The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Unpacking NOLA and Cybertruck Attacks & An Unusually Civil Jan. 6 | Rep. Jamie Raskin
Tue, 07 Jan 2025
Jon Stewart kicks off 2025 with an unusually civil Jan. 6 election certification, and right-wing media's desperate attempts to make the Bourbon Street attack about immigration. Plus, Jon unpacks the eerily normal digital footprints of recent terrorists and questions the internet's role in their radicalizations. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland joins to discuss the country’s future following the certification of Donald Trump’s 2024 election win. The newly-elected ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee weighs in on Democratic priorities moving forward, his friendship with Rep. Lauren Boebert, and positive memories from the day after the 2021 insurrection.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened on January 6th?
It did snarl traffic, but a lot less bear spray and Confederate flags. Of course, it is January 6th. It is the day that traditionally we now pretend that we knew was a big deal in terms of certifying the elections.
But...
Be honest. Before that insurrection, you had no idea. You had no idea there was a January 6th ceremony or what it did or why it did. Now you just got to act like, oh, yes, the reading of the election. So important. But let's get to it. It always begins with the traditional children's procession where they bring in boxes filled with the cremated remains of their dead pets.
And then they dump them, all the ashes, on the speaker's desk. And then the speaker blows on the dust until the name of the president-elect is conjured in the mist. America is a wondrous land. But it's good to see them bringing in the boxes there. Nice to know that democracy now has pallbearers. So, so trenchant.
Of course, the ultimate indignity of this January 6th is that Donald Trump's opponent, Kamala Harris, because she is the vice president, serves as the master of ceremonies to this... Really, you are a very reactive and sad group. The empathy is off the charts with this group. Kamala Harris has to be the master of ceremonies. But it does suck.
The votes for President of the United States are as follows. Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes. Kamala D. Harris... That's got to sting.
She's like, um, I can hear you. God damn. It's like attending your own funeral. And even the mourners are like, woohoo! I can't imagine anything that would be more uncomfortable than standing there while the crowd applauds your opponent.
Kamala D. Harris of the state of California has received 226 votes. Wait, hold on.
That sounded louder. There's a lot of joy in that room. I think she could still win this thing. She just needs to find like 130,000 votes in Georgia. And then, you know, tell me Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Wisconsin, maybe nice to flip North Carolina. But ultimately, the certification ceremony that we all look forward to every four years since I was little. went off without a hitch.
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Chapter 2: What was the New Orleans terrorist attack about?
Now we're hearing from multiple reports that he was an American citizen, he was in the Army Reserves, that he wasn't some illegal immigrant that came across the border. Lift the cloche!
Look, the cloche has been deployed. You must lift the cloche. Or the thing in the... All right. So, it didn't turn out to be the ironclad argument for sealed borders that the right was hoping for, but fear not. More chaos to come.
Breaking news out of Las Vegas, where a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump Towers Hotel.
Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump Hotel. So even terrorists are political cartoonists now? A little on the nose, don't you think? I mean, come on.
I think it's pretty clear what's going on here. Have at it, boys. John, I'm going to put out the obvious. He goes to the Trump resorts in Las Vegas, Donald Trump. He's in a Tesla Cybertruck, Elon Musk.
This was a statement. They was making a statement about Trump, about Elon.
Should the FBI be treating this as another attempt on Trump's life, even though he wasn't at the hotel at the time?
Why the f**k not? I saw a car accident outside his hotel in New York. Let's make that number four or five. Who cares what's really happening? But unfortunately, even for that narrative, the statement by the bomber was actually, I think Trump is awesome.
Officials say the man who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Vegas Trump Hotel expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
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Chapter 3: How did the media react to the attack?
Saying Americans need to, quote, rally behind President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Far be it from me to tell someone how they should express their affection. I've worked for years to become more open. But even I know that blowing up someone's shit in front of more of their shit, it's what we in the therapy business call a mixed message. So neither end of the... Illegal immigrant anti-American parlay has hit, but don't let reality ruin a good narrative.
The person who committed the attack was indeed an American citizen, but let's not take our eyes off the bigger picture here, which is that over the past four years, millions of people have come into the country. My goodness, what else don't we know? If these are a couple of people who are homegrown, what don't we know of all of these people who have come across the border?
Yes, yes, clearly we have a problem over here, so what about over there? It turns out that American-born extremists not only show we have to close the border, they also take the wind out of the left's other favorite policy prescriptions.
