According to filmmaking legend Michael Mann, today’s political climate in America is the same as the social unrest of the 1960s, but if Woodstock was replaced by a streaming special.
As far-right former fans of South Park love to remind us, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taken a very different approach to satirizing the politics of 2025 as they did in past decades when “Douche and Turd” was the cutting edge of social commentary. Over the last six episodes of South Park, the centrist cartoon kings have made their feelings toward President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump and his followers perfectly clear, earning the public ire of the White House and causing uber-conservative crybabies to campaign for Paramount to cancel South Park.
South Park Season 27/28 has featured some of the most pointed political parody of the show’s 28-year history, and at a time when our deeply divided nation faces innumerable threats to our way of life, Parker and Stone are the most prominent and impactful critics of power in all of popular culture — or so said the Last of the Mohicans director at the recently concluded Lumiere Festival in Lyon.
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“What’s going now is like the ’60s in America in a sense,” said Mann. “Except that the vanguard and the resistance today is in South Park.”
From an entertainment perspective, it’s hard to argue that South Park isn’t the single most defiant IP in an age when the federal government is actively attempting to subjugate the entirety of American media. Even Jimmy Kimmel Live! hasn’t hit Trump as hard as Parker and Stone have, despite how Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr personally attempted to silence the late-night show before getting crushed by a mountain of cat shit and losing his freedom of speech.
Unfortunately for America, Mann’s praise for South Park is also an indictment of the non-entertainers of the resistance, who have struggled to come up with a unifying and effective strategy for combatting the Trump administration’s all-out assault on democracy. In lieu of a Bobby Kennedy-type political figure who can channel the anti-government sentiment of the modern era into organized action, we just have Parker and Stone waging their campaign on Comedy Central while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer works to become Donald Trump’s pen pal.
For all its brilliance, South Park shouldn’t be all that’s standing between America and authoritarianism, and if this really is the 1960s all over again, we’re going to need an even greater grassroots movement to combat the fascist takeover of the federal government. Eric Cartman would be the first to tell us that we’ll need more than just lazy, smelly hippies to save the planet this time around.
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