8 ms·

I watched South Park for almost 20 years, but stopped about a decade ago. Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the

I watched South Park for almost 20 years, but stopped about a decade ago. Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation? What I mean is, SP is one of most prominent cultural examples of " both sides are equally bad, everyone and everything sucks", they've had great success with this schtick, ManBearPig, Turd Sandwich, etc. They did a lot of prep work for the current regime, after all, once you but into their mindset, MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.

al_borland 7d ago
I don’t see how maga is the logical conclusion of the mindset. Both sides do suck, and the answer isn’t blind tribalism, it’s common sense and reason. There is a lot of basic stuff that most of America would be on board with if they stopped trying to make everyone fight over a few issues that they’ve been fighting over for decades. Get some wins on the easy stuff, build some momentum and cooperation, and then maybe it will be easier to tackle some of those harder problems.
- alephnerd 7d ago
  Much of the culture war crap that helped justify Tea Party and proto-alt right commentary started out from 2000s and early 2010s South Park. The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline. Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media and not easily accessible on modern streaming.
  - rapind 7d ago
    > The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline. It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure). Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
    - dylan604 7d ago
      > even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure). The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
      - al_borland 7d ago
        Positions that were mainstream in the Democratic Party 10-15 years ago are now being labeled as far right. There are a lot of normal people who haven’t changed their politics very much, but were left behind by the Democratic Party. The right happily scooped them up, as they had nowhere else to go. I think Rogan, and much of his audience fall into this camp.
        karmakurtisaani 7d ago
        Do you have any examples of such positions?
        al_borland 6d ago
        Illegal immigration. Preventing it, and correcting lax enforcement of the past is now labeled a maga issue, with democratic cities actively trying to work against ICE and people who support the left protesting against it. Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tb37decBZFk https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tb37decBZFk
        rapind 6d ago
        You're taking a small slice of left progressives and applying it to all democrats to try and push this "the left are all commies" narrative. ICE is running around like the gestapo in targeted blue cities, so of course it's an issue. If they were doing this in red cities (where the crime actually is), there'd be the same push back. It's obvious that republicans are intentionally trying to create issues and division using every tool at their disposal. There won't be enough leopards for all of these faces.
  - dylan604 7d ago
    It's on Paramount+. How is it "not easily accessible on modern streaming"?
    - alephnerd 7d ago
      > It's on Paramount+ That's the issue. Paramount+ only has roughly 59 million subscribers in the US. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu/Disney+ remain the big 4 nationally [0]. Additionally, you don't see the same degree of memes, zeitgeist, and discourse for South Park that you would see a decade ago, let alone 2 decades ago (remember ginger kids - it got so bad that multiple kids committed suicide due to bullying arising from kids misinterpreting the episode. Or ManBearPig turning into an epithet for climate change denialism for over a decade until the writing staff retconned it). This isn't to say it's a bad show. It's just older, and Paramount+ distribution is difficult to access for the 18-34 demographic, amongst whom Family Guy and American Dad remained the two dominant streamed adult cartoons in 2025 [1] despite there also being a South Park season last year. Frankly, South Park mismanaged the COVID transition - they basically took an almost 5 year hiatus which dropped viewership in a now very competitive adult animated market. [0] - https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united-states/ https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united... [1] - https://www.cartoonbrew.com/streaming/nielsen-end-of-year-streaming-data-258510.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/streaming/nielsen-end-of-year-st...
aftbit 7d ago
Nonsense. 100% nonsense. To the contrary, acting like only one side is bad and thus only one side can be made fun of is a huge reason we're in this situation. The right took the left's cancel culture and weaponized it to the extreme. South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards. I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster. As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
Gimpei 7d ago
I don’t understand this attitude. There’s zero evidence that South Park had any effect on any political outcome of any kind. South Park is a comedy show and they make fun of things, liberals and progressives included. I thought people were supposed to speak truth, or is that only the case when they say what you want them to hear.
lobf 8d ago
This is why I stopped watching as well. They really set the table for conservative populists to feast. I resent them tremendously.
- liveoneggs 8d ago
  please expand
  - deleted 8d ago
    [deleted]
  - lobf 8d ago
    Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same." John Kerry would not have invaded Iraq on false pretenses. He wouldn't have perma-fucked the budget with his massive tax cuts for the rich. The GWB administration was a disaster and these guys pretended they were equivalent. ManBearPig lambasted the very idea of climate change as laughable, and anyone who cared about it was a pussy liberal loser. They have recently walked this back, but the damage is done. Overall they contributed to the perception that sincerity and earnestness are lame and the only way to appear cool and enlightened is to be a cynic.
    - Lammy 8d ago
      > Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same." idk I feel like an election boiling down to “Which Bonesman would you like?” is a valid thing to question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_member... > In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
      - lobf 8d ago
        Is their membership in this silly club the defining characteristic of either man? What does this have to do with their presidential platforms?
xingped 8d ago
Why would they? They're firmly in the "too rich to care what the peasants think" bucket as well as not being culturally relevant for 20 years. Honestly, the fact that someone even posted here is pretty cringeworthy.
mattzito 8d ago
I think it’s worth watching more recent seasons, at least from the first trump presidency. I agree that they had originally a “both sides bad” approach, but over the last 10 years or so, they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”. There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.
- kylehotchkiss 8d ago
  You forgot the Emmy winning lovemaking scene between POTUS and VPOTUS
- ipaddr 8d ago
  They satire society and that changes with who is in power. A cartoon that can have pc principal then rebrand him as religious maga fan when the tide changes also satires people who shift who they are when the world changes. PC Principal has an interesting arc when he hooks up with strong woman and has pc babies who reject his transformation and then ultimately accept him.
