Month: October 2020

If President Trump loses next week’s election, do you think that Civilian Donald Trump will continue to unleash ALL-CAPS rants from 3:00-8:00 am? Probably, but Trump’s doing anything possible to make sure he’s got four more years, and that includes the appearance of unduly influencing another branch of government by threatening the Supreme Court in a few ways. That includes attempting to frighten them with the notion that Joe Biden wants to render the nine current justices ineffective through “a heavily PACKED” and “REVOLVING COURT.” Never mind that Biden is actually leery of adding justices because Trump simply wants to win, so he’s being spooky.

“If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well,” Trump tweeted. “At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!”

Well, it is almost Halloween, so spooky fits. Trump’s clearly spooked on his end over how current presidential polling is trending, and he’s preemptive blaming the Supreme Court for a potential Biden win in these ways: (1) In the case of a razor-thin margin, the court might have to step in, which would make the newly installed Amy Coney Barrett very valuable to Trump; (2) The president is steamed over recent mail-in ballot rulings, and he’s convinced that these ballots will help “rig” the election against him.

He wasn’t done yet. Trump — while diving in and out of other topics this morning on Twitter — also fired off a “Biden will destroy the United States Supreme Court. Don’t let this happen!” Then came a strange cheerleading-esque tweet that simply read, “SUPREME COURT!”

November 3 is almost here, but there’s a decent chance that we might have a hanging-chad-esque situation on our hands, and the election might actually not be “decided” on Tuesday night.

It’s that time again: Recording artists from across the music world are beginning to post their costumes for Halloween. Despite the ongoing pandemic and decided lack of places to show of their effort, stars are upholding the tradition as best they can with the help of their glam teams and social media. However, they may all want to pack it in after seeing Bay Area rapper Saweetie‘s impressive triple costume, which she posted to Instagram last night.

Saweetie is a huge fan of Beyonce and Destiny’s Child — see almost any of her 2000s-era-inspired music videos for evidence — and put her fandom on display with a costume inspired by the cover artwork and music video for the girl group’s 2001 mega-hit “Bootylicious.” Not only did she perfectly recreate the cover right down to the wardrobe and hair, but she also remade the music video with the help of some fancy editing to portray all three members.

Although Saweetie’s been quiet on the musical front in 2020, only releasing a handful of singles throughout the year, those singles have been absolute chart monsters, gobbling up streams and taking over the public consciousness. A remix for her 2019 hit “Tap In” featured the hugely successful DaBaby, breakout artist Jack Harlow, and Hot 100 mainstay Post Malone, while her “Pretty Bitch Freestyle” rebutted years of criticism about her flow. Her latest single, the R&B-sampling “Back To The Streets,” had fans begging her to release it for months ahead of time. With her debut album right around the corner and her Icy Life and Icy University shows running up numbers on social media, Spotify, and YouTube, it’s only a matter of time before she’s as recognizable as her idols.

Saweetie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have already taken fans behind the scenes of their “WAP” video in a clip from last month, but now there’s a new video that unveils more trivia about the production. For example, Cardi originally wanted Meg to have a spider on her head, as if being surrounded by snakes wasn’t skin-crawling enough.

This fact comes via a new “Vevo Footnotes” version of the “WAP” visual, which quotes Cardi as saying, “I really like my solo, I like both the solos because I just really thought and I knew that it was gonna be so fire. A room completely covered with cheetah. A room covered with like, tigers. I originally wanted Megan to have a spider on her head, I don’t know why, I just thought it was gonna be so beautiful.”

Director Collin Tilley also noted some of his visual inspirations for the video, saying, “I’m a big Tim Burton fan, I would say I’m always inspired by childhood books, Dr. Suess, etc.”

