Seth Meyers
With just a week left until the midterm elections, “Republicans have made their priorities very clear,” said Seth Meyers on Monday’s Late Night. “Continue spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, intimidate people trying to vote on this election, and claim pre-emptively that the results must be illegitimate if they lose.”
Meyers cited a new study from FiveThirtyEight which found that 60% of Americans will have an election denier on the ballot this fall. “We simply cannot have a functioning democracy where one party denies the legitimacy of any election they don’t win,” he said.
The strain of election denialism in the US has trickled down to local elections, with reports of men dressed in camouflage patrolling ballot drop boxes in Arizona to intimidate voters. “It continues to shock me how these guys continue to be both incredibly dangerous menaces and also complete dipshits at the same time,” said Meyers.
“We are living in an era of lethal dipshits,” he continued. “On the one hand, they’re accomplishing their mission of scaring voters away from drop boxes, but on the other hand they’re sitting in lawn chairs wearing camouflage like a dude trying to catch a gopher in his backyard.”
Donald Trump has egged on the voter intimidation, even posting the address of Arizona drop boxes to his social media site, Truth Social. “Do you know how out-of-your-mind obsessed you have to be to even know the address of a ballot drop box?” Meyers laughed. “I don’t even know the exact address of my six-year-old’s school.
“At this point, Trump’s social media accounts are like scavenger hunts for insane people. It’s the Dumb-Vinci Code.”
Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah took the Daily Show live from Atlanta on Monday evening, where he addressed the razor-thin Senate race between the Rev Raphael Warnock and former football star Herschel Walker.
Sure, Herschel Walker is a liar and hypocrite, but he's also just really weird pic.twitter.com/qNoh5IG2d6
— The Daily Show in Atlanta (@TheDailyShow) November 1, 2022
Walker, a Trump support and anti-abortion candidate, has faced numerous scandals throughout his campaign – he lied about his work with law enforcement, the number of children he fathered, and that he graduated from the University of Georgia.
“At this point, I want to meet the Herschel Walker that Herschel Walker thinks he is,” said Noah. “He treats real life the way we treat dating apps – you know, just in your profile like ‘I’m one of the tallest people you’ll ever meet, I founded my own industry, and my mom lives with me, not the other way around.’
“But the bigger thing about Herschel Walker isn’t all the lying and the hypocrisy. He’s also just weird,” Noah added. He cited “one of my favorite answers ever in politics”, when Walker was asked about the biggest problem facing America today and responded: “We have so many celebrities telling people that they can’t do it. Telling a lot of people that you gotta feel bad for yourself, feel sorry for yourself, which is sad to me because they’ve done it. But they telling you you can’t do it.”
“The biggest problem?” Noah marveled. “You think the average American right now is saying, ‘I know inflation is bad right now, but the bigger issue is that Vin Diesel has never told me to follow my dreams! I could’ve owned a bakery by now.’”
As a celebrity, Noah addressed the American people with a facetious “supportive celebrity cam”: “In America, you can do anything, just like Herschel Walker. If you want to be an FBI agent, you claim you’re an FBI agent! If you want to graduate valedictorian, just tell people that it happened because it did. If you want to be the father of one despite having fathered four then by God, be the father of one despite having fathered four children. That is the American way.”
Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert noted Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last Friday, which precipitated an explosion of hate speech on the platform; use of the N-word jumped 500% after Musk took over.
“The company blamed it on trolls, but of all the trolls on Twitter, none are troll-ier than the troll who just bought it,” said Colbert, pointing to Musk’s reply on Sunday to Hillary Clinton’s tweet condemning the attack of Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul by a conspiracy theorist. Musk linked to a homophobic conspiracy theory about the attack, seemingly blaming Paul Pelosi. “That’s not just awful, that is beyond the pale,” said Colbert.
“And so is Elon Musk,” he added over a photo of the shirtless billionaire on a yacht.
Musk summarily dissolved Twitter’s board and appointed himself sole director. “Let that be a lesson to you kids,” Colbert joked. “If you work hard, become wealthy and powerful enough, one day you too could pay $44bn to sit in a room by yourself.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also expressed disgust over Musk’s tweet about Paul Pelosi, calling it a “vile and disgusting thing to do”.
“An 82-year-old man was assaulted by a lunatic with a hammer, he went to the hospital with a fractured skull,” he added. “And these scumbags, their first instinct is to try to smear him.”
While Pelosi was in the hospital, Donald Trump Jr tweeted a picture of white underwear with a hammer, calling it his “Paul Pelosi costume”.
“What is wrong with these people?” Kimmel wondered. “And by the way, I have my Donald Trump Jr costume ready – it’s hair gel, a bag of a white powder and a penis pump.
“Put that on, you shameless wart on your father’s nutsack,” he added. “This is the ‘family values’ gang we’re seeing here.”