  - titanomachy 7d ago
    > rebrand him as religious maga Ah yes, Power Christian Principal
- antonvs 8d ago
  > they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”. That's kinda good to hear - I suppose - but they only did that after the consequences of their destructive actions became clear to them, even though nearly every other intelligent person on the planet had been warning about that.
  - 7d ago
mywittyname 8d ago
They have not changed. They still maintain this "enlightened centrist" persona, while claiming "both sides are the same". And their social commentary, if you could call it that, is very tame. They did briefly lean into making politicians out to be evil, but they kind of walked that back and now their story lines read more goofy than anything. The whole premise of the new season is telling. It's not about the suffering people have gone through due to wars (trade or military) or the food situation (the diarrhea parasite / cancer beef ep writes itself). Nope, it's about how the silly goose in office is renaming stuff. It's possible to be serious and funny, but the new stuff I've seen has been unserious and unfunny.
- gjsman-1000 8d ago
  Well, I think both sides are the same to an uncomfortable degree. To quote Bill Maher: “Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
  - wredcoll 7d ago
    You know, aside from, well, everything else that makes this a stupid comparison, the most important part is the motive that people like you seem so happy to ignore. Latinx is a not particularly useful attempt by a tiny group of people to make another tiny group of oppressed people feel slightly more comfortable Trump renamed lake ontario because he is a gigantic asshole.
  - kg 8d ago
    His examples don't hold up. Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two. "Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it). On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.
kyboren 8d ago
Yeah! And for that matter, has Jon Stewart atoned for his sin of leaving The Daily Show in 2015? If he had stayed, no way Trump could have won! And why didn't Oprah run in 2024--she could have saved us! It's all their fault! Get real. I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation. It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
- kg 8d ago
  I watched the first 13 seasons of South Park as they aired and the post you're replying to feels like at least a sincere and reasonable interpretation of SP's politics. What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from? Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
  - Jtsummers 8d ago
    > What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from? It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
  - kyboren 8d ago
    > Why is it insufficient It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"! Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation". Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
Lammy 8d ago
> Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation? For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-audience-character.html https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
liveoneggs 8d ago
south park is a product of the 1990's! its origins lean heavily on the still-true left/democratic party's pro-censorship leanings just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)
- edoceo 8d ago
  The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?
  - deleted 8d ago
    [deleted]
  - Whoppertime 8d ago
    How did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?
  - henryfjordan 8d ago
    The perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance. Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
    - coloneltcb 8d ago
      broadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word. Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)
dktp 8d ago
I think they're largely making fun of extremes, whether left, right or Kanye West, Disney/China, Scientology etc. (And once in a while apologize when they get it wrong, like Man Bear Pig) Lately the extremes are more extreme and powerful on the right and so more episodes target that The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...) They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted I'm a big fan though
- ipython 8d ago
  Agreed. And they have been poking fun at the right for decades. Heck they made a whole movie about how ridiculous the global war on terror was, back in 2004.
  - a34729t 8d ago
    Which is still the best satire on American foreign policy, ever
  - deleted 7d ago
    [deleted]
jsiepkes 8d ago
They backtracked on "ManBearPig" (climate change) a long time ago.
why_at 8d ago
I also watched it in its prime when I was a teenager, but have hardly watched any in the last 10 years. It feels similar to The Simpsons where they're mostly reacting to the latest news and popular culture, which I don't find as enjoyable. I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism". >Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!” [1]https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-end-world https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-e...
- k12sosse 8d ago
  Am I out of touch? No, no, it's the satirists who have changed
skygazer 8d ago
Well, in fairness, both sides were bad, and still are -- although, now, one side is spectacularly worse. Dems can't ever agree on a candidate or position or message, and intentionally run candidates the otherside would abhore, and Republicans would happily vote in unison for an old shoe as long as it was sufficiently dog-whistley.
- psadauskas 8d ago
  One "side" is actively and intentionally destroying the country, the other is letting them. It's not that both sides are bad, it's that both sides are the same side, working for the same people.
  - Whoppertime 7d ago
    You'll find people on both sides of the aisle who agree with this sentiment, they just disagree with what side is destroying the country and what side is letting it happen
plussed_reader 8d ago
No; the cruel libertarian streak that has been at the basis of the show since inception is still ever present. They are still very good about not punching down and I think that is one of the nicer things to say about the show but their shtick got old during the 45th admin and I haven't tuned back since.
kulahan 8d ago
I love the idea that one side has simply been historically evil in your mind, and that by not spending most of their time explaining carefully to everyone how that group IS in fact evil and despicable, they're somehow part of the extremist group having found a populist president amid a nation that generally has extremely low voter turnout. Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
brailsafe 8d ago
I thought Turd Sandwich fairly accurately captured what was and still is often a common sentiment that hasn't gone away just because the U.S federal government is conducting itself in such an uncommonly (although not that uncommonly) abhorrent way. A similar sort of election plays out every year and many levels of government in many countries. It's usually between some douche and some turd, and things rarely change for the better as a consequence, so people who feel apathetic and forgotten about don't bother, while people who fear what the other side will do try to convince everyone else theirs is correct. Tale as old as any two-party system. I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking. I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.

