The Daily Show host was measured, respectful, and challenging in his 26-minute conversation with TheBlaze pundit Tomi Lauren.
He tried to get a genuine answer from Lahren on a much more nuanced query relating to Kaepernick’s protest. “Here’s a black man who says, ‘I don’t know how to get this message across. If I march in the streets people say I’m a thug. If I go out and protest, people say it’s a riot. If I go down on one knee, it’s wrong,’” Noah said. “What is the right way, I’ve always wanted to know, what is the right way for a black person to get attention in America?”
The Danger of a Dominant Identity
Crude tribal dividing lines inevitably arouse a besieged, victimized us/them mentality. This mentality assumes that the relations between groups are zero sum and antagonistic. People with this mentality tolerate dishonesty, misogyny and terrorism on their own side because all morality lays down before the tribal imperative.
The only way out of this mess is to continually remind ourselves that each human is a conglomeration of identities: ethnic, racial, professional, geographic, religious and so on.
.. Getting out of this mess also means accepting the limits of social science. The judgments of actual voters are better captured in the narratives of journalism and historical analysis than in the brutalizing correlations of big data.
Trump Makes White Nationalist Proposal; Media Doesn’t Notice
We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and 2015. Many of these arrivals have greatly enriched our country. So true. But we now have an obligation to them and to their children to control future immigration as we are following, if you think, previous immigration waves…
To keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms. To select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self- sufficient.
We take anybody. Come on in, anybody. Just come on in. Not anymore.
What’s he mean by 1965? Well, reading most of the news, this morning, you’d never know. But I guarantee you that most KKK members and neo-Nazis know exactly what he is talking about.
In 1965, we passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. That law essentially repealed the crux of a 1920s law called the Emergency Quota Act.
.. If Trump is elected, he is going to need someone pushing things further right than he is. When David Duke is saying “we need to completely repeal the 1965 immigration act and issue an executive order stating that all citizenship awarded to non-Whites after 1965 was fraud and needs to be stripped from those awarded it,” all of the sudden Trump banning and expelling Moslems becomes normal... A direct rebuke of, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
How It Happened
by the latest count she won 400,000 more votes than Trump, who got fewer votes than either Mitt Romney or John McCain.
.. Trump won Florida by one; Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 30,000 votes.
.. nearly 10 percent of millennials voted for third-party candidates
.. On the reasonable assumption that by far most of those who voted for the third-party candidates would have otherwise gone for Clinton, Gary Johnson, the odd-duck Libertarian, with 3.2 percent of the popular vote, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party, receiving just 1 percent, damaged and perhaps destroyed Clinton’s chances.
.. A CBS News exit poll found that if those who voted for Johnson or Stein had had to choose only between Clinton and Trump they would have supported Clinton by nearly two to one. It’s not a stretch to conclude that, absent the third-party candidates, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.
.. Hillary Clinton wasn’t giving people a reason to vote for her. “Stronger together” meant what?
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. Bill Clinton worried that the leaders of his wife’s campaign were too fixated on their supposedly fearsome get-out-the-vote drive and were failing to craft a coherent message for her
.. The “moral” of the story may be that if you’re going to lie in the course of a public contest, lie so often that people can’t keep up with you
.. she started off being dismissive, and then sarcastic: asked in a press conference if she’d wiped her server she replied, “With a cloth?” And her explanations were often legalistic and evasive
.. she got nearly five million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012—resulted in the lowest voter turnout in twenty years
.. Trump channeled the anger at Washington institutions that particularly the working class felt had failed them, while Clinton came across as the very symbol of those institutions. Though Trump was a wealthy man, his populist message—even the baseball caps—made him seem accessible
.. The Clintons’ greed kept getting them in trouble.
.. white voters, whom Trump won almost across the board: not just among the working class, as expected, but also among college-educated voters, except for college-educated white women, whom Clinton won by a small margin. Among white men overall, Trump dominated, winning 72 percent of non-college-educated ones and 54 percent of those with a college education.
.. For many women voters, culture and class mattered more than gender.
.. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, by an innovative method he devised: look at how people voted in the 493 counties that have Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores, and in the 184 counties with Whole Foods stores. In 2012 Obama carried 75 percent of the counties that had a Whole Foods and 29 percent of the counties with a Cracker Barrel. But that spread was exceeded this year—in the other direction—with Trump winning 76 percent of counties with Cracker Barrel stores and just 22 percent of counties with Whole Foods.
.. Clinton came across to them as an creature from another, urban, world—a wealthy woman who liked big government and didn’t understand them.
.. He uses a critical word in describing how Trump wins the support of so many of his people: relatable. “People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he’s a little outrageous, he’s a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward,”
.. Trump did a good job instilling fear of an America overtaken by immigrants and it didn’t take much imagination to understand his dark prophecies of where, when blacks were also counted, this country was headed. Trump’s presidency won’t be a good time to be poor, especially a black person who is poor. And in Trumpland, with a president who ran a racist campaign, divisions between the races are set to deepen, as already shown in incidents of harassment and violence against minorities since the election.
.. His ideas for education play to those who don’t care for integrated schools
.. I always tell my clients, If you lose, lose big. Then you won’t chew over for the rest of your life what you should have done differently.” The close election is all the harder to shake off
.. Steve Bannon, of Breitbart News, pushes the “alt-right” theme of white supremacy and is believed to have been the guiding spirit behind Trump’s chillingly anti-Semetic final campaign ad, which charged that Clinton associated with three people who happen to be prominent Jews: George Soros (“those who control the levers of power in Washington”); Fed chairman Janet Yellen (“global special interests”); and Lloyd Blankfein (“put money into the pockets of large corporations”). It’s hard to see how it could have been more blatant. These weren’t “dog whistles,” they were dogs barking loudly.
.. Trump has led his followers to expect a lot. He promised to end Obamacare “on day one,” which will be difficult because it was passed by Congress and therefore isn’t his to eliminate.
- Iran deal
- renegotiate trade agreements to get better terms for America
- bring back jobs to the US
.. In probably our most divisive and ugliest election ever, he prevailed in part because he intuited much about the voters’ psyche and he’s an experienced entertainer.
.. He knew how to appeal to the angry and discontented, who saw in him someone who would “shake up Washington” and deliver on his campaign slogan to “Make America great again.”
.. what happens if Trump fails to deliver to his followers? Who, and what, will they turn to next?