By Andrew Sanford | TV | November 4, 2022 |
By Andrew Sanford | TV | November 4, 2022 |
Democracy is great, right? A whole swath of people in this country disagree. They only want to win. It doesn’t matter what their views are, if they hurt other people, or if they legitimately lost. They only care about winning and think they are destined to do just that. If they don’t, it means that someone screwed them over, and they’re willing to fight to make sure their side comes out on top. There was a time when I thought this mentality would be dying off, or at least getting too fringe to matter. As Jordan Klepper shows in his latest special, that is not at all the case.
Klepper went to three battleground states, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, to do what he does best. He went to rallies and tried to reason with crazed Trump supporters. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Still, there’s an extra element here that I haven’t felt since he was present at the attempted Capitol insurrection on January 6th. There’s something big on the horizon, this time the midterm elections, that makes everything feel direr.
The supporters that Klepper speaks to are crazed, determined, and in some cases just dumb. There are two women Klepper speaks to who don’t know what concede means. When you see an interaction like that, it’s easy to understand why the GOP so desperately wants to defund and mutilate public education. It doesn’t help them in the slightest. They need people who they can easily manipulate.
It feels like Klepper’s goal for the majority of this special is to get these people to use critical thinking of any kind. He’s asking them questions and then asking questions about their answers. He just wants them to explain what they’re talking about, maybe in hopes that they realize how ridiculous it all sounds. Unfortunately, that does not happen. Instead, they treat him like he’s trying to pull a big trick. It’s sad.
I want to have hope for Tuesday. But when you see things like this, it’s difficult. Through Klepper’s specials alone you can see how we got here. It just always felt like it would die off at one point or another. Instead, it shifted focus and is more dangerous than ever.