I did the best I could. I was enrolled in college, and I decided to write a paper about it. I figured, I’m going to write a very technical academic paper that’s as unbiased, as technical, as truthful as I can be about it, and just put it out there and whatever happens, happens. I gotta get this off my chest. I kind of expected it would get more attention. But I was also kind of relieved that it didn’t, because I was kind of afraid of that. I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat. [laughs] How do you think about your relationship to phishing now? I see it as a very complicated thing. I feel good about where I’ve come to. I dealt with guilt for a lot of years. And that was only after I was able to overcome an aspect of myself that didn’t want to think it was that bad. There was an aspect of myself that was proud of it, that was proud of AOHell in general. And I didn’t know how to differentiate being proud of one aspect and acknowledging how horrible and awful this other thing was. And so there was a period of years where I learned to deal with that, and have a nuanced understanding of it and of myself, of who I am today and who I was then. I know I’m a decent person. I’m a good person. I created a tool. I did it as a kid, as part of a fun thing, with a bunch of other fun things. I knew it was wrong morally, but I had no idea it was going to spiral into this atrocity, or whatever word you want to use. That was just all happenstance and outta my control. So I don’t blame myself. It’s not like I created phishing, this abomination to the world, and that’s my contribution, and I burn in hell. I don’t think of it that way. Because I also think about how kids learned to program from it. All the way to Mark Zuckerberg getting on there and becoming a hacker. I’m more into tripping out over the fact that you could have an impact on the world just being some dude. I’m just some dude. That’s trippy to me. Dont you think that if you hadnt included a system for phishing in AOHell, someone else would have built something like it? When I think back, that is kind of how I thought of it. It was kind of a way for me to escape the guilt and just be like, well, it would’ve happened anyway. But I’m not convinced that it would have. There’s no evidence that it would have, thats been studied. We don’t really know how it transitioned over [to the internet] very well. It’s not something I want on my gravestone, but I’m cool with it. But I had to do a lot of personal growth and soul searching, and a lot of trial and error. There was a culmination of just getting that phishing stuff out of the way, that paranoia out of the way, not worrying about whether the NSA is looking over my shoulder and having that monkey off my back, coming clean, getting clean with my diet, all that stuff. And then, just understanding my family of origin, why I am the way I am. And over the last 10 years, just studying this stuff, thinking about itI have notepads, just hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes about psychology, about things that happened in my lifeI just worked through it. And I’m just at this point now where life is pretty decent. Its almost like you hacked yourself. Yeah, man. I look forward to what’s coming next.
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CBS is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next May, shuttering a decades-old TV institution in a changing media landscape and removing from air one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent and persistent late-night critics.Thursday’s announcement followed Colbert’s criticism on Monday of a settlement between Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a “60 Minutes” story.Colbert told his audience at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater that he had learned Wednesday night that after a decade on air, “next year will be our last season. It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”The audience responded with boos and groans.“Yeah, I share your feelings,” the 61-year-old comic said.Three top Paramount and CBS executives praised Colbert’s show as “a staple of the nation’s zeitgeist” in a statement that said the cancellation “is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”In his Monday monologue, Colbert said he was “offended” by the $16 million settlement reached by Paramount, whose pending sale to Skydance Media needs the Trump administration’s approval. He said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was “big fat bribe.”“I don’t know if anything anything will repair my trust in this company,” Colbert said. “But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”Trump had sued Paramount Global over how “60 Minutes” edited its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Critics say the company settled primarily to clear a hurdle to the Skydance sale.Colbert took over “The Late Show” in 2015 after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” and hosting “The Colbert Report,” which riffed on right-wing talk shows.The most recent ratings from Nielsen show Colbert gaining viewers so far this year and winning his timeslot among broadcasters, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. On Tuesday, Colbert’s “Late Show” landed its sixth nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show. It won a Peabody Award in 2021.David Letterman began hosting “The Late Show” in 1993. When Colbert took over, he deepened its engagement with politics. Alongside musicians and movie stars, Colbert often welcomes politicians to his couch.Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California was a guest on Thursday night. Schiff said on X that “if Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a similar statement.Colbert’s counterpart on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, posted on Instagram “Love you Stephen” and directed an expletive at CBS.Actor and producer Jamie Lee Curtis noted in an interview in Los Angeles that the cancellation came as the House passed a bill approving Trump’s request to cut funding to public broadcasters NPR and PBS.“They’re trying to silence people, but that won’t work. Won’t work. We will just get louder,” said Curtis, who has previously criticized Trump and is set to visit Colbert’s show in coming days.Colbert has long targeted Trump. The guests on his very first show in September 2015 were actor George Clooney and Jeb Bush, who was then struggling in his Republican presidential primary campaign against Trump.“Gov. Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years,” Colbert told his audience. “And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not.”Late-night TV has been facing economic pressures for years; ratings and ad revenue are down and many young viewers prefer highlights online, which networks have trouble monetizing. CBS also recently canceled host Taylor Tomlinson’s “After Midnight,” which aired after “The Late Show.”Still, Colbert had led the network late-night competition for years. And while NBC has acknowledged economic pressures by eliminating the band on Seth Meyers’ show and cutting one night of Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show,” there had been no such visible efforts at “The Late Show.”Colbert’s relentless criticism of Trump, his denunciation of the settlement, and the parent company’s pending sale can’t be ignored, said Bill Carter, author of “The Late Shift.”“If CBS thinks people are just going to swallow this, they’re really deluded,” Carter said.Andy Cohen, who began his career at CBS and now hosts “Watch What Happens Live,” said in an interview: “It is a very sad day for CBS that they are getting out of the late-night race. I mean, they are turning off the lights after the news.” AP Media Writer David Bauder in New York and AP Entertainment reporter Liam McEwan in Los Angeles contributed. Alicia Rancilio and Andrew Dalton, AP Entertainment Writers
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