Samantha Bee Is Losing Hillary Clinton The Election, Says ‘New York Times’
Samantha Bee is on the verge of losing Hillary Clinton the election. That’s at least the take of New York Times political columnist Ross Douthat.
In a recent op-ed, Douthat renewed the argument liberals posited last week — that Jimmy Fallon single-handedly got Donald Trump elected by messing up his hair on national television.
Douthat didn’t believe that, but he was trying to set up his point that late-night personalities like Samantha Bee are doing more for his chances of becoming the next president of the United States than anything else.
The ironic thing Douthat points out about Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers is that they’re trying to stop the controversial Republican but are further pushing independent and GOP voters into the real estate mogul’s camp.
Excellent article: the left’s dominance of pop culture makes voting Republican “an act of cultural rebellion” https://t.co/WhWmjrULSO
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 22, 2016
Douthat writes that while culture has always trended left, it has always left alone apolitical areas like late-night television.
With Samantha Bee and her ilk forcing viewers to listen to far-left rhetoric in place of or alongside laughs night after night, they are turning off most reasonably minded voters, who might otherwise consider her amid her opponent’s often controversial statements, he offers.
Exacerbating this problem is the weakness of Clinton’s candidacy.
Where liberals see an incompetent liar in their opponent, they don’t have a credible answer for their own candidate’s untrustworthy qualities.
The experience of the former secretary of state they often tout is mired in a world that has only grown more dangerous and chaotic during hers and Obama’s watch.
The advantage of flip-flopping and the racism they lay on the former Apprentice star’s shoulders is negated by her own dismay for freedom of speech (detailed here by Reason), freedom of the press (going close to 300 days without holding a press conference), opposition to gay marriage (she spoke out against it on multiple occasions), past comments about crime in the black community (“must be brought to heel”), and voting for the Iraq war.
Hail to the Censor, Hillary Clinton: New at Reason #tech https://t.co/w9Bg1Dmztc pic.twitter.com/QuqbJVk7Nu
— eopolis.tech (@eopolis) February 3, 2016
Trump’s past sexist comments are met by Clinton’s husband’s checkered past with women and allegations of her own participation in the harassment and intimidation of the women who accused him of sexual assault.
True or not, these cracks in the Clinton facade are no more worthy of ignoring than her adversary’s failings, at least to middle and middle-right voters, and they’re giving the Donald Trump campaign plenty of ammunition heading into the first debate on Monday, September 26.
When Samantha Bee and others continually punch in on Trump but give their own candidate a pass, they fortify a slice of voters who are harder left while pushing a majority of voters to him and third-party candidates.
The attacks meant to deride and sink only serve as a Pavlovian response to voters that they’ve entered a partisan zone where all things must be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
Douthat assumes Americans don’t like being told what to do. In the past, left-leaning culture had at least some opposition to give weight to the points it tried to make. This gave it a Resistance quality. It felt like a response to overtly repressive conservatism, which held the norm of the day.
Samantha Bee and the late-night leftists have seemed to turn that idea around, assuming the numbers are on their side.
Or, as Douthat puts it, “within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
But what do you think, readers? Are late-night comedians like Samantha Bee fast tracking Donald Trump into the White House? Sound off in the comment section below.
[Featured Image by Debby Wong/Shutterstock.com]
