Yo! What's going on, everybody? Welcome to
The Daily Social Distancing Show. I'm Trevor Noah.
And I'm happy to report that I've just completed
my first New Year's resolution,
which was that I would learn a brand-new instrument.
Uh, I actually wrote a little song for you guys.
It's called "2020 into 2021."
? ?
Anyway, on tonight's show,
we pay tribute to Melania's many accomplishments as first lady,
the NBA is taking on coronavirus,
and everyone has already forgotten about
what's-his-name-- you know, the guy with the hair.
Plus, Jelani Cobb is on the show to talk about
what's next for the country.
So let's do this, people.
Welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
? ?
-? ? -ANNOUNCER: From Trevor's couch in New York City
to your couch somewhere in the world, this is
The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah.
Let's kick things off with the story
that just won't end:
the coronavirus pandemic.
'Cause I know America has begun a new era,
but corona doesn't care about who's president.
In fact, it's been exactly one year
since we first learned that COVID-19 had reached
the United States, and things have only gotten worse.
Yesterday the country set a new record
for coronavirus deaths. And the CDC
now predicts that half a million deaths
will happen by mid-February.
Which is gonna make for a weird Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day is already pretty weird.
I'm supposed to buy an adult woman a teddy bear?
That is creepy as hell.
The point is it's more important than ever
to step up on COVID safety,
which is exactly what the NBA is doing.
NEWSMAN: Well, after witnessing some opposing players
disregarding new league rules against unnecessary contact
on game nights, the NBA is now moving team security to midcourt
following games to stop the hugging and handshakes
that may cause an unwanted spread of COVID-19.
High fives, hugs and handshakes,
along with extended post-game conversations,
are no longer allowed.
Man, this is so harsh, guys.
COVID won't even let you shake hands with opponents now?
That's a hard habit to break, because we've all been
doing that since we were five years old.
You know, you play a game, then you'd line up
and you high five the other team saying, "Good game."
Next they're gonna say that, what, COVID won't let you
eat orange slices at halftime?
Or drive past the ice cream store because your dad says
only winners deserve ice cream?
But look, I get it.
You got to do what you got to do to stop COVID.
And who knows, this could even
create some excitement after the game.
And here it is. Harden, going up for a high five,
and this is... Oh, no, he's rejected!
He's rejected by a security guard named Stanley.
At the same time, though,
will this really make a difference?
I mean, I'm all for COVID safety, but these guys have been
sweating and breathing on each other for two hours already,
and then they can't shake hands?
That's like handing out condoms
as people are leaving your orgy.
Remember to be safe. Remember to be safe...
That was fun, guys. Remember to be safe.
That was dope. (giggles)
I mean, I'm not gonna lie-- this just shows how
COVID has turned the whole world upside down, you know?
Players are now getting into trouble
for being nice to each other. Like...
Yeah, you better hold me back!
I'm about to hug this (bleep), man.
Yeah, I res... I respect you, asshole.
I-I will hug you right now. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Anyway, between the pandemic and all the insanity
around the presidential election, there have been
all sorts of stories that we just
haven't had time to talk about.
But they've kind of gotten stuck in my brain,
and I thought, well, maybe I could unstick them
by sharing them with you.
For instance, here's some big news you might have missed
out of Russia, aka Mean Canada.
Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic Alexei Navalny,
who was nearly poisoned to death,
returning to Russia and immediately detained.
NEWSMAN: A dangerous gamble for one of Vladimir Putin's
most vocal critics. He was arrested minutes after
arriving in Moscow, kissing his wife goodbye.
Alexei Navalny has now been detained for at least 30 days,
prompting outrage around the world.
Navalny nearly died last year after being poisoned
with the extremely toxic chemical weapon Novichok.
-(moaning) -He fell ill on an airplane, blaming the Kremlin
for the attack-- something they deny.
Okay, I don't know what's crazier here--
that this dude went back to the same country
that tried to kill him
or that they arrested him when he got there.
Apparently in Russia it's a felony
to not die when they poison you?
(Russian accent): Why did you do that? You make Putin look like
he don't know poison, huh? Why you do that to Putin?
(regular accent): Look, either Navalny's the bravest dude alive
or he's just really grown to love the taste of poison.
I mean, I don't know, maybe poison is delicious.
It's just that no one ever survives to tell us.
You know, maybe it's the most delicious thing in the world.
We don't know. Actually, I want...
I want to try poison now.
But either way, this guy has bigger balls than me.
I'm not gonna lie. Because I would not
be going back to Russia right now.
Forget the poisoning-- it's the middle of winter.
All Putin has to do is delay your Uber ride for five minutes
-and you're done. -(snaps fingers)
Meanwhile, in tech news, here's a story I really
can't stop thinking about involving bitcoin,
the money that lives... in space.
