If anyone was worried that The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper might run low on material once Donald Trump was out of office, that fear has been proven to be entirely unnecessary. Klepper really made his mark trolling Trump supporters at MAGA rallies, but while Joe Biden may have taken over Trump’s job, the people that built their entire lives and personalities around Trump haven’t gone anywhere.
In this latest segment, Klepper went to talk to people waging war in “what has become America’s new Thunderdome: school board meetings.” The people he talked to were ostensibly there to protest mask mandates in schools but also feel the need to shout about critical race theory—a term that has been so effectively co-opted by Fox News that every parent present at this North Carolina rally simply refers to it as “CRT.”
Klepper’s brilliance lies in his ability to get people to dig their own illogical graves with only the slightest of nudges helping them out. He never tricks people into saying stupid things and he’s never mean or snarky; he simply lets them talk and then makes them sit in their own inanity.
Speaking with these parents, he lets them talk about the “research” they’ve done on their own into the “science” of mask-wearing and how it harms kids. The answers range from a predictable misunderstanding of “carbon muh–dioxide” to a legitimately surprising attempt to connect masks and social distancing to Satanist rituals.
But Klepper also digs in hard to the slogan these parents had adopted: “I Don’t Co-Parent With the Government.” Those words were on signs and t-shirts, and parents repeated them with pride at what they clearly thought was their own cleverness.
While quite a lot of people who attend these school board meetings to yell about masks don’t actually have kids in public schools, Klepper spoke with many who do. And public schools, of course, receive federal, state, and local funds. They have a school board made up of elected officials. Those officials make decisions that affect children every day in myriad ways.
Parents who send their kids to public schools very much do “co-parent with the government.” Under the Biden administration, many of these parents are also receiving child tax credits. (You might think they’d want to send those back to the government but nope.)
Some of these parents don’t even “take the time” to vote in those school board elections (or at all), which is a shame for them because it sure seems like a lot more of their time is being eaten up in the end by having to go out and protest all the “co-parenting” decisions being made by the officials they could have tried to keep out of office in the first place.
(image: screencap)
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