Jimmy Kimmel
“The Republican party is having a bit of an internal squabble right now,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening. “The party is divided over whether the violent insurrection of January 6 was a violent insurrection or just a lively sightseeing tour of the Capitol.”
A week ago, the Republican National Committee voted to censure GOP legislators Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for participating in the House inquiry into the insurrection, and in a statement called the attack “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.
“They’re just a group of ordinary citizens wearing bear skin and horns smearing feces on the wall of the Capitol,” Kimmel laughed. “Just ordinary citizens.”
In a rebuke of his own party, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, reaffirmed this week that the attack was “a violent insurrection” aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power. “Just to show you how far down the crazy hole we’ve gone, we’re now applauding Republicans who are willing to admit that what happened, happened,” Kimmel noted.
“But there’s not just crazy, there’s some dumb going on, too,” he continued, pointing to deranged comments this week by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene likened Congress to a gulag and said Nancy Pelosi deployed “gazpacho police”, instead of the Gestapo.
“If you’ve got cold soup you’d better watch it, because Nancy Pelosi is coming for it,” said Kimmel. “These must be the soup Nazis Seinfeld warned us about so many years ago. And if the gazpacho police get ahold of you they’ll throw you right in the goulash.”
Trevor Noah
Highways across the country have been separating Black and white neighborhoods at all costs since the 1950’s… even if it meant making zig zag lines like a racist Mario Kart. pic.twitter.com/LPteLsVG9x
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 10, 2022
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah looked into the racist foundations of America’s highway system, which Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan seeks to address.
“What you may not know is that when America first started building its highway system back in the 1950s, people were often forced to leave their homes to make room for all these fancy new roads,” Noah explained. “And guess which people were moved the most.”
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, one of the largest and most consequential infrastructure measures in American history, added 41,000 miles to the interstate system and cut through almost every major American city, displacing predominantly black and brown residents. The construction of I-94 in St Paul, Minnesota, for example, displaced one in seven of the city’s black residents.
“Highway I-94 could’ve been anywhere in Minnesota, but it just happened to displace the very few black people living in Minnesota, more commonly known as the Minnesota Timberwolves,” Noah noted. “And look, don’t get me wrong: these highways had to go somewhere. I’m not saying no highways. But more often than not, that somewhere was right through a black neighborhood.
“Black people are used to being displaced by gentrification, even today, but at least when that happens, they get to enjoy Shake Shack for a few months first,” he added. “These highways, on the other hand, they didn’t provide any improvement to the neighborhood. They slashed a hole through it. And whatever was left of that neighborhood just withered and died.”
Highway construction not only displaced residents and permanently shut down black businesses, they also reinforced segregation at a time when new laws demanded the integration of schools. Highways in Atlanta, for example, “were laid down primarily with regard to keeping the races apart rather than keeping traffic moving efficiently”, said Professor Kevin Kruse of Princeton University. The city’s snarling traffic is in part due to design which winds around the city to cordon off black neighborhoods, rather than move cars.
“Man, racism is a helluva drug,” said Noah. “Instead of designing the most efficient highway, they instead made it zigzag around the city like some kind of racist Mario Kart.
“Highways might not be following black people around department stores or turning them down for loans,” he concluded, “but the way that highways were built in America was inarguably racist.”
