For the past several days, President Trump, Republican members of Congress, and Fox News have all been playing the victim in the wake of a treasonous attack on the U.S. Capitol that left six people dead, including two police officers (one by apparent suicide). Instead of trying to figure out how and why this act of terrorism happened, they’ve been complaining about social media companies purging accounts that have violated their terms of service by, among other things, plotting sedition and threatening violence.
As Seth Meyers said on Tuesday night, “Republicans have responded by doing what they do best: making themselves the victims.”
The Late Night host then threw to a clip of Fox News’ resident white nationalist-inciter, Tucker Carlson, who wondered aloud, “Imagine that: You wake up and you’re suddenly unpopular with the wrong person and you can’t communicate, and you have no legal representation, and you can’t fly on an airplane, and you can’t put your money in a bank.” (Carlson, by the way, is the multimillionaire heir to a frozen food fortune who used to wear bow ties everywhere.)
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Carlson’s strange made-up scenario prompted Meyers to bust out a hilarious impression of the right-wing blowhard and his penchant for straw men and various other logical fallacies.
“Imagine that: You take part in one little insurrection to overthrow the United States government and suddenly you can’t communicate, you can’t fly on an airplane, you can’t wear sandals to Houlihan’s, and you can’t park your BMW across two handicapped spots—even though you’re just running in to the pharmacy real fast to get your Cialis, and you can’t go to Red Lobster and stuff the big shrimp in your pockets, even though the all-you-can-eat sign never specified where and when you can eat it, and when you skip out on the check and tell the waiter you have a legal right to this shrimp based on the Constitution—a document you have never read!—he chases you down and takes your license plate, and calls 911, and tells them you’re a shrimp thief, and the cops come to your house and confiscate the shrimp from your fridge and embarrass you in front of your stepson and his friends while they play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on Xbox and laugh at you and call you a ‘shrimp dweeb,’ and you say, ‘Stop calling me that, Tyler!’ and then he and his friends, they push you down the stairs. Imagine that.”
“My god,” Meyers concluded, breaking from his Carlson character. “These people are whiny, hysterical lunatics who never miss an opportunity to make themselves the victims—even after a deadly insurrection at our nation’s Capitol.”
