“It’s been this way for a long time, but right now in particular if you look around, it’s easy to feel like virtually everything in our country is broken,” Seth Meyers said on his first episode of Late Night after taking the previous week off. “This past year has been one of ceaseless misery, dysfunction, and chaos—and yes, I know I’m starting to sound like Werner Herzog at the top of one of these segments.”
But with more than 500,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 and an ongoing power and water crisis in Texas, this is where we are. And the host spent the next several minutes hammering Newsmax for its “desperate” attempt to smear Joe Biden’s dog instead of covering actual news and Fox News for relentlessly pushing the blatant lie that green energy is to blame in Texas.
“Like clockwork, the Fox News disinformation machine went to work and blamed the power outage in Texas on a thing that does not currently exist in any form in Texas or at the national level, the Green New Deal,” Meyers said before playing a montage of the many times Fox anchors hammered that narrative, culminating in an unhinged rant from Tucker Carlson about “windmills.”
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“How would you like a windmill in your backyard, making noise, chopping up birds and sucking up all your air?” Meyers asked, imitating the Fox host. “How would you like a windmill to move in with you and live in your house, eating all your food and drinking all your booze? How would you like that windmill to get suspiciously close with your wife, to the point where they start going on shopping trips together without you, leaving you at home wondering what they’re doing at the outlet mall while you look out your window at all the chopped birds on your lawn?”
It went on like that until Meyers as Carlson warned viewers, “My wife left me for a windmill and it will happen to you too!”
“Of course, it won’t surprise you to learn that this lie is aggressively mendacious and dumb,” he added, returning to reality, citing a study that showed Texas’ power is generated overwhelmingly by natural gas and coal along with some nuclear. “Which, of course it does, it’s Texas!” Meyers said. They used to have a football team called the Houston Oilers, not the Houston Solar Panels.”
“And I’m sorry that I have to say this because it’s, you know, insanely obvious,” he continued, “but the Green New Deal is not a thing that exists in Texas or at the national level. This is like blaming your problems on Avatar 2. It’s not out yet!”
Instead, he explained, it was frozen natural gas lines due to lack of regulations that primarily caused the outages and only seven percent of Texas’ winter power capacity was expected to come from wind. “Kind of like how you can only believe about 7 percent of what you see on Fox News,” Meyers said.
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