News Satire Roundup: September 25th-September 29th

Sunday, September 25 – Yay, we’re back!!  First up was the protests in Charlotte, with pride of place going to some horrifically ignorant/tactless comments from a North Carolina representative – just gross.  John touched on the Wells Fargo debacle, insulting an 8-year-old Ron Howard (in The Music Man) and pointing out that a customer Wells Fargo scammed ten times would have been better off taking his money to any other bank, including Elizabeth Banks.  The main story was on scandals involving Clinton and Trump.  The goal was to sift through what’s true and what’s hyperbole, recognizing the false equivalency that tends to be put forth between them.  I feel I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty of Clinton’s emails and foundation, and the no-contest comparison to Trump was of course obvious.  John’s analogy comparing political scandals to raisins in cookies (with a colossal downpour of raisins representing Trump) was great.

Monday, September 26 – Live show following the debate.  The first general-reaction segment had some great bits in it.  I especially liked Trevor’s riff on “truth Trump,” in which Trump lets a tiny bit of truth slip out by mistake, as well as his disgust over Trump touting not paying federal income tax as proof of why he’s qualified to be president(?)  Roy had a slight disagreement with Trevor over the difference between fact-checking and Black-checking, and then Jordan was up, talking to a professional fact-checker about Trump and Clinton – I laughed at his assertion that, from a fact-checking perspective, Trump is a bore because he’s so blatantly easy to refute.  Alicia Menendez, a writer for Fusion, was the guest, and she and Trevor discussed where the chips seemed to have fallen by the debate’s end.  Interesting point about how both sides are so firmly entrenched that everyone thinks it’s obvious that “their” candidate won.

Tuesday, September 27 – The continued debate coverage featured the post-debate “spin” show, in which Trump himself joined his surrogates in trying to paint the night in his favor (or, barring that, trying to prove how it was rigged against him.)  I liked Trump’s contradictory complaints about his microphone, because it led to a really fun Darth Vader bit from Trevor.  Desi came in for a What the Actual Fact entirely composed of Trump interrupting Clinton to claim he never said things she accuses him of saying, when the original quotes are of course ludicrously easy to find.  I don’t understand the point of saying “I never said that” in an age when your video recordings/tweets never go away.  What’s the idea – if you refute it long enough, you can make it less true?  The guest, author Sara Goldrick-Rab, discussed college tuition/debt, speaking on the dire straits in which many students find themselves and her ideas on how to ease that burden.

Wednesday, September 28 – After a quick bit on the Taliban’s opinion of the first debate, Trevor dug more into Clinton’s charge about Trump’s body-shaming/remarks comments about a former Miss Universe.  Thesis?  Trump is gross, seriously.  This led into a larger story about Trump’s views on/derogatory comments about women.  I really liked what Trevor said about how Trump conducts himself as if the world is a beauty contest in which every woman is competing whether they want to or not.  It gets at the fact that, for Trump, degrading women is basically pathological, like he honestly can’t see them in any way that isn’t about their perceived sex appeal.  Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked In, was the guest.  He talked, not about his company, but about why it was so important for him to use his wealth and position to speak out against Trump (complete with a Trump-mocking card game he made and manufactured!)

Thursday, September 29 – First up was the governor of Maine’s racist “binder o’ Maine drug dealers” scrapbook that he alleged was 90+% Black or Latino (grossly innacurate, of course.)  Next, Trevor took a close look at stop-and-frisk in New York, featuring disturbing videos of citizens stopped/shoved around by police, and harrowing statistics of the practice’s racial bias (87% of stopped citizens were Black or Latin@) and overall inefficacy (700,000 stops in a year, and 88% found nothing.)  Roy and Jordan tag-teamed a field piece testing North Carolina’s HB2 law that allows businesses to discriminate against anyone they perceive as being LGBTQ, refusing service to random customers at a mocked-up food truck.  In doing so, they highlighted the insane fact that what they were doing was totally legal.  Blood Orange was the musical guest – all that really caught my attention was that he appeared to be half-wearing a lab coat(?)

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Red Cliff

This is the first time I’ve listed Big Damn Hero moments for anyone other than Whoniverse characters, but the amazing people in this story deserve it and then some.  Spreading the love between our various allied soldiers, here are the scenes that make me cheer the loudest (spoilers.)

Guan Yu Escapes Capture (Part 1)

Surrounded by enemy soldiers with their spears trained on him, Guan Yu isn’t ready to give in.  After staring down Cao Cao himself, Guan Yu breaks through the ranks around him and knocks over one of the imperial generals’ horse, throwing the general to the ground.  He then picks up his army’s fallen flag, mounts the horse just as it rights itself, and peaces out.  Hardcore.