The clip offers some other neat tidbits beyond those, so watch the “Vevo Footnotes” video of “WAP” above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When beloved Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at age 87 in September, a sizeable chunk of the United States uttered an F-bomb upon hearing the news. The liberal firebrand shall remain irreplaceable, even though the Senate inserted a Trump nominee into her spot on the court this week. Quite simply, RBG was a legend, and even in the face of an increasingly conservative court, her searing dissents will stand for all of posterity. Her decades of work — on issues including gender and abortion rights, same-sex marriage, Second Amendment, healthcare, and immigration — will never be forgotten. As the chaos of 2020 continues to swirl, Comedy Central decided to give RBG a proper sendoff on Friday, October 30 at 11:00pm EST with a special that’s entitled, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Presents: Remembering RBG – A Nation Ugly Cries with Desi Lydic.

Desi, of course, has been a The Daily Show staple since Trevor Noah began his post-Jon Stewart tenure in 2015. This shall be her second special for the news satire program (the first one being 2019’s “Abroad”), and as with everything in 2020, things are very different. Desi’s been bringing us the quarantine humor for most of the year, and she was gracious enough to hop into a Zoom call with us to discuss RBG’s legacy and how the special will unfold with both serious and humor-filled notes aplenty.

I was just watching the Elizabeth Warren clip from this special. Since you were scrambling to put on makeup, I figured I’d put some on for you.

Let me tell you, I went to the effort to put on a blazer but did not blow dry my hair today, so it’s all a balance.

It’s very beachy, so I’m digging it.

Oh thank you, it’s so lazy.

You’re working at home these days, of course. What’s the biggest adjustment that you’ve had to deal with?

You know, I have so much respect for our crew, for our camera operators and our directors, and audio. I always thought I had respect for people doing our jobs at our show, but this has really blown my mind, how difficult every step of the process is. For the special, we shot everything at home. We did not go out. We had an incredible director, Stacey Angeles, who works at the show as well, but my husband was camera-operating everything, so we were, like, rigging the iPhone to my son’s scooter and pulling back for dolly shots.

I bet that changes the whole at-home dynamic.

It’s a full-on family affair at this point.

With this year being such a total nightmare, how do you wrap your mind around such serious subjects and stay, you know, funny?

[Laughs]

That’s a real question, Desi!

It’s still to be determined! TBD from the audience after they see this special. For me, working through this period of time in history with like-minded people at the show, who all happen to be very funny people, is very cathartic. It’s the only way that I know how to deal with pain and any sort of difficulty. I also think comedy can be a great unifier. I come from a family that has different political beliefs… and we can laugh together. It’s the one thing that can be a conversation starter, and we hope that by laughing through these times, there’s some sort of cathartic conversation that comes out of it.

Speaking of cathartic, this special’s cold open included your “reaction” to RBG’s death, and it was the same reaction I had.

Oh good!

It’s exactly what a lot of people I know did, too.

Well, I mean, it’s not good, but we’re in this together.

Then the Senate went ahead and “replaced” RGG this week. Did that alter your plans for this special?

I think we were pretty realistic about what the outcome was going to be. We thought that we might have to reshoot a few things, but we sort-of prepared for the outcome that ultimately came to fruition. That’s part of why we wanted to make this — after the news of learning about Justice Ginsburg’s death, there was just this collective feeling, and particularly from women, who I spoke to, it was just this, “Oh [throws hands up].” That word that I probably shouldn’t say, which we bleep out on Comedy Central. I felt like the GOP was pushing this through so quickly with this confirmation that there wasn’t really a chance to take a minute and take a step back and appreciate her legacy and talk about some of her greatest achievements and process the grief and the emotional roller coaster that many of us are on right now and figure out the “what is next?”

What kind of tone does the special strike while paying tribute?

We go on a journey of processing the five stages of grief and everything that is ridiculous and funny about that. And then I sit down with some legal experts, and we sit down with Elizabeth Warren to discuss the possibility of court expansion, how that can potentially be an option, and what’s difficult about getting something like that through? What the Democratic Party might be able to do, going forward, about RBG’s legacy, and not just to protect it but build onto that and what’s next. We were fortunate to speak with a lot of incredible women who can lay the groundwork on where to go next. In addition to getting some really nice interviews from people who knew Justice Ginsburg personally with anecdotes and stories that I hadn’t really heard before. Nina Totenburg told a story about a theater outing with Justice Ginsburg that was very funny.

