Watch Jordan Klepper visit the front lines of the Capitol insurrection, now that you've had a week to process
Aux Features Jordan Klepper
In what might be the most depressing man-on-the-street segment outside of the season finale of Wonder Showzen, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper roamed the crowd outside of the United States Capitol shortly before they, you know, stormed it. While Klepper definitely gets in some good zingers (“Do you know where the sedition is?”), much of the segment finds him simply challenging the insurrectionists on basic facts.
“Do you think it’s possible that Hugo Chávez infiltrated the Dominion systems and changed the votes?” he asks two especially dimwitted conspiracy theorists. When they agree—never mind that Chávez has been dead for almost eight years—he then asks if it’s possible that a president who never had an approval rating above 50 percent could have simply lost the election.
“Absolutely not,” says one of the women.
Of course, the tension within the crowd soon boils over into full-on danger and criminality at the behest of (now twice-impeached) Donald Trump himself. But Klepper never loses face, even as his cameraman gets attacked and he witnesses the mob breaking into the Capitol building. Some of the video’s more absurd imagery—a dude wearing an oversize “Tyranny Response Team” t-shirt, another person riding a hoverboard toward the Capitol steps—suddenly feels more sad than funny. We throw around this adjective a lot when talking about the world these days, but kudos to Klepper and The Daily Show for capturing the dystopian nature of modern politics.
Watch the whole thing below.
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54 Comments
“he then asks if it’s possible that a president who never had an approval rating above 50 percent could have simply lost the election.“Absolutely not,” says one of the women.”This is one of those wonderful, horrifying moments of a lunatic facing reality and outright rejecting it
In their defense, have you seen reality?
In our defense, who’s to blame for that reality?
Persons* like the aforementioned women, whether Karening on Twitter, or Karening at POC cookouts, or Karening masklessly at the grocery store I’d wager shoulder a pretty good amount of that responsibility.
antifa straight up needs a rebrand.
i mean, yelling “f*ck antifa” sounds cute, but “f*ck antifascists” kinda puts it out there a whole lot better.
well, i just watched a doc on netflix about the aftermath of franco’s regime in spain re: the collective amnesia that people are still propagating. really interesting.
also, your username….interests me.
The best part of this exchange is that right before this, when Klepper asks them the Hugo Chavez question, they responded with “Anything’s possible.”
Klepper’s setup game is low-key but actually really underrated.
“riding a Segue”I’m seeing way too many grammar errors in recent weeks. Is there no editor reviewing these posts before they go live?
Speaking of riding a segue…
There’s so many people itching to review them after they go live though and they do it constantly and for free.
Editors? You must be new here.
It’s also not a Segway®.
Was it a hoverboard?
You mean ‘grammatical errors’?
I always read a lot, and my reading vocabulary was always much larger than my speaking vocabulary.I was an adult when the Segway came out and someone mentioned the homonym and I was like, “oh, segue is pronounced segway and not se gyou”
Ha. I did almost the same thing. In my head, segue was pronounced “seeg”, and it took literal decades before it occurred to me that presenters “segwaying” between topics was the same thing.
I had an old Star Wars soundtrack boxed set that used the word “segue” constantly in the liner notes, and yes, I constantly read it as “seeg.”
The editors spend the bulk of their time building slideshows and making sure that ads cover 90% of the screen space on mobile.
Apparently Blue Lives only matter when they’re strangling minorities or beating up lefties. LOL — igowild, beaches, British Indian Ocean Territory, 2 hours ago
Pretty much.
Its so sadly true.
And/or major fire damage. It’s surprising how little damage they did. I don’t think that will be the case next time (and there’s going to be a next time).
It honestly seemed like they were waiting for the next level to load after getting in.
I’m sure all those Molotov cocktails weren’t prepared just to burn up some offices and decorations. The attempt to get get as much of Congress into one place was pretty obvious. We’re not talking about yelling at them; this would have been a massacre.
Yeah, you don’t pack flexicuffs if your plan is to give them a stern talking to
I honestly think the only reason it didn’t happen is because America has gotten soft over the last several decades. Even before the internet, people stopped doing things for themselves and more and more people became corporate worker drones instead of entrepreneurs or creators. I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of those people was ready to kill, but they were waiting for a middle manager to come around with his coffee and say, “If you could just go commit murderous treason…that would be great.”
Reason why that one Capitol officer needs a goddamn parade for going “Ooowee, lookit me being a black person with authority! How dare I exist! Don’t look to your left y’all”
That officer was brilliant. He deserves all the praise he got and more.
