Jon Stewart Channels Tucker Carlson to Promote 'The Great Displacement Theory'

Sixty-five percent of the voting population turned out to vote in 2020, one of the biggest turnouts America has ever seen. That’s great. But another 35 percent still didn’t vote. Most of them didn’t vote because politicians did not pay attention to them. They are poor. They don’t contribute to political campaigns. Politicians ignore them, and they, in turn, ignore politicians when it comes time to vote.

Considering how much money politicians spend to elicit even one vote, that’s a huge, election-deciding demographic if only one of the Presidential candidates would reach out. The Democrats are decent about reaching out to people of color, to the LGBTQ community, and women in the suburbs, but what we don’t do well anymore is reach out to poor folks. We pay lip service to systemic racism, but we don’t even do that for systemic poverty anymore.

Sure, yes: Democratic policies are better for poor people, but even the Democrats mostly talk about the middle class. A green economy, student debt relief, and inflation are important issues to tackle, but when was the last time even the Democratic party pushed an anti-poverty initiative? During the pandemic, we had a robust child tax credit that cut child poverty in half, but the Republicans refused to renew it, and the Democrats honestly didn’t put up a huge fight to save it. No one talks about trying to revive it, either. It was the largest drop in child poverty ever recorded, and Biden doesn’t even try to run on that, probably because — the year after it expired — America saw the steepest incline in poverty in its history, wiping out all the gains.

Families could actually feel that change because the government was adding a meaningful amount of money into their bank accounts each month. There is an election-changing number of people who do not usually vote, who might go out and do so for an extra $300 to $1000 a month. Those people might also vote if you promise to raise their wages from a criminal $7.25 an hour to something approximating a livable wage. Where is the effort to do that? Bernie and Elizabeth used to talk about it, but it’s not even a subject of conversation now. Both parties forgot about poor people, the people who need the government’s help the most in this country.

This was a topic of conversation between Jon Stewart and Rev. Dr. William Barber, who is trying to mobilize poor people and bring those millions of people together to agitate, to be heard, and fight for better wages and other anti-poverty initiatives. There’s no common ground between the right and left anymore, but there’s plenty of common ground among poor people of every color, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, and from blue state or red. Not only do they have poverty in common, they can all agree that the hillbilly motherf**ker J.D. Vance sold them all out.

Sorry for the bait and switch (because the subject of “white poverty” promotes about as many clicks as it does votes), but here’s what you really came for: Jon Stewart going full Tucker Carlson — parody-version — to promote the “displacement theory,” the theory that Republicans from red states are flooding blue states with guns to kill all of the Democratic voters.