South Park has lost the plot

Since 1997, South Park has satirized just about every group in modern life while hilariously positioning itself as the voice of moderation. Yet with the premier of Season 27 last week, the show seems to have lost sight of reality, instead circling the drain of MSNBC-style political delirium. Far from rejecting the extremes of American politics, the shows repositions leftist extremism as the new moderation. 

The new season’s first episode shows the Principal, who was once politically correct, embrace devout Christianity in an America where wokeness is effectively illegal and Christian Nationalism reigns supreme. The town’s adults are annoyed to see public schools foist religion on the kids, so they organize their usual rabble-rousing resistance. But they’re stymied by President Donald Trump, a “tin-pot dictator” who’s quite literally in bed with Satan. 

The Right reacted predictably, arguing that South Park has been historically hypocritical in skewering conservatives while generally giving the Left a pass. That’s not quite true; creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have certainly dinged the Left over the years, mocking everything from atheism to the racial-grievance industry, and even the new season pokes fun at wokeness. Recently, however, a double standard has subtly emerged. While the Left is satirized as overzealous but well-meaning, the Right is portrayed as a Leftist caricature.

Over the last several seasons, conservatives cheered as Randy got sucked into a hypocritical PC frat, the school got taken over by a crusading PC Principal, and Disney got labeled “lame and gay” for making everything about diversity. Yet the moral warning against wokeness didn’t speak to its purposeful destruction and latent totalitarianism, but rather viewed it as empathy run amok – silly and often disingenuous, but not much more. 

The new episode abandons all subtlety, with the woke crowd cynically embracing Christianity. Wokeness is rightly seen as transactional, but the comparison is far more unflattering to Christians than it is to the Left. PC Principal remains an absurd character who simply seeks an outlet for his performative “compassion” – apparently just like the adherents of the world’s largest religion. 

But it’s Trump who mostly gets blamed for the world going to hell, as the episode embraced every trite Leftist talking point imaginable. “Woke is dead,” we’re told, because “you can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares” after Trump shredded the Constitution. Trump’s staunchest supporters turn against him for his supposedly obvious extremism and corruption, as he personally profits from the presidency, censors the media, and has CBS journalists groveling in fear. He aims to install a Christian dictatorship, all while cavorting with Jeffrey Epstein and having sex with Satan. And just to rub it all in, we’re dealt multiple shots of his microphallus. 

After decades of thoughtful insight, Parker and Stone have reached their final form of establishment shitlibbery. Whatever even-handed grasp of social reality the show once had is gone, lost to the creators’ apparently terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Far from satirizing the TDS of the townsfolk, the satirical subtext of the show is that the deranged are all bravely correct – the rest of the country is just too scared or corrupt to admit it. Trump really is a unique threat, and the comparatively sane liberal establishment is cowering under his boot. 

Since the ’90s, South Park generally stuck to the same shtick: the adults get swept away in a moral panic before the kids emerge as the voice of reason. All politicians, religions, and identities were fair game – no one was spared, but neither was anyone truly demonized. Instead, the lesson was always the same: extremes are morally equivalent, moderation is key, and we should all view our ideological drives with a healthy dose of skepticism. There’s a reason the term “South-Park Republican” came to describe an old-guard classical liberal attuned to the modern age. 

With Parker and Stone unable to recognize where extremism lies, this shtick no longer holds. The truly moderate – as well as the truly subversive – insight is that Trump himself is simply a South-Park Republican: a 90’s-style pragmatist clinging to the same moral vision of a free, prosperous and meritocratic America that most people generally shared when South Park first aired. In an age when the other side has gone fully insane and normalized its own extremism, he’s fighting for sanity in the best way he can under the circumstances. 

A good satire must always grasp the underlying truth it’s meant to elevate. Unfortunately, it seems that South Park has lost the plot.