It’s quite telling that Trevor Noah, an inauthentic South African—he brings with him nothing authentic from the old country—is a household name in America.
Noah is not funny. He has no wit. He’s PC. He’s left-liberal. He’s a cliche. All the attributes that are needed in an imported talent. The Atlantic thinks nothing of a comedian being unfunny, writing that Noah is a “late-night host who will often choose to swerve away from an easy laugh in favor of a more even-handed dialogue.”
Time magazine is likely jealous of Noah’s access to Barack Obama, but it does at least correctly appraise his talent as “a host who’s been touted lately as both a combative interviewer and deep thinker [but] had little to say.”
Obama, with whom Trump has been too cozy, for some reason, told Noah that President-Elect Trump had invited a Russian hack attack, which, asserted Obama, had indeed happened. (Obama then went on to lament racism and colonialism and to remind us all why we can’t wait to see him exist center stage):
“What is it about our political ecosystem, what is it about the state of our democracy where the leaks of what were frankly not very interesting emails that didn’t have any explosive information in them … ended up being an obsession, and the fact that the Russians were doing this was not an obsession?” He said the emails were “fairly routine” but they got “breathless coverage” and were “depicted as somehow damning in all sorts of ways,” lamenting how emails overshadowed every single big policy issue.
… we have, by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism, but that the progress we’ve made has been real and extraordinary, if I’m communicating my genuine belief that those who are not subject to racism can sometimes have blind spots or lack of appreciation of what it feels to be on the receiving end of that, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not open to learning and caring about equality and justice and that I can win them over because there is goodness in the majority of people.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest took a cue from his boss, Obama, and got in on the banana republic act, putting it out there, on Wednesday, “that ‘there is ‘ample evidence’ the Trump campaign both knew about and encouraged the actions behind the DNC hacks. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager, blasted Earnest’s ‘irresponsible’ statement Thursday morning.”
My column this week is “The Russians Are Coming.”