Just when we thought the world couldn’t get any more surreal than what we experienced in 2020, 2021 happened. While this year has been just as strange and full of as many instantly meme-able moments as the previous one, few states had as many major missteps as Texas.
On Tuesday, The Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng dedicated more than five minutes to taking us down memory lane in the Lone Star State, which truly had an incredible year. From a senator who high-tailed it to Cancun when the temperature dipped (leaving his tiny Poodle, Snowflake, to fend for itself) to the state’s enactment of a near-total abortion ban to a gaggle of conspiracy theorists gathering in Dallas to await the resurrection of JFK Jr. (has he arrived yet?), Texas proved yet again that everything’s bigger there—including the scandals. Or, as Chieng described it: “The state that grabbed 2021 by the horns and made it its bitch.”
Chieng gave top billing for the wild ride of a year to Governor Greg Abbott: “He banned masked mandates,” Chieng explained. “He banned vaccine mandates. He banned vaccine cards. Because the best way to fight COVID is with freedom… and ICU beds, but we ran out of ICU beds because of all the COVID.”
After rattling off many more of the state’s embarrassing “accomplishments” from the past 12 months, Chieng—complete with sound effects—continued defending Texas’s lawmakers.
“Say what you want,” Chieng exclaimed. “But what other state would have had the balls to turn their entire population into a bunch of snitches? Not Rhode Island! F*ck you, Rhode Island!”
“The fact is, Texas was a powerhouse all year long,” Chieng continued. “Even when they didn’t have power in their house… That’s right, thanks to Texas’s independent power grid, the energy capital of America had no energy. This past year, Texas was even number one at irony: Pipes were bursting, cell phone towers were down, people couldn’t even put gas into their horsies.”
But Chieng probably summed up his argument best when he called out “you other b*tch-ass states” and repeated the oft-heard statement that “Everything’s bigger in Texas… especially the lines to vote in Black communities.”
You can watch the full clip above.