al_borland 7d ago

I don’t see how maga is the logical conclusion of the mindset. Both sides do suck, and the answer isn’t blind tribalism, it’s common sense and reason. There is a lot of basic stuff that most of America would be on board with if they stopped trying to make everyone fight over a few issues that they’ve been fighting over for decades. Get some wins on the easy stuff, build some momentum and cooperation, and then maybe it will be easier to tackle some of those harder problems.

alephnerd 7d ago
Much of the culture war crap that helped justify Tea Party and proto-alt right commentary started out from 2000s and early 2010s South Park. The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline. Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media and not easily accessible on modern streaming.
- rapind 7d ago
  > The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline. It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure). Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
  - dylan604 7d ago
    > even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure). The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
    - al_borland 7d ago
      Positions that were mainstream in the Democratic Party 10-15 years ago are now being labeled as far right. There are a lot of normal people who haven’t changed their politics very much, but were left behind by the Democratic Party. The right happily scooped them up, as they had nowhere else to go. I think Rogan, and much of his audience fall into this camp.
      - karmakurtisaani 7d ago
        Do you have any examples of such positions?
        al_borland 6d ago
        Illegal immigration. Preventing it, and correcting lax enforcement of the past is now labeled a maga issue, with democratic cities actively trying to work against ICE and people who support the left protesting against it. Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tb37decBZFk https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tb37decBZFk
        rapind 6d ago
        You're taking a small slice of left progressives and applying it to all democrats to try and push this "the left are all commies" narrative. ICE is running around like the gestapo in targeted blue cities, so of course it's an issue. If they were doing this in red cities (where the crime actually is), there'd be the same push back. It's obvious that republicans are intentionally trying to create issues and division using every tool at their disposal. There won't be enough leopards for all of these faces.
- dylan604 7d ago
  It's on Paramount+. How is it "not easily accessible on modern streaming"?
  - alephnerd 7d ago
    > It's on Paramount+ That's the issue. Paramount+ only has roughly 59 million subscribers in the US. Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu/Disney+ remain the big 4 nationally [0]. Additionally, you don't see the same degree of memes, zeitgeist, and discourse for South Park that you would see a decade ago, let alone 2 decades ago (remember ginger kids - it got so bad that multiple kids committed suicide due to bullying arising from kids misinterpreting the episode. Or ManBearPig turning into an epithet for climate change denialism for over a decade until the writing staff retconned it). This isn't to say it's a bad show. It's just older, and Paramount+ distribution is difficult to access for the 18-34 demographic, amongst whom Family Guy and American Dad remained the two dominant streamed adult cartoons in 2025 [1] despite there also being a South Park season last year. Frankly, South Park mismanaged the COVID transition - they basically took an almost 5 year hiatus which dropped viewership in a now very competitive adult animated market. [0] - https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united-states/ https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united... [1] - https://www.cartoonbrew.com/streaming/nielsen-end-of-year-streaming-data-258510.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/streaming/nielsen-end-of-year-st...

