Amanda Nguyen tells Trevor Noah about being Nobel-nominated for "helping people pen their civil rights"

If anything, she’s underselling it there, as Nguyen told Noah that, after her own rape as a Harvard undergraduate in 2013, she was informed that, in Massachusetts, rape kits are destroyed every six months unless a criminal charge is filed. That, despite the statute of limitations on rape cases being 15 years. Shocked and stonewalled by an unjust and opaque process, Nguyen founded RISE to advocate for sexual assault survivors across the country, telling Noah that, faced with the full waiting room at a rape crisis center following her own assault, she could either “accept the injustice or rewrite the law.” Explaining to Noah that RISE has grown its civil rights mission in the interim, Nguyen announced that her organization is currently helping other activists (like the Parkland school shooting survivors group, ZeroUSA) craft their own legislative solutions through a RISE’s new civil rights incubator, RISE Justice Labs. Explaining to Noah that the 22 pieces of legislation her group has helped pass in its brief existence represent “22 proved points,” the activist (and aspiring astronaut, for added impressiveness) said that, in a “time of frustration and waning faith in our democracy,” the citizen activism of RISE is one effective way to fight back.

As to the way that the criminal justice system (especially but not exclusively those aspects under the control of those like cartoonishly villainous plutocrat dilettante Betsy DeVos) treats women, Nguyen was unsparing. Noting that, in a functioning legal system, issues like Title IX, the confirmation of boozy, belligerent accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act “would be litigated differently,” Nguyen said, “There’s never been a more vital moment in our history for everyday people to understand that they hold the power.”