I mentioned recently my puzzlement that Trump’s MAGA followers still talk to Jordan Klepper even though his clips make them look ridiculous. In an interview, he answers that question, saying it it is not hard at all to find people willing to talk, even if they know of him and his work.

But at a Donald Trump rally in June, he looked genuinely flabbergasted when a couple of young women seemingly had no knowledge of what happened on January 6, 2021 (see clip below).

“There’s definitely a surprise to be found at every Trump event,” Klepper tells Deadline. “I wish I could say that we went to these places, and we were fishing for people, but that’s not the case, we only talk to anybody who would like to talk to us. More often than not, people want to come in and talk to us. But the fact that they had never heard of January 6, even the terminology around insurrection was new to them was frankly shocking to me. I knew there was a rock a lot of people lived underneath, I just had no idea it was so encompassing.”
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One of the more curious elements of Klepper’s segments is why so many right-wing folk are willing to talk with him, given that he is essentially making fun of them. But he likens it to being a heel in wrestling, that Trump supporters see this as entertainment.

“I probably took 50 or 60 selfies with people who were excited to just see somebody involved in the narrative surrounding this Trump World,” he says. “There are even politicians at CPAC who would come up and ask if they could set up a time [to talk]. You become like a villain in the Trump universe. It’s always that the rallies are like a sporting event. There’s ideology, there’s pomp and circumstance, it is fun, it’s entertainment and that also speaks to why people talk to me.”

Still seems a bit strange to me. Maybe it is because I at least try not to look like an idiot, even if I do not always succeed.

This time he goes to Waukesha, Wisconsin that held its primary elections on Tuesday. He seems to never run out of total nutters who are willing to go on TV and say the most outlandish things. Of course, they themselves clearly think they are being perfectly logical and factual.

By now, any reasonably politically conscious person would be aware of Klepper and that they would look foolish when the clip is broadcast. My guess is that they only read and watch right-wing media and hence still have no idea who he is or what he does. But you would think that word would have at least spread through the MAGA grapevine to avoid talking to the very tall comedian who is not Conan O’Brien and who is followed by a camera crew

This time he spoke at some length to a woman who seemed enamored of something called Gematria in order to interpret political events. I had not heard of this before and so looked it up. It seems to be a species of numerology.

Gematria is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used.

Hebrew alphanumeric ciphers were probably used in biblical times, and were later adopted by other cultures. Gematria is still widely used in Jewish culture. Similar systems have been used in other languages and cultures: the Greeks isopsephy, and later, derived from or inspired by Hebrew gematria, Arabic abjad numerals, and English gematria.

Here is Klepper.

I think that everyone would have heard the tune Yakety Sax. It was composed in 1963 by James Q. Rich and Boots Randolph and played on the saxophone by Randolph. For those who have not had the pleasure of hearing this very catchy tune that is guaranteed to lighten anyone’s mood, here it is.

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(Doonesbury)

Rural America has many roadside attractions, some amusing, some religious, most of them kitschy. My attention was caught by a news item a couple of days ago about a faux Stonehenge granite monument in rural Georgia called the Georgia Guidestones that had a mysterious origin and aroused quite a bit of controversy and, this being America, conspiracy theorizing. It had to be demolished after unknown persons exploded a device that had damaged part of it and rendered it unstable.

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