Over the last few months, the value of the virtual currency
has skyrocketed to insane heights,
which is great for people who own it.
But it'll never catch up to the market value
of my Pokémon cards. That's right, people,
I've been saving up these bad boy...
Mom!
Mom, what did you do to my Pokémon?! Mo...
Anyway, one of the big draws of bitcoin is how secure it is.
Unfortunately for one investor, it's turning out to be
a little too secure.
A virtual nightmare for a man with
a quarter billion dollars in bitcoin. Yes, billion.
He's forgotten his password.
Stefan Thomas says
he's been locked out of his account since 2012.
Back then it wasn't as much of a fortune,
because each of his 7,000 coins was worth
about ten bucks in cash.
Now, going... uh, the going rate--
-you know how much it is? It's $37 grand. -MAN: What?
WOMAN: Uh, the man has the password
stored on an old hard drive,
but he lost the password to that, too,
and has only two more tries before he gets locked out.
Wow. What a feel-good story.
In that I feel good that it's not me.
This guy can't access
a quarter billion dollars
because he can't remember his password.
Yo, let me tell you something.
For a quarter of a billion dollars, I'm hiring people
to beat the shit out of me until I do remember.
Don't go easy on me! Come on guys, I know something.
7-2-5, lowercase E, G...
dash, dash. (cries) I remember.
And, finally, from Colombia,
an exciting setup for a brand-new season of Narcos.
A notorious drug lord's exotic pets
are now posing an environmental disaster.
Pablo Escobar's four hippos escaped after he was killed
and are now taking over the marshlands in Colombia.
Experts say they are breeding so fast there
there could be more than 1,500 in the next couple of years,
posing a danger to the people and wildlife.
They are now saying the so-called cocaine hippos
-should be shot. -WOMAN (chuckles): Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, you go shoot the cocaine hippos
who were raised by Pablo Escobar.
I'm just gonna stay out of the water.
And I know some people are gonna be like,
"Do you have to shoot those hippos?
Why not just round them up and put them in a zoo?"
No.
We're not gonna be taking Pablo Escobar's hippos
and putting them in a zoo.
'Cause you know three weeks later they're gonna escape
through a tunnel that they built out from under their cage.
There's gonna be a note left behind from the hippos, saying
(thick African accent): No zookeeper alive can hold me!
(regular accent): Yeah, you see, some people would think
that the Colombian hippos are gonna sound Colombian,
but hippos are from Africa,
so I like to keep the jokes authentic.
I got to say though, man--
over-reproduction
is the most badass reason to be exterminated.
When was the last time you had so much sex
that the government had to step in?
The good news is there is an easier solution to this problem.
Just release some meth gators
to deal with the cocaine hippos.
Then, to deal with the meth gators,
you release the Molly cobras.
Then, to take out the Molly cobras,
you release the straight-edge tigers.
They don't do cocaine, because the real thrill
is being in control.
Here's a question I have though--
I've always wondered this--
what's the deal with drug dealers and animals?
Huh? It's like the higher you go up the ladder,
the crazier your pet has to be.
The dealer on the corner has a fish tank,
the drug lord has hippos.
I bet that family that invented Oxy
has a T. rex just chained up in the backyard.
(screeching)
"You guys are killers.
You should have gotten more than just a fine." (screeches)
But let's move on now to the big story of the day,
the inauguration of Joseph Robin Hood Biden.
Yesterday, after being sworn in
on the book that knows when we're all gonna die,
Biden became the 46th president of the United States.
But he can't run the whole country himself.
So, immediately after being sworn in,
he turned around and administered the oath of office
to his new White House staff.
And hopefully all 4,000 people on the Zoom
were paying attention.
NEWSMAN: For new members of the Biden administration,
a virtual swearing in.
And we have to restore the soul of this country,
and I'm counting on all of you to be part of that.
And a stern warning from the new commander in chief.
If you're ever working with me
and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect,
talk down to someone,
I promise you, I will fire you on the spot.
On the spot.
No if, ands, or buts.
Okay. Wow.
That took a turn.
"Welcome to a new era of kindness and respect.
"And if you're not on board with that,
I'll rip your nipples off."
But insisting on respect is just one of the ways
that President Biden is trying to make a clean break
from his predecessor.
In fact, he even redecorated his office
to be as un-Trumpy as possible.
We're getting new details right now
about the, uh, inside of President Biden's Oval Office.
A bust of Cesar Chavez, for example,
sitting behind the Resolute desk,
along with statues of Martin Luther King Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy.
NEWSMAN: It is Joe Biden's stamp on the Oval Office.
But some of it is familiar. You see those gold drapes?
You see the blue carpet on the floor?
