Trevor Noah
After three days of record-cold temperatures, blackouts in Texas have stranded millions without electricity, clean water, or access to food. “This, no matter what anybody says, is awful,” said Trevor Noah on Wednesday’s Daily Show. “I know people were praying for Texas to go blue, but not like this! I mean, is it too much to ask for just one apocalypse at a time?”
Republicans are so desperate to let fossil fuels off the hook, they're blaming AOC and the Green New Deal -- which hasn't even happened yet -- for something that's happening in Texas RIGHT NOW. pic.twitter.com/HXwECXSdxL
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 18, 2021
Noah played clips of residents’ desperate measures for warmth in homes not designed to withstand freezing temperatures – boiling pots of water on the stove, taping doorways, even dangerously turning on cars in the garage (which has led to a spike in carbon monoxide poisonings). “You know, Covid is bad enough, but now Texans have to deal with their homes turning into meat lockers? This shit is unfair,” he said.
The power outages that have crippled the state are due in large part to failures of the state’s natural gas-powered plants and years of underinvestment in the state’s power grid, which was deregulated and moved outside federal guidelines in the 1990s.
The rollback led to “a lack of oversight that could’ve helped to keep the infrastructure maintained”, Noah explained. “Instead, for some reason, there are more people keeping tabs on Britney Spears than the Texas power grid.
“This just goes to show you that you can’t put profits over quality and safety,” he added. “Money’s not worth a whole lot if you have to burn it to keep warm.”
The crisis was especially embarrassing for the state’s leaders, he continued. “I mean, this is the state that prides itself on its oil and gas industry and now that industry has failed spectacularly.”
“Which is probably why state officials and their allies on cable news are working so hard to blame someone else,” he continued, segueing into a series of Fox News clips which uniformly blamed the blackouts on frozen wind turbines and, by extension, renewable energy, the Green New Deal and, in the words of the former governor Rick Perry, “AOC America”. (The latter is a reference to a frequent target of rightwing ire, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; in reality, wind turbines account for only 12% of the lost power in the state.)
The blame shift is “fucking insane”, said Noah. “These guys are so desperate to just let fossil fuels off the hook that they’re blaming AOC and the Green New Deal – which, by the way, hasn’t even happened yet – for something that’s happening in Texas right now? But this just goes to show you that no matter what happens, no matter how far removed she is from the problem, conservatives can and will always find a way to blame the bogeyman AOC.”
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel checked in on Donald Trump, who reappeared after 27 days of relative silence with a phone call to Fox News. The call was ostensibly to honor Rush Limbaugh, the rightwing radio host who died at age 70 on Wednesday, but Trump had other plans. His tribute to Limbaugh? “Well, Rush thought that we won. And so do I, by the way.”
“Anyway, who died again?” Kimmel joked. “There’s no I in eulogy, Don. And it’s not the like Fox crew didn’t try – they did everything possible to tee him up to talk about Rush. But somehow he kept coming back to this election that he still thinks he won.”
In another clip, Trump quickly spun a Limbaugh question into his baseless talking points on election fraud, America as a “third world country”, and “you don’t know how angry this country is”.
“Well, I have to believe that listening to Trump blather on nonsensically about himself is what Rush would’ve wanted,” Kimmel joked.