Zhao Yun in the “Tortoise” Battle (Part 1)

I opted for this scene instead of Zhao Yun fighting a ton of soldiers while carrying a baby – cool, but cheesy.  This one, though, is just cool.  He goes to town on these imperial soldiers, so much so that he doesn’t even take the time to pull his spear out of whatever soldier he kills.  He just slides the dead soldier’s spear out of his hands and moves on the next one (or two, or twenty.)

Zhou Yu Saves Zhao Yun (Part 1)

Oh my gosh, this is amazing.  So, Zhou Yu sees a mounted imperial archer aiming straight for Zhao Yun, who’s too busy being a boss to notice.  Zhou Yu knocks his own horse off-balance so he falls in the path of the arrow, taking it in the shoulder to save Zhao Yun.  But guys, he’s not even done.  He yanks the arrow out, takes this leaping twist into the air, and stabs the archer in the neck with the arrow that the archer just shot him with.  No words for this.  Just amazing.

Zhu-ge Liang Gets 100,000 Arrows (Part 2)

Funny – even though Part 2 has the epic final battle, both moments I picked from it don’t involve direct fighting.  Zhu-ge Liang, for instance, gets his moment by being one smart BAMF.  With the allied army in desperate need of arrows, Zhu-ge Liang gets the imperial army to unwittingly give them to him.  He waits for a heavy fog to minimize visibility, then sends twenty sparsely-crewed ships covered in straw with strawman soldiers on the decks to the edge of the imperial camp.  Thinking it’s an ambush, the imperial generals order wave after wave of arrows shot at the ships.  So many get stuck in the straw that the ships look like heavy-laden pincushions.  And all the while, Zhu-ge Liang sits inside one of the ships calmly drinking tea.  Now that’s style.

Sun Shangxiang Reveals the Map (Part 2)

Sun Shangiang is great throughout as a spy in Cao Cao’s camp, but my favorite part is when she comes home.  To the shock of all the (male) generals, she disrobes in the strategy room because she has a huge, meticulously-detailed map of the enemy camp drawn on pieces of cloth that she sewed together and wrapped around her torso.  I love watching how animatedly she explains the finer points of the map, hastily shrugging off all attempts to cover her bare shoulders/midriff.

Relationship Spotlight: Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff (The Avengers)

Hands down, my favorite friendship among the main Avengers.  I was excited to see Natasha in The Winter Soldier just because I love Black Widow so much, but I came away really liking the great relationship between her and Cap.  Although Natasha is a little too shunted into her plot with Bruce in Age of Ultron for there to be much Natasha-Steve, the duo resurfaces in Civil War and makes up for it nicely (some spoilers, including Civil War.)

The Avengers is very much a “throw different characters together and see what sticks” sort of movie, still figuring out where the best dynamics are, and it’s pretty light on the Cap-Natasha front.  At a time when Steve is still feeling like a misplaced museum piece, she’s casual with him, not viewing him as a relic of SHIELD history but not skirting around his past, either.  The scene in which she tells him about Coulson’s Captain America trading cards in fun, and they do some good work together at the street level during the final battle.

It’s not until The Winter Soldier that we really see their relationship.  At this point, they’ve been working alongside one another at SHIELD for a while, and they’ve gotten to know each other well enough that they joke around and play well off of each other on missions.  Steve, having trouble with the transition from soldier to agent, struggles a bit with Natasha’s spy sensibilities – he doesn’t like her having undeclared agendas, and he sometimes feels he can’t get a read on who she actually is beneath all her assorted covers.  However, when everything hits the fan at SHIELD and there’s no one to trust, Steve (somewhat reluctantly) lets Natasha in on what Fury’s shared with him, and they set off together to uncover the dark truth at the center of SHIELD.

Oh yeah, and they’re awesome.  Since Steve’s new to the spy game, Natasha’s skillset comes in handy for sneaking around and acquiring intel while they’re being hunted by shady people.  She helps Steve blend in/adopt covers, and she traces an important location they need.  When it comes to combat, they work seamlessly together, each lending the other an assist when needed but completely trusting that the other can handle themselves.  It’s an excellent equal-footing partnership, because even though the serum gives Cap abilities that Natasha doesn’t have, she knows how to do plenty of things that he can’t.  All in all, not a pair you want to mess with.

