As Samantha Bee explains in this Full Frontal clip, one-man-conservative-hyperbole-machine Glenn Beck has been acting rather strangely lately (and I’m not even talking about his new ensemble—not exclusively, anyway). Unfortunately, that’s because the entire world has turned upside down recently, and we’re all still finding our way in this strange new bizarro land.
The effects of this new reality include Samantha Bee, our liberal TV comedy hero, agreeing with Beck on the idea that fighting “Trumpism” is a non-partisan issue. That doesn’t mean that partisan differences—some of which were part of Trump’s rise and remain part of his policies—just suddenly go away, or that we’re just going to be OK with the GOP’s efforts to, say, curtail voting rights or damage civil rights and equality in other ways.
Really, it means we have to redouble efforts to identify policies that shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone on either side and do everything we can to fight them. True to that, Bee’s not-so-subtle discomfort with the idea of being thought of as Beck’s “legacy” illustrates an important distinction between the right’s reaction to Barack Obama and the left’s reaction to Donald Trump: Things really have deviated dangerously from the norm this time around, and ignoring that is not the way to come together against “Trumpism,” which Beck himself admits is necessary.
It’s also important to remember that the right is currently embracing Trump, which makes uniting against him and his more dangerous tendencies a bit hard.
The interview was civil, and Bee didn’t explicitly point out the key differences in circumstances right now (except for her telling quip about normalizing), but … well, just look at how much we’re all enjoying this strange new world:
(image via screengrab)
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