This also should lay bare the idea that gun control is going to make us safer. You know, we're using, what are we going to do? Start registering people for car, or giving background checks for people to get cars?
i saw you got halfway through that point you're like no i don't i can almost see it when your brain i don't want to go down that road oh what are we gonna have to do now register our yet Abort! No, don't say abort! I don't know what's happening. Putting on a one-man show over there. What are we going to make people get licenses for their...
What it seems to show is that people have a tremendous ability to fit whatever happens into their predetermined dogmatic worldview. It's not a rush to judgment as much as like a gag reflex, which is why in the immediate aftermath of these terrible events, we all wait to see whose worldview will be validated.
And it makes it doubly frustrating that the FBI feels the need to play into the demand for immediate answers when they couldn't possibly know them yet. I give you the FBI four hours after the attack. This is not a terrorist event. Just say you don't know yet. Because a couple of hours later, when you find out what's really going on, you're just going to look.
FBI. We are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Cybertruck explosion?
I don't remember Bin Laden having to remind himself to hang in there. By the way, this is true. Just as a side note, that is the original hang in there baby poster. I don't remember. I had one that was like a super cute orange kitty, but this one, it really seems more of a like demanding you hang in there. Like, like, like it's in black.
Like, like it doesn't really look like a kitty trying to like give you more. It looks more like De Niro and Cape Fear doing pull-ups in a cell and being like, I will f*** you up. Like, that is not... That cat... That cat would... If you died, that cat would eat you and crawl inside and go to sleep. Although, I guess most cats... All right, look...
I don't like these terrorists and killers having such vibrant digital trails. I don't want them to be relatable. The cyber truck bomber guy.
You see some of the photos on Facebook. He did a lot of traveling. There's one photo of him that was actually taken in Thailand.
I nap. And look at Luigi Mangione. This guy was a hooded professional assassin with a silencer, and now we got to watch him deliver the valedictory speech at his high school?
As I conclude my speech, I have to remember that a valedictory, by definition, is a farewell.
By the way, where did that kid go to high school? They all look like extras in a consent video. I'm not trying to be a dick, but it looks like everybody in the background looks like they're about to go like, alright girls, who wants some grain alcohol? And now we all got to wait around on pins and needles for their motive. Have to know why.
What's the road from real estate wannabe to the West is decadent? And they have left manifestos, but their manifestos suck. Luigi Mangione, who was allegedly so obsessed with health care costs that it drove him to murder. Here's what he wrote in his manifesto.
Frankly, I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.
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Chapter 5: Who is Shamsud Din Jabbar?
Chapter 6: What are the implications of homegrown terrorism?
Hey, chat GPT, write me a concise screed against the healthcare industry as though it were a Drake rap. Like, this is... The point is, I don't know what's going on here, where normal-seeming people have a setback in their life, end up online, down some rabbit hole, the algorithm amplifies their anger and fears, and all of a sudden, you're releasing a half-assed manifesto and shooting the place up.
It doesn't have to be this way. So a plea to all the would-be terrorists that are out there. Hey, girl. Down on your luck. Girlfriend left you. Job's a dead end. Spending a lot of time watching whatever YouTube autoplay is showing you. And now you've got some ideas. How about you don't kill everybody? Just do what everybody else does in that situation. Get a f***ing podcast. That way, nobody dies.
You get a podcast. Nobody dies. You can still terrorize people. And no, I do not want to be on it. When we come back, we'll be talking to Congressman Jamie Raskin. Don't go away. Hey, welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight, he represents Maryland's 8th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He was elected ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.
And he joins me now from Washington, D.C. Please welcome to the program, Congressman Jamie Raskin. Sir, hello. How are you, sir? Thank you for joining us. I imagine, sir, a very hectic day. Did they do the traditional chasing of the congresspeople through the bowels of the building?
Yeah, well, luckily it was snowing outside, so all the insurrectionists were slipping and falling on the road and everything. But no, today was actually a totally uneventful and peaceful and nonviolent day. It's what January 6th should be. And it's what it used to be like, I suppose.
Congressman, is it hard on a day like today, seeing the way that it went, not to be passive-aggressive to the Republican colleagues, to not be like, oh, hey, look at this. Done by one. Hey. Oh, my God. We can go out to Fridays and eat apps because there was no rioting.
