In what might be the most depressing man-on-the-street segment outside of the season finale of Wonder Showzen, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper roamed the crowd outside of the United States Capitol shortly before they, you know, stormed it. While Klepper definitely gets in some good zingers (“Do you know where the sedition is?”), much of the segment finds him simply challenging the insurrectionists on basic facts.
“Do you think it’s possible that Hugo Chávez infiltrated the Dominion systems and changed the votes?” he asks two especially dimwitted conspiracy theorists. When they agree—never mind that Chávez has been dead for almost eight years—he then asks if it’s possible that a president who never had an approval rating above 50 percent could have simply lost the election.
“Absolutely not,” says one of the women.
Of course, the tension within the crowd soon boils over into full-on danger and criminality at the behest of (now twice-impeached) Donald Trump himself. But Klepper never loses face, even as his cameraman gets attacked and he witnesses the mob breaking into the Capitol building. Some of the video’s more absurd imagery—a dude wearing an oversize “Tyranny Response Team” t-shirt, another person riding a hoverboard toward the Capitol steps—suddenly feels more sad than funny. We throw around this adjective a lot when talking about the world these days, but kudos to Klepper and The Daily Show for capturing the dystopian nature of modern politics.
Watch the whole thing below.
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