It’s also during this on-the-run team-up that each learns to understand the other so much better.  In between avoiding capture and learning shocking secrets, they talk about their lives and histories, the similarities and differences between the paths they’ve taken.  Steve admits his discomfort with the idea of deep-cover missions like Natasha has done, and despite her matter-of-factness about it on the surface, it troubles her not to know if he really trusts her, and she admits as much to him.  For his part, Steve confesses that he might have answered that question differently in the past, but due to what he’s seen on the mission, he’s absolutely confident that she has his back.  This is the relationship we see, albeit briefly, in Civil War.  Cap and Natasha are two of the few people that remain pretty cordial to each other throughout the film.  Though she signs the Accords and he doesn’t, each understands why the other makes the decision they do, and when the chips are really down, Natasha listens to what Steve has to say and helps him out.  Finally, in the midst of everything going down, I love that she takes the time to fly to London for Peggy’s funeral, just because she knows what a hard time it is for Steve and doesn’t want him to be alone.  Now that’s friendship.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-Present)

I just finished catching up with season 1 of this wonderful CW show on Netflix, which has spent the past two-and-a-half weeks eating my brain in the most delightful way.  Expect many posts about the show building up to and following the premiere of its second season on October 21^st.

High-powered lawyer Rebecca is living a successful but unfulfilling life in New York.  On the verge of getting a huge promotion, she careens toward a nervous breakdown, knowing she ought to be thrilled but continually haunted by the question, “When was the last time you were truly happy?”  As such, she’s not in the best state of mind when she runs into Josh, an old boyfriend from summer camp, and thinks she’s finally able to answer that question.  Before we know it, she’s packed up her old life and moved to sunny West Covina, California (where Josh “just happens” to live,) ready for a somewhat-regressive take on a fresh start.  At her new rinky-dink firm, she makes a friend in paralegal Paula, who learns of Rebecca’s way-more-than-slightly-unhealthy Josh fixation and – an instant-convert Rebecca/Josh shipper – vows to help bring them together.  Oh, and did I mention it’s a genuine musical with an average of two original songs an episode, sending up a variety of genres, romance conventions, and societal misconceptions?

I’m still very new to the show, so I haven’t had much time to talk it up to friends yet, but I’m also in an awkward phase of trying to figure out how to talk about it.  I mean, “Woman quits her job and moves across the country for an ex-boyfriend she dated for two months ten years ago?”  That sounds horrific, from both a feminist standpoint and a straight-up plot standpoint.  In trying to suss out how to sell it, the most I’ve come up with so far is, “It’s not like it sounds, trust me!”

Because, as the theme song says, “The situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.”  Even as the show enjoys the whacky bad-decision hijinks, it also explores the very real mental-health issues Rebecca is struggling with.  This character is on a really interesting journey stuffed with deep-seated patterns of self-destructiveness; she wants to do better but is still figuring out how.  The tone can be amped-up wild sometimes, a cartoon come to life, but it can also be utterly real and raw.  In much the same way, all the characters are far more than they appear at first glance, the humor and the drama are equally on-point, and the fantastic songs are at once hilarious, smart, and genuine ear worms (tell me about it – I’ve been humming for days!)  Not to mention, I also love the show’s low-key approach to inclusion with both racial and sexual diversity.  Don’t let the title or the premise fool you; this is a series chocked with goodness.

Rebecca is played to perfection by Rachel Bloom, who is also the show’s co-creator and has a hand in coming up with many of its hilarious, pitch-perfect musical numbers.  Bloom is new to me, but I’ve since fallen in love with her awesomely-dirty comic music videos on YouTube, her pre-Crazy Ex-Girlfriend claim to fame.  Familiar faces (or rather, voices) include Donna Lynne Champlin, who I was shocked to realize played Pirelli in the 2005 revival of Sweeney Todd, as Paula, and Santino Fontana (Hans from Frozen) as acerbic bartender Greg.  As with Bloom, I’m not familiar with Vincent Rodriguez III, who plays Josh, but he’s terrific as well.

Warnings

Language, sexual content, drinking, and strong thematic elements.

The Chemist (1936)

Another win in my book.  While on rewatch, I’d say The Chemist isn’t as strong as Grand Slam Opera or Blue Blazes, it stills follows the main characteristics of those shorts.  It’s quite well-made, despite the overall lack of budget/breathing space to work with in the Educational stuff, it has a good many quality laughs, and you can feel Buster’s influence on the comedy.