aftbit 7d ago

Nonsense. 100% nonsense. To the contrary, acting like only one side is bad and thus only one side can be made fun of is a huge reason we're in this situation. The right took the left's cancel culture and weaponized it to the extreme. South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards. I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster. As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.

Gimpei 7d ago

I don’t understand this attitude. There’s zero evidence that South Park had any effect on any political outcome of any kind. South Park is a comedy show and they make fun of things, liberals and progressives included. I thought people were supposed to speak truth, or is that only the case when they say what you want them to hear.

lobf 8d ago

This is why I stopped watching as well. They really set the table for conservative populists to feast. I resent them tremendously.

liveoneggs 8d ago
please expand
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
- lobf 8d ago
  Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same." John Kerry would not have invaded Iraq on false pretenses. He wouldn't have perma-fucked the budget with his massive tax cuts for the rich. The GWB administration was a disaster and these guys pretended they were equivalent. ManBearPig lambasted the very idea of climate change as laughable, and anyone who cared about it was a pussy liberal loser. They have recently walked this back, but the damage is done. Overall they contributed to the perception that sincerity and earnestness are lame and the only way to appear cool and enlightened is to be a cynic.
  - Lammy 8d ago
    > Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same." idk I feel like an election boiling down to “Which Bonesman would you like?” is a valid thing to question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_member... > In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
    - lobf 8d ago
      Is their membership in this silly club the defining characteristic of either man? What does this have to do with their presidential platforms?

xingped 8d ago

Why would they? They're firmly in the "too rich to care what the peasants think" bucket as well as not being culturally relevant for 20 years. Honestly, the fact that someone even posted here is pretty cringeworthy.

mattzito 8d ago

I think it’s worth watching more recent seasons, at least from the first trump presidency. I agree that they had originally a “both sides bad” approach, but over the last 10 years or so, they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”. There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.

kylehotchkiss 8d ago
You forgot the Emmy winning lovemaking scene between POTUS and VPOTUS
ipaddr 8d ago
They satire society and that changes with who is in power. A cartoon that can have pc principal then rebrand him as religious maga fan when the tide changes also satires people who shift who they are when the world changes. PC Principal has an interesting arc when he hooks up with strong woman and has pc babies who reject his transformation and then ultimately accept him.
- titanomachy 7d ago
  > rebrand him as religious maga Ah yes, Power Christian Principal
antonvs 8d ago
> they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”. That's kinda good to hear - I suppose - but they only did that after the consequences of their destructive actions became clear to them, even though nearly every other intelligent person on the planet had been warning about that.
- 7d ago

mywittyname 8d ago

They have not changed. They still maintain this "enlightened centrist" persona, while claiming "both sides are the same". And their social commentary, if you could call it that, is very tame. They did briefly lean into making politicians out to be evil, but they kind of walked that back and now their story lines read more goofy than anything. The whole premise of the new season is telling. It's not about the suffering people have gone through due to wars (trade or military) or the food situation (the diarrhea parasite / cancer beef ep writes itself). Nope, it's about how the silly goose in office is renaming stuff. It's possible to be serious and funny, but the new stuff I've seen has been unserious and unfunny.