The word “legacy” is overarching, and it includes her dynamics within the court. I can’t help but think of how RBG was such a liberal firebrand, but she didn’t let that stand in the way of being great friends with arch-conservative Justice Scalia. But then they could argue at work! What’s your fondest memory of her?

You know, so much. I think so much of her work, early on, before she was on the Supreme Court, was dedicated to fighting legal discrimination all over the country and pregnancy discrimination. The Daily Show hired me when I was six months pregnant so that one really hit me, I can’t help it. That is baked into the sensibility of The Daily Show without even blinking.

That’s seriously incredible. You gotta conclude that RBG paved the way.

Her work, so many years ago, with changing people’s perspectives about how women can have careers. It doesn’t have to be the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the homemaker. She really challenged those gender roles and those stereotypes that had a huge impact on so many of our lives. In the middle of shooting this special, for the last three weeks, my work, this job, has taken over our entire apartment and my entire family and my husband, without blinking an eye is keeping my dinner warm and fully raising our son for three weeks without my help at all. So, I just think about all that work she did early on to shift the American perspective for that to be something that, now, you might not think about twice.

Her work ethic was unparalleled, and Trevor Noah singled that out on-air. She even scheduled her chemo to miss as little time as possible.

Yeah, we discuss how much she was able to accomplish in her years. That’s one of the most incredible things that I remember processing after I watched in this really great RBG documentary. They spent a lot of time talking about that, including her struggles early on with taking care of her husband and raising her child.

Her husband suffered from cancer while she was in school. Damn.

And she helped him with his schoolwork while she was getting a law degree at the top of her class. It’s really incredible, I can’t even imagine how hard that was for her.

Imani Gandy, who has always gone by the @AngryBlackLady handle on Twitter, is one of your legal experts. I love her. What does she bring to the table?

Imani, yeah! She’s great. I wish Imani’s interview could have been so much longer than we had time for in the show. She spoke on so many issues. We talked about what’s at stake, like reproductive rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change, and all of these things that are on the line right now. And Imani’s fantastic because she’s so dynamic, and as a legal expert and a woman with a really dynamic personality, she really makes it very understandable for myself and her audience.

Everyone, of course, thought of Roe v. Wade being in jeopardy when RBG died. What did your experts think of the likelihood of that decision being dismantled?

We do get into that a little bit, yes. There’s some concern, and a lot of concern on a state-by-state basis. It really only affects the states between New York and California, so just a few!

I immediately thought of Texas, which will do anything to shut down pro-choicers.

Yes, Imani speaks to that a lot about being concerned for what could come next there.

You also dive into the same-sex marriage issue and possible court fallout.

We do. We talk about that potentially being on the line, and we also spoke to a very lovely couple that RBG married. She officiated their wedding, so also hearing their story of their interaction with her and what she meant to their lives was really nice. Seeing that up against, “Oh, this is on the line now?” That really hits home, the reality of what we could be dealing with.

Before we go, I’m curious about what your experts thought about court expansion. Do they think that’s a reasonable possibility?

That depends on who you ask. We talked to Kate Kendall, who is part of Take Back The Court, and Imani Gandy had her take as well. They both are somewhat optimistic that it could potentially be a possibility and that it’s a real solution to a lot of the problems. We talk about whether it’s stooping to their level, and if it’s a reasonable thing to ask for. And we come to the resolution that it is a reasonable thing to ask for, according to Kate and Imani, and it would be difficult to pull off. And we don’t know if it’s going to be a possibility, and if it is, there might be a long wait for something like that to happen. It’s challenging, and Imani talks about how the Democratic Party is going to have to, as she would put it, “Blow sh*t up.”

That sounds about right from Imani.

Her words, not mine! But yes, “Blow sh*t up” and get in the fight.

‘The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Presents: Remembering RBG – A Nation Ugly Cries with Desi Lydic’ premieres on Friday, October 30th at 11pm EST.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) thinks of himself as one of President Trump’s closest political allies. He said so earlier this week at a rally in Greenville, South Carolina, telling a crowd, “We got off to a rocky start. He beat me pretty badly,” but now, “we’ve got something in common: I like him and he likes me.” That’s debatable, as Trump is notorious for holding grudges and Graham said some damning things about him in 2016.

