Samantha Bee: ‘A revolting trash heap of racist talking points’

On Wednesday’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee did not mince her words, laying into the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose sexist and racist comments on women and Muslims resurfaced over the weekend.

The audio clips, from a radio show Carlson used to call frequently hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, capture Carlson saying such niceties as: “I love women but they’re extremely primitive. They’re basic.”

“Ugh, that is vile and disgusting,” Bee commented. “And presumably the audition tape that got him a show at Fox.”

Bee then turned to more telling comments from Carlson, such as his 2006 wish that a presidential candidate would promise to kill “lunatic Muslims” and his 2008 description of Iraq as a “crappy place filled with a bunch of you know, semi-literate, primitive monkeys”.

“Oh my God, Tucker Carlson publicly advocated a genocide while promoting his MSNBC show?” Bee mock-exclaimed. “To quote Tucker Carlson’s face: huh?”

Carlson responded to the controversy with “all the grace and humility you’d expect”, Bee deadpanned. “If you want to know what I think, you can watch” his show, he said in a non-apology statement.

Bee took him up on the challenge: “We have been watching your show and we found that it’s a revolting trash heap of racist talking points.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m not saying Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist – oh no, I’m sorry, yes I am.”

Bee then turned to more recent examples of Carlson’s race-baiting, such as when he bemoaned how immigrants make America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided”, accused Latin American countries of “forcing demographic change” and said nobody cares about Americans (“It’s like shut up, you’re dying, we’re going to replace you”).

“Oh, that’s weird, where have I heard sweaty white men yelling about being replaced before?” Bee mused over a picture of white supremacists from the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville.

Many of Carlson’s defenders say you can’t fault someone for their fans, including the former KKK grand wizard David Duke, “which is kind of true”, Bee conceded. “If you own a restaurant that neo-Nazis go to, that doesn’t make you a white supremacist. But if neo-Nazis go there because you make the soup spell racist tropes, then yeah, you might be a white supremacist.”

Stephen Colbert: ‘Manafort’s served two countries at the same time’

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert recapped a double whammy of bad news for the former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. On Wednesday, Manafort faced a second round of sentencing for fraud and conspiracy; whether the new sentence would run concurrently or consecutively to his previously determined 47 months was up to the judge.

“Now it might sound impossible to serve two sentences at the same time,” Colbert commented, “but I think Manafort’s up to it, because he’s served two countries at the same time.”

All told, Manafort faces seven and a half years in prison. “So someday, Manafort’s going to have to walk up to the biggest guy in the yard and say, ‘Mr President, can I have a pardon?’” Colbert joked.

Even worse for Manafort, just minutes after his sentencing, Manhattan’s district attorney “said, ‘hold my beer,’” and indicted Manafort for 16 crimes – in a jurisdiction in which Trump does not have the power to pardon him.

Trevor Noah: ‘Like a really uninspiring Disney movie’

On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah unpacked the still-hot college admissions scam, in which wealthy parents, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, paid thousands of dollars in bribes to get their children into select universities.

The scheme implicated several athletic coaches who accepted kids as recruited athletes for sports they didn’t even play.

Having your parents busted in a college bribery scandal is hands-down the worst way to find out they think you’re a dumbass. pic.twitter.com/9iMOgMcjkC — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 14, 2019

It’s an “insane” scheme, Noah said, adding that “the perfect punishment for these coaches would be forcing them to compete with a team full of all the fake athletes that they recruited. And then on top of that, we say that they have to win the championship or all of them go to jail.

“It would be like a really uninspiring Disney movie,” he said over a mock-up poster for his remake of the Mighty Ducks. “The Mighty Dicks.”

Of course, these parents probably wanted the best for their kids, Noah said, but he didn’t feel bad for them; according to the criminal complaint, many of the parents wrote off their bribes as tax-deductible donations to charity.

“They just added a bonus crime to the crime that they already committed,” Noah said of the fake donations, also known as tax fraud. “That was not necessary – that’s like you’re robbing the bank and on the way out you start robbing the pens.”

Noah did admit to feeling bad for their kids, many of whom didn’t know about the fraud behind their college acceptance. The exposure, Noah concluded, is “such a shitty way to find out that your parents think you’re a dumbass”.