Buster is an outside-the-box inventor looking to make good.  His specialty is concocting special “powders” that do all sorts of outlandish things, like instantly increase the size/strength of any person or animal or, regrettably, cause immediate and overwhelming attraction (to be fair to The Chemist, it’s now 2016, and genre stories are still incorporating plots about “love” brought about by supernatural/magic/sci-fi influences without acknowledging how creepy that it from a consent standpoint.)  His real boon, though, is a just-add-water powder for noiseless explosions.  The breakthrough earns him a lot of attention, but – just his luck – it also catches the notice of a trio of crooks who see the potential in easy, discreet safe-breaking.  It takes all of Buster’s cunning to escape the thieves and bring them to justice.

Some great gags here.  I love the opening sequence with Buster’s laboratory breakfast (soft-boiling eggs in a beaker, making toast over a Bunsen burner, etc.)  It’s a fun bit that feels at home next to the creative-cooking scenes in films like The Scarecrow or The Navigator.  I get a kick out of the sight gag of the goldfish that, thanks to the enlarging/strengthening powder, gets swapped out for an entirely, blatantly different kind of a fish but is still amusingly passed off as the same animal.

It’s also a good short for the ol’ Buster initiative.  There’s his tenacity in cooking up crazy ideas no one at his university believes in, and once he gets nabbed by the bank robbers, he uses all sorts of imaginative techniques to challenge them.  It doesn’t matter what obstacles Buster is faced with.  Be it a rival, a machine, an army, a show of force by nature, or a herd of cattle, I just need him to be resourceful in meeting the problem head-on – as long as he’s doing that, all is right in the world.

My absolute favorite example of that here comes when the thieves have chased Buster back to his lab, where he locks himself inside and uses a neat bit of foley artistry to convince them he has a gun.  I love this bit, because the creativity is so Buster, and yet, the very sound-based nature of the comedy in this scene means it’s a type of gag we really haven’t seen from him before.  I love watching him create the illusion of gunfire (under extreme pressure and with limited resources, because how else does Buster do anything?)  Seeing it, I always imagine it as an indicator of what Buster’s sound career could have been like if he’d been able to maintain creative control of his films, resulting in this very funny (if somewhat wistful) might-have-been gag.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, crime, and an unfortunate “love powder.”

Character Highlight: Grace Holloway (Doctor Who)

(TV movie spoilers ahead.)

Grace doesn’t feel out of place to me now, but I’m sure that, when the TV movie came out, a lot of people probably didn’t know what to make of her as a companion.  These days, absolutely no romantic interest (requited or otherwise) between the Doctor and a female companion is no longer SOP.  In ’96, though, anything resembling a Doctor/companion romance had up till that point been strictly subtext.  I imagine that for some, it was hard to adjust to Grace.

Because it seems that’s what’s best remembered about Grace, what comes up first when she comes up at all.  Since she’s only in the one televised adventure, you can’t really call her relationship with the Doctor a romance, but it’s definitely flirtier than what generally came before.  He kisses her in a moment of exhilaration (so I guess there’s precedent for Eleven doing the same,) and she dazedly requests that he “do that again.”  Later in the story, she laments, “I finally meet the right guy, and he’s from another planet!”  I can’t quite tell how much of this is their actual dynamic versus how much is the way Grace interprets it.  While the Doctor is definitely taken with her, Eight has this romantic, whirlwind personality that can be misleading.  But whatever the case may be, Eight and Grace are credited with paving the way for Nine/Rose and further developments in the new series.

But there’s more than that to Grace as a companion.  She has a tall order to fill – again, she’s only in the TV movie and, 90 minutes or not, that’s still just one story to go through her entire character journey.  It doesn’t help that, as a surgeon meeting a recently-regenerated, wildly discombobulated Doctor, she naturally assumes he’s escaped from the psych ward.  Even as things go all weird and sci-fi, she continues to insist that there must be a rational, non-alien explanation for everything, and we don’t get a ton of time to see her come around.  Since we of course know the truth, that means Grace spends a big chunk of her only screentime playing catch-up to us.

Luckily, she has some good traits to balance that out.  She’s very dedicated to her work and cares a great deal about it.  And while she’s not quite ready to believe in aliens, she is willing to believe in things that seem impossible.  She insists to her superior that the Doctor has two hearts, to the detriment of her boss’s confidence in her; even though she doesn’t know how it could be true, she knows that it is.  She’s a good judge of character, she’ll help a stranger in a pinch, and her scientific curiosity usually wins out over any other instinct.  Plus, I like that she likes opera.  True, it’s a bit of shorthand to help the Doctor recognize her after his regeneration, but it’s also rare that a companion has a really specific, concrete interest, and I wish it happened more often.  Yes, the companion is the audience insert, there for us to imagine ourselves in their place beside the Doctor, but they’re also people, and people have hobbies, pet peeves, and favorite songs.  Madame Butterfly provides a nice extra character wrinkle for Grace.