“Are you a citizen?”
“Am I a citizen? No, I’m not. I’m not, why?”
“Do you have a green card?”
“I do not.”
“If I were you, I’d be in a hurry. If Trump wins, your days are numbered, pal. Young black liberal guy from Africa is not going to work with him.”

That’s an exchange between Graham and host Trevor Noah on The Daily Show in the months before Trump was elected president. The senator also compared Trump to “being shot in the head” and called the Republican party “completely screwed up.” Four years later, he’s spinelessly begging for money on Fox News, while his Democrat opponent Jaime Harrison is breaking fundraising records, and sucking up to Trump. What happened? That’s what The Daily Show wants to know — on Thursday, the show’s Twitter account tweeted, “@LindseyGrahamSC is this one of the tapes we were supposed to play back for you?” It also re-uploaded the 2016 interview, as seen above.

“Use my words against me,” Graham once said. “OK” — Trevor Noah.

Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl cares deeply about schools and the educational system, party because his mother, Virginia Grohl, was a teacher. He has discussed education on multiple occasions and now he has done so again, this time with his mother and Jill Biden for a new Joe Biden campaign video.

Foo Fighters shared a four-minute clip of a video call between the three. Grohl begins the video, “I was raised by a school teacher, so I knew as a child how hard my mother worked, not just at the school, but within the community.” Biden responded, “The teachers are the rockstars,” to which Grohl replied, “I have always felt that way!”

Grohl’s mother also explained the issues she faced as a teacher, saying, “Nobody has listened for a long time. I mean, teacher salaries is one thing. I taught in northern Virginia, and [as] a single parent raising kids, I couldn’t afford to live there on my pay. So, I had to work two or three jobs all the time.”

Grohl responded with some praise for his mom and her drive, saying, “Every morning, I would wake up in our little house in Springfield, Virginia, and my mother was already ready to get us in the car and get us to school, knowing that she had a full day ahead of her with hundreds of children that relied on her to help them move forward in life. And every night after dinner, I would watch my mother at the desk in the living room working on the plan for the next day. And so I watched my mother make plans to help other people my entire life. I started looking back on that and thinking, ‘Well, who’s making the plan for the teachers?’”

Watch the video above.

BABY YODA.

Now that I have your attention, BABY YODA.

If you are a fan of The Mandalorian but have, somehow, only seen the first Star Wars movie, you could still probably recognize most of the references in the season two premiere. Much of “Chapter 9” (the second episode in the post-The Rise of Skywalker era) is centered around characters, creatures, and throwaway lines from A New Hope, including the Tusken Raiders, Jawas and their sandcrawler, the oft-mentioned womp rats (seriously, even whiny Luke only brought them up once), Tatooine’s two suns, the Krayt dragon (skeleton only), and Timothy Olyphant’s beautiful face. Oh wait. That one’s new to Star Wars, and very appreciated. It doesn’t make up for hiding Pedro Pascal under a helmet for 99 percent of season one, but it helps. Even though so much of “Chapter 9” is dependent on A New Hope, however, you have to look to The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and the prequels to recognize the face at the end of the episode.

The Empire Strikes Back introduced us to bounty hunter Boba Fett (let’s pretend the Special Edition and Holiday Special never happened, for many reasons), who helped capture Han Solo for Darth Vader; he reappeared in Return of the Jedi at Jabba the Hutt’s palace and sail barge, but fell into a sarlacc pit and died… Unless he didn’t.

We’ll get to that, but first, let’s rewind to decades before the original trilogy. In the prequels, we learn more (arguably too much!) about Boba, including that he’s a clone raised by Jango Fett, who served as the genetic template for the Republic’s clone army. Boba watched his “dad,” the “best bounty hunter in the galaxy,” get killed by Mace Windu, which is a more honorable way to go than rolling into a sandworm’s mouth.

I have always said this.