gjsman-1000 8d ago
Well, I think both sides are the same to an uncomfortable degree. To quote Bill Maher: “Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
- wredcoll 7d ago
  You know, aside from, well, everything else that makes this a stupid comparison, the most important part is the motive that people like you seem so happy to ignore. Latinx is a not particularly useful attempt by a tiny group of people to make another tiny group of oppressed people feel slightly more comfortable Trump renamed lake ontario because he is a gigantic asshole.
- kg 8d ago
  His examples don't hold up. Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two. "Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it). On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.

kyboren 8d ago

Yeah! And for that matter, has Jon Stewart atoned for his sin of leaving The Daily Show in 2015? If he had stayed, no way Trump could have won! And why didn't Oprah run in 2024--she could have saved us! It's all their fault! Get real. I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation. It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.

kg 8d ago
I watched the first 13 seasons of South Park as they aired and the post you're replying to feels like at least a sincere and reasonable interpretation of SP's politics. What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from? Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
- Jtsummers 8d ago
  > What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from? It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
- kyboren 8d ago
  > Why is it insufficient It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"! Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation". Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.

Lammy 8d ago

> Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation? For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-audience-character.html https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...

liveoneggs 8d ago

south park is a product of the 1990's! its origins lean heavily on the still-true left/democratic party's pro-censorship leanings just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)

edoceo 8d ago
The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
- Whoppertime 8d ago
  How did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?
- henryfjordan 8d ago
  The perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance. Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
  - coloneltcb 8d ago
    broadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word. Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)

dktp 8d ago

I think they're largely making fun of extremes, whether left, right or Kanye West, Disney/China, Scientology etc. (And once in a while apologize when they get it wrong, like Man Bear Pig) Lately the extremes are more extreme and powerful on the right and so more episodes target that The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...) They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted I'm a big fan though

ipython 8d ago
Agreed. And they have been poking fun at the right for decades. Heck they made a whole movie about how ridiculous the global war on terror was, back in 2004.
- a34729t 8d ago
  Which is still the best satire on American foreign policy, ever
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]

jsiepkes 8d ago

They backtracked on "ManBearPig" (climate change) a long time ago.

why_at 8d ago

I also watched it in its prime when I was a teenager, but have hardly watched any in the last 10 years. It feels similar to The Simpsons where they're mostly reacting to the latest news and popular culture, which I don't find as enjoyable. I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism". >Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!” [1]https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-end-world https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-e...

k12sosse 8d ago
Am I out of touch? No, no, it's the satirists who have changed

skygazer 8d ago

Well, in fairness, both sides were bad, and still are -- although, now, one side is spectacularly worse. Dems can't ever agree on a candidate or position or message, and intentionally run candidates the otherside would abhore, and Republicans would happily vote in unison for an old shoe as long as it was sufficiently dog-whistley.

psadauskas 8d ago
One "side" is actively and intentionally destroying the country, the other is letting them. It's not that both sides are bad, it's that both sides are the same side, working for the same people.
- Whoppertime 7d ago
  You'll find people on both sides of the aisle who agree with this sentiment, they just disagree with what side is destroying the country and what side is letting it happen

plussed_reader 8d ago

No; the cruel libertarian streak that has been at the basis of the show since inception is still ever present. They are still very good about not punching down and I think that is one of the nicer things to say about the show but their shtick got old during the 45th admin and I haven't tuned back since.

kulahan 8d ago

I love the idea that one side has simply been historically evil in your mind, and that by not spending most of their time explaining carefully to everyone how that group IS in fact evil and despicable, they're somehow part of the extremist group having found a populist president amid a nation that generally has extremely low voter turnout. Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode

brailsafe 8d ago

I thought Turd Sandwich fairly accurately captured what was and still is often a common sentiment that hasn't gone away just because the U.S federal government is conducting itself in such an uncommonly (although not that uncommonly) abhorrent way. A similar sort of election plays out every year and many levels of government in many countries. It's usually between some douche and some turd, and things rarely change for the better as a consequence, so people who feel apathetic and forgotten about don't bother, while people who fear what the other side will do try to convince everyone else theirs is correct. Tale as old as any two-party system. I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking. I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.