Jordan Klepper visits the Canada trucker protesters

As part of his ongoing series of videos where he talks to those who are part of the anti-vax, right-wing, QAnon, Trump-supporting movement, he went to Ottawa in Canada and finds that the people who are blockading the city center say pretty much the same things that people who attend the Trump rallies in the US say, which is mostly nonsense veiled in rhetoric of freedom.


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Among the Trumpists

I have to admit that hearing Trump supporters say the most clueless things seems to never get old. I am impressed by Jordan Klepper’s ability to find among them people who can be made to say the most absurd things.

Fellow Daily Show correspondent Michael Kosta seems to be developing his chops in this area as well as he asks them what they think of Trump’s Space Force.

(WuMo)

The difficulty of gauging Trump’s strength

I predicted that once Donald Trump was out of office, his ability to draw large crowds to his rallies would diminish as people wearied of hearing the same stuff over and over again. It looks like I was wrong. He has been holding allies like the one in Iowa that drew a large audience. Since this is the first state to vote in presidential primaries, his visit was seen as an indicator that he plans to run again. He spoke for almost two hours, devoting much of it to the well-debunked claims that he only lost the election due to fraud. The fact that so many people would devote such a large amount of time to attend an event and listen to him saying what he has said many times before shows that his hold on the Republican party remains strong.
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Jordan Klepper reports from the riot

Jordan Klepper has made it his niche to embed himself at rallies where angry Trump supporters gather and talk to them. He was at the insurrection at the Capitol last Wednesday, though he did not enter the building. I have mentioned before that I wondered if at some point these crowds would attack him because his reports show them in a poor light and this time his cameraperson was attacked, though I am not sure if they were targeted specifically or as part of the general attack on media personnel.

Stephen Colbert has been on a roll following the riot and yesterday he had another rant.

Clip from Jordan Klepper’s new show

The Daily Show alum Jordan Klepper has a new daily show where he adopts the persona of a character based on the wild right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The show is called The Opposition and premieres on September 25. Here is a clip that previews it, where he attends the recent Trump rally in Phoenix where people could not tell the difference between a right-wing nutcase and a parody of a right wing nutcase making fun of them.
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Trump supporters try to outdo their hero

I can understand those supporters of Donald Trump who try to excuse his recent damaging statements or explain them away. What I find difficult to fathom are those who think the best way of neutralizing the damage is to be even more extreme than him. Take a look at some of the shirts being worn by people at Trump rallies and you cannot help but be appalled. Below are two of them.
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Here’s a tough question: Who is worse, Trump or Cruz?

We are at the stage where the two leading Republicans are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz who lead the polls but also have high negatives. If these two are the only ones left standing after the early primaries, then party members, especially those in the establishment, will be forced to choose between two candidates they detest. The New York Times, as befits a paper that serves as the mouthpiece for the establishment, has editorially slammed both of them and endorsed John Kasich (and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side), not that the Republican party base will care what the paper thinks and will actually see it as an endorsement of Trump and Cruz.
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Republicans flailing in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses

As usually happens, the hot takes by the losers following a bad election loss like what Trump and the Republicans suffered on Tuesday tend to be somewhat extreme. Although they lost everywhere, it is Mamdani’s win that seems to have struck a real nerve and it is not hard to see why. The defeats in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, though by much larger margins than anyone expected, were to largely centrist candidates who did, however, lean into the fact that running against Trump was a good idea, something that Mamdani demonstrated throughout his surprising race that took him from 1% in the polls a year ago to winning over 50% of the vote on Tuesday. For example, 71% of people who voted for Mikie Sherrill for governor of New York Jersey said that it was a vote against Trump.

What must bother them is that Mamdani did not at all shy away from all the attempts to ‘other’ him, to make him look like ‘not one of us’. Instead he embraced it. As he said defiantly in his victory speech, “I am young … I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” Republicans are making a big mistake if they think that Mamdani won because of those qualities. New Yorkers may be more progressive than the nation as a whole but they are not that progressive. I think he won despite those things being a handicap and if Republicans focus on those things and don’t look closely at what made Mamdani’s message such a winning one that it neutralized all those deficits, they will be making a big mistake. Mamdani’s achievement was in seizing upon the issues that New Yorkers cared about and refusing to be sidetracked by attacks on his biography. Others could have done what he did but he was the one who saw the opening and seized it. The fact that he is charismatic and energetic and presents a vision of youthful energy and change undoubtedly helped.
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Why won’t they stand behind their own words?

I have written before of the work done by the comedy duo known as The Good Liars who are attending creepy Trump events and recording their interactions with his supporters, like the way that Jordan Klepper does for The Daily Show.

In a recent one, they ask Michele Morrow, a candidate for the position of North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, for her autograph. She is of course gratified until she is shown the document to be signed which is a social media post by her calling for the killing of Barack Obama.

Here are the tweets.

I am puzzled by her reaction. Why would she be willing to proudly make a public post and then embarrassingly try to escape signing it? That looks worse than if she had nonchalantly done so.