Put another way: dad Jango has clone son Boba; Jango die; Boba becomes bounty hunter; Boba dies (?). Got it? It’s long been part of the Extended Universe, er, Legends that Boba Fett survived his fall into the sarlaac pic, and his return was even foreshadowed during a season one episode, but now it’s canon: that’s Jango’s kid at the end of “Chapter 9,” watching Din Djarin and Baby Yoda speeding off into the sunsets. How can you tell it’s Boba? The closing credits. The guest stars include Olyphant (as Cobb Vanth, of Vanth Refrigeration, a character introduced in the book Aftermath), Amy Sedaris returning as Peli Motto, John Leguizamo as the one-eyed alien who betrays Mando, and Temura Morrison, the New Zealand actor who plays Jango and other clone troopers, including Commander Cody, in the prequels. This is the first time we’ve seen adult Boba without his armor (which the Jawas traded to Cobb for some crystals), but as he’s a clone, he would look exactly like his father. With more battle scars:

You probably wouldn’t look so hot after a tumble with the sarlacc and at least five years living as a hermit in the Dune Sea (not that Dune, this Dune), either.

Ariana Grande’s new album Positions dropped at midnight, and in the hours since, it has spawned multiple trending topics on Twitter. The song “My Hair” is among them and it’s due to the impressive vocal abilities Grande displays on the track. Towards the end of the song, there’s a section where Grande hits uncommonly high notes while singing in whistle register, which is the highest possible register of the human voice.

When fans heard this, they were pretty amazed and took to Twitter to share their reactions, which was a mix of shock at her abilities and jokes about her being out of breath after recording that part of the song.

As for the rest of the track, it’s about Grande opening up to a special someone and being vulnerable by letting them run their fingers through her hair, as she sings on the second verse, “It’s been way long overdue / Just like these inches down my back / Usually don’t let people touch it / But tonight, you’ll get a pass / Spend my dimes and spend my time / To keep it real, sometimes it’s tracks / But I don’t care.”

Listen to “My Hair” above and check out some more reactions below.

Positions is out now via Republic. Get it here.

Netflix wraps up October with one final spooky offering and, you guessed it, a holiday movie. His House might prove to be the most terrifying horror film the streaming service has delivered this Halloween, starring Matt Smith and Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku. But if you’re tired of being scared — by the movies you watch, not real life — maybe Emma Roberts’ new rom-com is more your speed.

Here’s everything coming to (and leaving) Netflix this week of Oct. 30.

His House (Netflix film streaming 10/30)

Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku stars in this British horror flick landing on Netflix this week. The film follows a couple that flees war-torn South Sudan and applies for refugee status in England. As they try to adapt to life in a small town, evils lurking in their neighborhood (and their house) threaten their newfound safety. It’s a wholly original take on the genre, and if you’ve been watching Lovecraft, you know how good Mosaku will be in it.

Holidate (Netflix film streaming 10/28)

Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey star in this millennial rom-com with a holiday twist — because really, it’s never too early to start watching Christmas movies. Roberts plays Sloane, Bracey plays Jackson. They’re both single and dreading spending the holidays with nosy family members constantly pestering them about their dating life. So they make a pact to be each others’ plus one throughout each holiday of the year. You can guess where this will go, can’t you?

Here’s a full list of what’s been added in the last week:

Avail. 10/27
Blood of Zeus
Chico Bon Bon: Monkey with a Tool Belt: Season 4Vilas: Serás lo que debas ser o no serás nada / Guillermo Vilas: Settling the Score

Avail. 10/28
Holidate
Metallica Through The Never
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight
Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb

Avail. 10/30
Bronx
The Day of the Lord
His House
Somebody Feed Phil: Season 4
Suburra: Season 3

And here’s what’s leaving next week, so it’s your last chance:

Leaving 10/31
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Burlesque
Charlotte’s Web
Clash of the Titans
District 9
The Firm
Fun with Dick & Jane
The Girl with All the Gifts
Grandmaster
Highway to Heaven: Seasons 1-5
The Interview
Just Friends
Magic Mike
Nacho Libre
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
The NeverEnding Story
The NeverEnding Story 2: The Next Chapter
Nights in Rodanthe
The Patriot
Set Up
The Silence of the Lambs
Sleepless in Seattle
Sleepy Hollow
Spaceballs
The Taking of Pelham 123
The Ugly Truth
Underworld
Underworld: Evolution
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Zathura