Exactly who i thought of. Clever and brave, using their own bigotry to manipulate them.
Yeah, there were a bunch of idiots there to be sure but there were enough people that seemed to know what they were doing (plus it’s sounding like they had extensive inside knowledge)
Did you see the tweet from the house rep (cori bush?) Stating that members of Congress had given insurrectionists personal tours of the Capitol the day before? Not saying they knew at the time what would happen, but come on guys, run names thru a background and social media check first.
I’ve come to believe that it was a deliberate attempt at insurrection, planned and driven by the White House, which failed for the same reasons that almost all of Trump’s ideas fail: because he surrounds himself with fatuous yes-men who are really bad at their jobs. If Trump was less of a chest-thumping buffoon, he might have installed himself as dictator – but then he wouldn’t be Trump.
“Faux tough guys literally throwing themselves on the ground to perpetuate victimhood”- Ha. Is there such a thing as Male ‘Karens’?
Chads.
Hopefully they’ll be hanging chads.
I proposed that to my friends as a prospective name for our Year 2000-themed band.
“Chad” has been my go-to upper-class male douchebag name ever since I read a Zagat review of some restaurant here in L.A. that was described as a place to find “MBAs named Chad”. This was 20-ish years ago; I don’t remember what restaurant it was and internet searches have come up empty, but my wife and I still bust out “MBAs named Chad” as an in-joke.I bet if I went to the library and found old Zagat guides from ~2001 I might be able to find it, but that’s too much work.
Italian soccer players?
I’m just reminded of how, in 1856, Senator Charles Sumner was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor for criticizing slave owners (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner).
Funny you mention him. The idiot with the Confederate flag walked by his portrait in that already famous photo. Sumner must be so pissed right now.
Hell, by the 1850’s Congressmen were coming to the Capitol armed and were having straight up Mexican Standoffs.
The 1850s were a crazed time. Its pretty easy to see how obvious the Civil War was by the time stuff like this and John Brown was happened.
You say that like none of the representatives is showi.
I mean we haven’t gotten to Mexican Standoff territory. We probably will in a few months.
So… is The Daily Show back from holiday break yet? The most recent episode on the website is from December 16.
My PVR has said that all the episodes already aired this week have been new ones (it doesn’t record repeats) but they’ve all been from Dec 2020. Haven’t checked last night’s episode yet.
Klepper has Sasha Baron Cohen-sized balls. I would not have wanted to be in the middle of that mob even anonymously and I’m a white guy, but he basically started picking fights with those dolts. If one of them had recognized him who had seen any of his previous segments mocking the cultists I’m genuinely afraid for what they might have done. Stay safe JK, you’re doing good work but it’s not worth dying for.
I’ve read interviews where Daily how correspondents talk about how people know and understand what TDS is but once the cameras turn on they’ll just say anything, (It might have been Colbert, but basically he said it got a bit harder once they became famous but people would still literally sign everything away to be on the teevee)
I don’t doubt that (because hey, TV!), but this was a crowd full of angry, pumped up dipshits; a literal “mob rules” scenario, and he represented the “liberal media” enemy. If he had stumbled on the wrong person and mocked them a little too openly they could have turned around and yelled “hey everyone, its the Daily Show guy who loves to make us look like assholes! Who wants to say hi?” and then he’d be literally running for his life.
Just being mistaken for an actual news reporter could’ve been dangerous.What if they thought he was working for CNN?
my thought exactly…when I realized CNN had that nice Irish guy in the middle of things I prayed they were smart enough to remove any CNN logos from him or the camera, because he might have been torn to shreds. I really hope Trump and the GOP face some consequences (and not just “the GOP is forever tarnished!”) for unleashing this insane cult mindset among all these people.
At one point they cornered a photo-journalist and, in s very threatening Maher, asked him if he’d ever worked for CNN. He knew that his life may have depended on the fact that he said no.
So, SO much Crisco-laden blood gonna spill on the streets of D.C.
Y’know, I like videos like this, mostly. But one thing that bugs me is that sometimes they immediately cut to the next scene on a quip. We don’t get to see the reactions of the other people, or see how they react to being questioned. Or even just live in the awkward moment. (Granted, I wouldn’t want to be around these obviously violent people more than a second, but if you’re already out there doing this kind of thing…) Sometimes that’s what I want. I’m very scared there will be violence next week.