(Also?  I love the shot of her running down the hall to the O.R. in her opera gown.  It says a lot about her – that work always comes before fun, that she likes to look nice but isn’t afraid to look messy – and it’s a gorgeous moment to boot.)

Dear Hollywood (Chinese Co-Production) Whitewashers: Poster- and Trailer-Makers (The Great Wall)

This is a slightly thorny one, which is why I didn’t write about it when I first saw the trailer.  This “Matt Damon fights monsters in ancient China” movie isn’t quite as simple as a lot of the Hollywood whitewashing I’ve talked about by virtue of the fact that it isn’t purely a Hollywood movie.  The film, out in February, is an English-language co-production between filmmakers in the U.S. and China, with Hollywood screenwriters and a Chinese director (Zhang Yimou, of House of Flying Daggers and the beautiful Hero.)  In addition to Damon, the cast includes a few other Western actors (Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal) and a number of Chinese actors, including Andy Lau.  I get that the Chinese film industry doesn’t have the baggage Hollywood does when it comes to parts for Asian actors – obviously – and in China, casting a white guy in a Chinese fantasy epic is a rarity, not standard practice.  But I still want to talk about it.

After the first trailer/poster for the film was released in the U.S. and Constance Wu groaned on social media about what appears to be yet another White Savior movie, Zhang rushed to the film’s defense.  Among other things, he said, “Matt Damon is not playing a role that was originally conceived for a Chinese actor. The arrival of his character in our story is an important plot point. There are five major heroes in our story and he is one of them – the other four are all Chinese.”

Now, the film isn’t out yet, so we don’t know what it’s really like.  I want to hope that Zhang’s description is accurate and the movie offers up an equitable five-part collaboration between four Chinese heroes and one white hero, in which Damon’s part reflects cross-cultural contact in the ancient world rather than Mighty Whitey riding in to save the day.  If that’s the case and the movie is amazing, I’ll gladly love it and eat whatever crow is necessary to counteract my earlier side-eying.

However, as you can see from the title of today’s post, my beef isn’t with Zhang Yimou at this point.  It’s with whoever had a hand in the first trailer/poster put out for the film here in the U.S., whether that was in making them or just approving them for public release.  You know, the trailer where Matt Damon has the only lines and the poster with only Matt Damon’s face on it, both of which name only him as a cast member.  Now, it’s true that promotional materials don’t necessarily reflect the truth of a movie.  It’s entirely possible that Damon’s role is no bigger than Zhang suggests it is.

What this trailer and this poster does, though, is send a message, which is pretty blatantly, “Come see Matt Damon fight monsters in ancient China!!!”  The message is, “It’s got Matt Damon – what more do you need to know?”  Yes, it’s only a first trailer/poster, and yes, Damon is a bankable name here in the U.S.  That said, these promotional materials are coming on the heels of outrage about whitewashing in Ghost in the Shell, and Doctor Strange, and Gods of Egypt, and Aloha, and Pan, and shall I go on?  Assuming that the people who made the trailer/poster are familiar with the U.S. film industry, and assuming that the Hollywood side of production signed off on both of them for release, then I would imagine they’ve been working in the industry as these other films have been raked over the coals for their racial tone-deafness and, notably, the ones that have already come out haven’t had success at the box office (not saying specifically that they flopped because of whitewashing, just that all those inappropriately-cast white actors didn’t equal big money, which producers often cite as a big reason for whitewashing.)  Which means they watched all these controversies unfold, looked at the trailer/poster they made, and still thought, “Yep, everyone’s gonna love this!”

In a way, if the movie is an awesome ensemble piece with mostly Chinese leads, then the promos are even more troubling because it means that the Hollywood side of this production either 1) doesn’t understand the outcry over whitewashing in recent years or 2) doesn’t take it seriously.  These people should have been saying, “You know, what with the Matt Damon of it all, people might think we’re pulling a Ghost in the Shell/Doctor Strange/take your pick.  Let’s get ahead of this before it starts; let’s put out a trailer and a poster that gives them a glimpse of our awesome ensemble and alleviates some of those fears.”  I’m not saying don’t put Damon in the trailer or the poster – I’m saying don’t only feature him.  Given the way they’ve chosen to introduce the film to U.S. audiences, they can’t honestly be taken aback when people worry that it’s a White Savior flick, right?  How did they think this was going to look?  If the film itself is a valid answer to the criticism it’s received, then I wish it would have been promoted in a way that reflected that.  As it is, regardless of what the film is actually like, the message this trailer/poster sends is, “Look at our big white star, and nothing else matters.”  Which, if Zhang is describing it well, does it a huge disservice.