Leaving 11/1
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil
Olympus Has Fallen
Shark Night

Leaving 11/4
Death House

Leaving 11/6
Into the Forest
Krisha

Nostalgia has a way of fooling us into believing that times were better in the past. (This is especially true in 2020, when “better” has a historically low bar.) But the past hardly ever is actually better, it just seems that way because people back then couldn’t fully grasp the reality of what was going on around them. We don’t miss the way the world actually was. We just feel wistful over the naïveté and ignorance we lost.

I was reminded of this truism when I revisited The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear, which occurred 10 years ago this week. In 2010, more than 200,000 people converged on Washington D.C. to protest … protesting? I mean, I guess that was the point?

Even now, a decade later, it’s hard to suss out a coherent message to this “satirical” political rally hosted by the era’s two biggest Comedy Central stars, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The original idea was to poke fun at Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally, which occurred two months earlier and harnessed the anger of the Obama-hating Tea Party movement. But it was also about liberals learning to respect their right-wing counterparts, while simultaneously chiding them for being batcrap insane. Though this mockery was ultimately civil, because it’s the media’s fault that Americans of differing political persuasions hate each other. Except, come on, why are you looking for a message here anyway? This was a comedy show! Other than the part at the end, which sounded an awful lot like a political speech, when Stewart asked for a moment of “sincerity” and once again blasted the media for propagating the “false” narrative about the deep divisions that exist in this country. Oh, you mean like fake news? I’m reminded of a guy who agrees that reporters overstate negativity in order to tear at the fabric of this country, though his name escapes me now.

Seen from the vantage point of 2020, a left-leaning faux-protest premised on the idea that political anger in response to societal ills is inherently irrational and based solely on fear — as opposed to being a natural reaction to the circumstances of your own life — seems pretty … well, let’s just say it hasn’t aged all that well. Though it should be noted that plenty of commentators felt that way in the moment. David Carr dinged Stewart and Colbert in the New York Times for viewing politics strictly through the lens of cable news, even though the vast majority of Americans (even in 2010) don’t watch it. Janet Malcolm, writing for The New York Review Of Books, mocked the vanity of attendees patting themselves on the backs for their centrist reasonableness, dubbed the rally “a giant preen-in.” Even Bill Maher, a fellow comrade in the political comedy world, chided Stewart and Colbert for wasting an opportunity to galvanize the left at a time when Obama was politically vulnerable. “If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up,” he mused, “you might as well make it about something.”

Looking back, some have seized upon The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear — and the impotent both-sides-ism it signifies — as a symbol of “liberal futility” in the face of conservatives seizing control of state and local governments and the courts. While lefties were feeling good about their own decency, the other side was mobilizing. This, also, was apparent in the moment: The week after the rally, Republicans trounced Democrats in the midterm elections, winning seven seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House Of Representatives, a historic shift in Congressional power not seen in more than 60 years. While the Comedy Central rally outdrew the Tea Party rally, Glenn Beck laughed last.

Was it Stewart and Colbert’s responsibility to get out the vote in 2010? Not really. These are — as we must reiterate for the umpteenth time — comedians, not politicians. But if you assess The Rally To Restore To Sanity And/Or Fear strictly as a comedy show, it hardly fares any better. I’m telling you: This thing was hella boring.

You can watch all three hours on YouTube. Though I recommend skipping the first hour, at least if you’re looking for laughs. There was a pretty good musical performance by The Roots and John Legend, and then — perhaps in a sign of basic-cable unity — the Mythbusters came out for an interminable stretch of crowd work. Finally, after about an hour, Stewart emerged to introduce the vocal group 4Troops for a syrupy rendition of The National Anthem. Then he earnestly urged the crowd to pick up their litter and clean the Washington Mall once the rally is over.