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing took, like, maybe 25 minutes. It should have taken 15 minutes, but some of our Republican colleagues confused it with the Republican National Convention, and they were cheering and applauding and yelling. We were just there to count the votes. And we were not there to continue the campaign.
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Chapter 7: How do political narratives shape public perception?
But yeah, I mean, I talked to my friend Lauren Boebert and I asked her how she enjoyed it. And she said it was great because no Democrats had made any objections. And I said it was terrific because nobody tried to assassinate the vice president. And so, you know, we were all happy with how it went.
That's a good point. Now, at any point with Lauren Boebert, when you say something like that, and I'm assuming that this doesn't happen, but does she ever say touche?
Lauren's actually very funny, you know, like it's sort of like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You're either a Marjorie Taylor Greene person or you're a Lauren Boebert person. And I'm a Lauren Boebert person myself, although they call her Lauren Gropert, which really isn't fair. So.
So there's a lot of passive aggression down there. There is indeed. What is now, things aren't going to change much in the House because Johnson was the speaker before the Republicans controlled the House. So generally, other than some changing of committee chairmanships and your being elevated to ranking, what's going to be different for Democrats in the House in this new session?
They've got a much narrower margin now. So I think we're down to 219 to 215 because Matt Gaetz left and then Elise Stefanik's on her way out and Mike Walls. Oh, I appreciate that cheer. And so it'll be 217. to 215, which means they cannot afford to lose a single vote.
And they've already suffered the defection of Congresswoman Sparks from Indiana, who got so mad about the fact that she wasn't put on the committee she wanted that she has left the Republican conference and is an independent now. And we haven't even started deliberations yet.
So I think we're going to be in good shape to exploit some of the conflicts and contradictions going on within the Republican conference. I think you probably saw, John, that the enraged, nativist, racist mega base is upset with Elon Musk and the brologarcs who want to bring in tens of thousands more cheap foreign laborers.
And so that's something that's already starting to explode in terms of the Republican politics. But there's a bunch of issues like that, including abortion, where there's still some libertarians who don't want to go near it. But the theocratic majority within MAGA, led by Mike Johnson, say that life begins at conception.
and so they've been trying to ban it nationally, and we expect that to come back, and hopefully we'll be able to pull over some of the lingering pro-choice Republicans.
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Chapter 8: What role do social media and digital footprints play in radicalization?
And is there something in here, too, Congressman, I want to ask you, isn't there a certain something freeing for the Democrats right now, having nothing to do with the Republicans and their infighting and all that? I... I follow this relatively closely, enough to look like this now. I'm 27. I follow it relatively closely. I don't know who's in charge of the Democratic Party.
I don't know the direction you're going. Isn't there something... enlivening about the opportunity before Democrats right now to rethink, to have that opportunity, almost a rumspringa, if you will. You don't control the judicial, the Congress, the executive. You have the opportunity to recreate what this party will be going forward. Is there a process for that? Is there a desire for that?
Yes, and being in the minority definitely is a lot more fun. And it invites a lot of creativity. And it's, you know, it's a riot in the pre-January 6th sense of the word.
That is not a slogan that's going to fly with most minorities. I think most minorities would be like, ooh.
But look, we we now have the opportunity to organize for massive Democratic victory in 2026. And that's exactly what we're doing, because we think that everywhere they're headed is so extreme that the vast majority of the American people are going to reject it. Most Americans do not want to ban abortion across the country. Most Americans do not want to deport 12 million people.
Most Americans don't want to turn the Department of Justice into an instrument of revenge and retaliation. And we're going to be standing up every single day, John, for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the freedoms and rights of the people.
Do you think it's going to be a lot of work? But I look forward to seeing how it goes. But do you think, you know, with this election being sort of a repudiation, boy, there's nothing worse in politics than having to govern, it seems. Like, it's just when everybody gets mad at the status quo.
Do you think the leadership from the Democratic Party, the future of it, is going to come from Washington, which is so... The brand is so... diluted at this point for the American people? Or do you think it's going to be more from the state houses and the governors? Where do you think that energy is going to come from in your mind?
I mean, look, I think it's going to come from all over the country. I think it's going to come from Democracy Summer, the project we've got for young people all over America to learn about the history of social change in the country and to get involved in digital organizing and canvassing and organizing. And You know, it might come from our two new states.
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