News Satire Roundup: September 19th-September 22nd

New episodes start up next Sunday!  For now, props to John for the excellent format he established for his show.  Premiering in a TV landscape that already had multiple news satire shows airing throughout the week (not to mention all the late-night talk shows likely to deliver punchlines about the day’s top stories in their monologues,) it would have been impossible to air a half-hour show once a week that felt like it was “keeping up” with the news.  John’s approach is much savvier.  Just a few quick highlights (stories too big to miss or less-known snippets that other shows aren’t talking about) before turning it over to the main event.  Taking an in-depth, tremendously well-researched look at a single issue for 15 to 20 minutes is a just great tack to take.  It makes the show stand out from others of its kind, often turns a spotlight on topics I don’t necessarily understand as well I should, and always leaves me feeling much more well-informed.

Monday, September 19 – Plenty on the explosion in Chelsea.  I liked Trevor’s slightly-impressed reaction that so many New Yorkers were mainly just annoyed at roads being closed, subways not running normally, and being woken up with a mass-text alert about the suspected terrorist (complete with frustrated ISIS members realizing they could’ve just been mass-texting Americans all this time.)  Michelle had a nice piece on burkini bans in several French cities.  She covered the hypocrisy of dictating what women can wear on the grounds that their religion shouldn’t dictate what they wear, and she made a shrewd point that their “fighting terrorism” means they’d prefer that their “terror suspects” blend in more.  Guests Ben Schnetzer and Nick Jonas promoted their movie The Goat.  The film (a dark story about fraternity hazing) brought them to toxic masculinity and the damaged caused when young men feel like they can’t be vulnerable.

Tuesday, September 20 – Trump’s son’s horrible “Syrian refugees = poisoned Skittles” analogy provided the framework for the first segment.  After eviscerating Trump Jr.’s factually-devoid fearmongering, Trevor used his own Skittles analogies to “helpfully explain” Trump’s recent charity scandals and derisive “finish” of birtherism.  I loved Trevor’s comment that Trump was basically saying, “Let’s forget the racist thing I’ve been saying for the past five years so we can all focus on my new racist ideas!”  Jordan’s field piece asking Trump supporters for their conspiracy theories (Obama being a secret Muslim, Obama causing 9/11, Clinton having a secret double) was staggering; I know they’ve done plenty of these stories and pretty much proved that there’s no bottom with this stuff, but it still shocks me.  Jada Pinkett-Smith was the guest, talking Gotham and the possibilities now that she and her husband are both in the DC universe.

Wednesday, September 21 – Whoa, central Minnesota on The Daily Show!  And… surprise, it’s about Islamaphobia!  Much love for Trevor snarking on the restaurant owner defending his “Muslims Get Out” sign with such gems as, “I don’t mean my place of business, I mean America!”  Fantastic response from Trevor to the police shooting of Terence Crutcher.  I’m amazed at how he can keep doing these stories that bring new insights to the same old horror.  Here, he talked about what happens when police only interact with Black communities in the context of crime and called out the U.S. for the phrase “all-Black high school” not raising any eyebrows.  Adam talked about the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal and all the audacity that went down there – decent piece.  Talk show host/media empress Wendy Williams was the guest, and I enjoyed watching Trevor’s fanboy tendencies coming out in full force.

Thursday, September 22 – Quick bit on Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to “cure all disease” – I laughed at Trevor’s admiration of his “billionaire T-shirt” – before the story shifted to Facebook as a news source.  The primary news source, in fact, for a very large percentage of people.  Trevor highlighted the problems with this, like the fact that nothing on Facebook needs verification and that its “suggested for you” algorithm creates an echo chamber that only gives people what they already want to hear.  He also shared some choice clips from Tomi Lahren, a far-right commentator whose videos get millions of views from likeminded Facebookers.  I enjoyed the interview with Lisa Ling discussing her CNN show This is Life.  She and Trevor talked about two episodes, one on mass incarceration and one on policing in Black communities, and both sounded fascinating.