These optics will be familiar to anyone who has followed Stewart and Colbert — both of them favor old-fashioned nods to God and country as a way to demonstrating to skeptical right-wingers that liberals are “real” Americans just like them. Only these gestures never really work. If you can accuse Joe Biden of being a socialist, you are pretty much incapable of accepting that any leftie can be patriotic. (Liberal millennials and zoomers have learned that you might as well push actual socialist policies that could potentially transform the country if you’re going to be painted with that brush no matter what.)

Stewart and Colbert, meanwhile, signify the sort of respectability politics in relation to the right that was endemic to the early Obama years, and now seems utterly inept and even delusional. While technically nonpartisan, the liberal bent to The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear could hardly be more clear. Deeply enmeshed in his “Stephen Colbert” character, Colbert played the crazed, flag-humping, right-wing buffoon to Stewart’s measured, “why can’t we all just get along?” good-guy left-winger. When Colbert and Stewart duet on the snarky Lee Greenwood-style number “Greatest Strongest Country,” we’re meant to understand it as a goof on self-serving Fox-endorsed nationalism. But what about the part an hour or so earlier when you had a cadre of wholesome veterans sing a string-laden version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”? Are these patriotic displays pious or corny? Where do you guys stand, exactly?

As was the case on their respective TV shows, the dissonance between mocking the “divide and conquer” media for polarizing the country and the hosts’ own readily apparent political leanings is weirdly self-defeating. The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear was inevitably going to annoy conservatives. (“Keep Smug Alive” was the headline on The National Review‘s withering post-mortem.) And yet the event, even as satire, ultimately felt like a frustrating half-measure against a hostile opposition. It was – to use a word favored by another aughts-era TV personality who opted to actually enter politics — weak.

The strangest — and most telling — moment of The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear was when Stewart gushed about a new song that was “so apropos” to this event. And then he introduced Kid Rock, who came out to perform “Care,” a hymn to centrist “rationality” in the face of partisan “insanity.”

“Cuz I hear screamin’ on the left / yellin’ on the right / I’m sitting in the middle tryin to live my life,” Rock sang, before listing a number of issues — including poverty, war, and inequality — that he can’t do anything about. “The least that I can do,” he concluded, “is care.”

Describing what is essentially a pro-apathy song — it’s certainly true that the least anyone can literally do “is care” — as “apropos” to The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear is a far worse slam than anything conjured by The National Review. Also, it’s hardly “apropos” to the worldview of Kid Rock, who campaigned for Mitt Romney two years later and for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He’s had no problem “yellin’ on the right” for the past decade.

In 2020, the left out of necessity has cut the sarcasm out of their protests. Believing that national divisions are a fantasy of opportunistic cable networks is a luxury none of us can afford any longer. But the influence of The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear persists in surprising places.

Earlier this month, Dan Brooks of New York Times Magazine wrote a perceptive piece on how Donald Trump has defanged our current crop of Stewart and Colbert wannabes. He coined the phase “ambiguous irony” to describe how the right now advances “joke versions of its actual agenda, in ways that make it hard to distinguish between the two,” creating “asymmetries in how insiders and outsiders interpret what is being said, so that any statement that gets too much blowback can become someone else’s failure to take a joke.”

What this means is that Trump can tweet ridiculous things — about COVID, about Hunter Biden, about rigged elections — and later claim that he was being ironic … or not. “The real Donald Trump acts as if he’s doing an impression of some normal-looking, occasionally self-aggrandizing president we don’t know about,” Brooks writes. This was the game Stewart and Colbert played for years. They might have looked and acted like political commentators, but if you failed to understand that were really just comedians having fun at the expense of lecherous Republicans, the joke was on you.

All of this is painful and even a little embarrassing to reckon with. Like so many white, college-educated liberals, I was a regular viewer of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report in 2010. Watching those shows back then felt like a tonic — these guys see what I see, they acknowledge the craziness that few else in the media will point out, and this makes me feel less alone. But now, I take a different message from The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. It’s not a balm, but a warning — against complacency, against my own intellectual vanity, and against any possible suspicion that putting yourself above the passions of your fellow citizens is a virtue and not a defect.