Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently trolled Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for failing to properly understand one of the Kimmel show’s segments, HuffPost reports. The host produced a map and asked self-identified Republican voters to name a country on a map, and several failed to do so.
Back in 2018, Kimmel posted a video of passersby being shown a map and asked to name any country on it.
“Is this South Africa?” one user asked, pointing to the continent of South America.
Another, pointing in the general direction of Russia, proclaimed, “that’s the country of Asia.”
Clips like this have been a staple of comedy shows for decades. What’s more, these clips fail to tell the whole story. Viewers see only what the production team wants them to see; clips of passersby easily doing what they’re asked to do doesn’t make for compelling TV.
Nevertheless, this clip somehow made it to the attention of the Twitter account of For America, which tweeted a video of the clip.
“Pray for our youth,” For America captioned the post.
Sen. Ted Cruz retweeted For America’s tweet, and added his own caption, saying that these people were Bernie Sanders’ base, and that their purported ignorance is what’s driving them to vote for Sanders.
This is Bernie’s base—the same folks who tell pollsters that socialism is great because free stuff is cool & they have no idea how many countries have tried it and utterly failed. The antidote: facts, truth & substance. https://t.co/zQhrvwRkmz
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 18, 2020
The problem, as Kimmel pointed out, is that the political affiliations of the respondents wasn’t a part of the clip, and indeed, none of them were even asked what their political affiliation is.
“Unfortunately, the guy talking about facts, truth and substance made it all up,” Kimmel said of Cruz, adding, “Bernie wasn’t even running when we shot this.”
Kimmel then trolled Cruz by having his production team film another video of passersby being asked to name countries on a map. Only this time, he specifically asked people who self-identified as Republicans. Not unexpectedly, the clip showed people failing to identify even a single country.
“I believe that’s Africa,” one said as they pointed to Australia.
Another pointed at Africa and was reminded that it’s a continent, not a country. He was unable to name a country in Africa.
Another was asked by a producer if she supports the president, to which she replied, “yeah.” Then, shown the map and asked to name a single country on it, the participant chuckled and then drew blanks when the producer pointed at Australia, Africa, and Europe.
Again, it bears noting that this video does not include any participants who successfully named a country, if indeed there were any.
