Samantha Bee didn’t expect to be giving this particular monologue.
Samantha Bee furiously takes white people to task after Donald Trump’s victory
“If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.”
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
For her post-election special, the Full Frontal host stood onstage in what she had hoped would be a celebratory sparkly blazer, in response to Hillary Clinton being elected as America’s first woman president. Instead, she mourned the end of Clinton’s campaign with not a small amount of fury — and dug into how, exactly, Donald Trump came to win.
As crushed anti-Trump voters to try to “dust for fingerprints” and assign blame for Clinton’s loss, Bee insisted there is one demographic that deserves the brunt of it: white people.
“I guess ruining Brooklyn was a dry run,” she added.
Showing CNN’s exit polls, Bee pointed to the 58 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump — making white people the only demographic in which more people voted for the president-elect than for Clinton.
Bee then addressed her liberal-skewing audience directly. “Don’t try to distance yourselves from the ‘bad apples’ and say, ‘it’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for him! #NotAllWhitePeople,” Bee said, with searing disdain. “If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.”
For despondent liberals, Bee’s anger might have been cathartic — and that anger will no doubt continue to be a theme throughout a Trump presidency. But as Bee emphasized again and again, she’s pretty devastated to be delivering jokes during what could be a disastrous few years.
“What we did was the democratic equivalent of installing an above-ground pool,” Bee said. “Even if we’re lucky and it doesn’t seep into our foundations, the neighbors will never look at us the same way again.”
