‘South Park’ Fans Roast the ‘New York Times’ for Saying Cartman Is Part of the Resistance
Right now, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the most popular and proudly defiant critics of President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump in popular culture, but anyone who is eager to place them on one end of the political spectrum or another should stop and examine the precedent set by “Douche v. Turd.”
For as long as South Park has been on the air, its creators have pushed back at attempts to place them in a box or establish any consistency in the show’s political leanings. South Park’s mock-everything philosophy on satire necessitates that its writers take the same comedically critical approach to lampooning the rich and powerful regardless of their political affiliations, and, in an era when the far-right controls the federal government and seeks to expand its influence across the entirety of the American media landscape, the show’s ongoing 27th season has been one big middle-finger to the Trump administration — but don’t mistake South Park's enmity toward Trump to be an indication that Parker and Stone have finally picked a political party.
That is, in essence, what The New York Times' chief television critic James Poniewozik argued in his recent piece titled, “Eric Cartman, Welcome (for Now) to the Resistance,” but that headline quickly spread across South Park’s proud centrist-to-conservative following who bristled at a bastion of moderate liberalism seemingly claiming that South Park is on their side (for now).
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As one South Park fan wrote of Poniewozik's piece in the show's subreddit, "Wow they just made South Park uncool almost instantly."
In his article about how South Park has been the most effective critic of the Trump administration through two episodes of Season 27, Poniewozik identified that the recent criticisms of Trump’s open corruption, ties to Jeffrey Epstein and attacks on the freedom of speech followed decades of fence-sitting and “both sides are equally stupid”-type comedy. “The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical,” wrote Poniewozik. “Its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.”
Poniewozik suggests that South Park's blanket dismissal of all popular political beliefs “may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism" and “an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia,” but the last 28 years of nonpartisan iconoclasm has also given the series a spotless reputation for refusing to stump for any politician or political belief. As such, the fact that South Park has been so rabid, ruthless and anything-but-indifferent in its attacks on Trump is an indication to the many conservatives and politically aloof members of the show’s audience that, in 2025, our democracy is in far more peril than it was back when our choice of figureheads was between a Turd Sandwich and a Giant Douche.
At the same time, however, the gleeful liberals who are now claiming South Park and its creators as part of their own movement will likely erupt in outrage at the show when South Park’s sights inevitably sway to the left side of the political spectrum. Said Poniewozik of South Park's current popularity among Trump critics, “I assume it will do something to infuriate the people now cheering it, maybe in its next episode, certainly eventually.”
Poniewozik’s points about South Park’s criticisms of the Trump administration carrying more weight among Middle Americans than the talking points of the politically aligned, as well as his warning that the series will undoubtedly go back to attacking the liberals that are currently singing its praises, should be completely uncontroversial among any South Park fans who are caught up on Season 27, aware of America’s current political climate and able to read a newspaper article past the headline. Since too few in the South Park fandom ticks all those boxes, Poniewozik and his headline have been roasted across the online South Park community.
“Sounds like NYT doesn’t have anyone on staff who is an actual fan of the show. IMHO SP is pretty moderate. Each episode that gets political generally goes ‘Let’s make fun of both sides and then do a monologue about how they’re both right and wrong and some sort of compromise is probably the way to go,’” wrote one fan in the South Park subreddit who apparently missed the part in the last episode where President Trump uses ICE to sex traffic Dora the Explorer.
Another fan wrote of the article, “Can the partisan hacks please go fuck off? It’s a comedy not preachy bullshit.”
“These people have no idea what South Park is about. Enemy of my enemy, I get it, but the NYT is not our friend,” one more user wrote. “Honestly, if another episode this season is about Trump, I’ll be disappointed.”
Clearly, South Park’s “civic nihilism,” as Poniewozik puts it, is still alive and well in the fandom, despite the show’s recent transition into impassioned, defiant attacks on a president and a federal government that they clearly see as unjust and tyrannical. At a time when the president is using his influence to silence comedians who speak out against him, many South Park fans still expect Parker and Stone to put aside politics and carry on with its regular scheduled programming as if their own rights aren’t under attack.
And, in all fairness, Parker and Stone still might do just that — this Wednesday, we’re going to find out if South Park really thinks that Trump is a small-dicked Middle-Eastern dictator whose unchecked power represents an existential threat to American democracy and our civil rights, or if Randy just found a new passion to take over the next five years of the show, à la the Tegridy Farms arc.