Those were in the Oval Office
during the Bill Clinton presidency.
The decor is certainly different than it was
under President Trump.
Okay, first question,
is it really an improvement
to switch out Trump's carpet for Bill Clinton's?
I mean, on Trump's carpet, yes, you can catch COVID.
But on Clinton's,
you could get pregnant.
And, look, I respect history,
but, at some point, it starts getting suspicious.
"This desk was used by President Roosevelt."
"Wow!"
"And these chairs were sat on by President Kennedy."
"Wow!"
"And these drapes were hung by President Monroe."
"Dude, are-are you broke?
Is-is that what's going on here?"
But I do think it's cool that no matter what other changes
a president makes,
the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. stays behind.
Because no one wants to be the guy
who removes the bust of MLK.
Once it enters the room, it's there for good.
If a tornado hit the Oval Office,
it would still go around MLK.
(blowing)
(quietly): "Ha, ha, I'm not racist.
I'm not racist." (blowing)
Now, of course, redecorating the Oval Office
is just a symbolic change.
But even after one day,
people are really noticing how different
Biden's presidency will be from Donald J. Trump's.
You just got President Biden's schedule for tomorrow,
his first full day in office as-as president.
Uh, I imagine it's a little bit busier
than what we've been reading
is the former president's schedule.
This is a return to normalcy.
Also a return to functioning government.
The White House Press Office is now actually sending out
press releases that are informative.
So instead of having the Trump administration say
Trump is making "many calls,"
the Biden team's actually revealing the calls.
That's a good sign. That's progress.
NEWSWOMAN: President Biden is now unveiling
a national strategy to tackle COVID.
First of all, I-I just have to say that it's great
that we have somebody that comes out and actually has a plan.
Today felt like a new day.
I mean, the press briefing was boring as hell.
And that was refreshing.
We didn't have to count how many lies Jen Psaki was telling.
We didn't have to get up there and hear her talking
about the largest crowd size or yelling at the media.
Yo, guys, Joe Biden is so lucky.
All he has to do is have a vaccine plan
and not lie for ten minutes
and he's basically, what, the next George Washington?
And we all know this is only thanks to Donald Trump
for setting the bar so low.
It's like getting hired as a babysitter
and your predecessor was a Roomba covered in knives.
You're gonna be better.
And there's a useful life lesson here for all of us.
Always follow the worst possible person.
Like, if you want to date someone,
wait until after they've broken up with Armie Hammer.
"Baby, I promise I will never eat your flesh."
"What a gentleman."
In fact, people are so excited to be moving on from Trump
that some at Biden's inauguration celebration
were already pretending that Trump never existed at all.
NEWSWOMAN: Appearances by three former presidents,
George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama
but not President Trump.
Well, I think, uh, the fact that the three of us
are standing here talking about a peaceful transfer of power
speaks to the, uh,
in-institutional integrity of our country.
We've got to... not just listen to folks we agree with
but listen to folks we don't.
You think about the three presidents,
the three former presidents that we saw gathered together
to-to speak about this moment in history,
to speak about, uh, the new president.
The former president who just left office
could have been among those three.
-It could have been four. -Mm-hmm.
And forevermore now, one considers,
when there are gatherings of all the presidents,
will the most recent president,
-uh, who just left, will he be in there? -No.
All right, is it just me or was Anderson Cooper working overtime
to avoid saying the word "Trump"?
Dude, you can't summon him by saying his name.
All right? The guy's an ex-president, not Beetlejuice.
Just say it. "Trump."
But I will say this-- I'm not surprised
and nobody should be surprised
that Trump doesn't want to be a part
of the Former Presidents Club.
It's kind of like when Don Felder left the Eagles
because he was jealous of Glenn Frey and Don Henley's success.
Okay, I'm gonna be honest, guys.
I don't actually know what anything in that joke means.
I'm just trying to win over some of these white people
who don't have a leader anymore.
So, uh, yeah.
Honestly speaking,
I think Trump not being included in the club is for the best.
Because what are these guys gonna talk about?
(a la Obama): "Uh, you know everybody can agree.
"Uh, being president is one of the hardest jobs in the world.
Am I right?" (a la Trump): "Tell me about it, dude.
"Sometimes I would have to work 12 hours
a month. It was excruciating."
And while I understand
that people want to pretend Trump didn't exist,
the truth is he did.
Not only did he exist
but his presidency was historic.
Like, you may not realize it because we're living in it,
but, guys, he sent a mob to ransack the Capitol.
People are gonna be talking about this forever.
We're living in a history book right now.
In, like, a hundred years,
they're gonna be doing musicals about this Trump era.
? We're gonna march on the Capitol ?
? Not me, I'm going home, but you guys gonna go in all alone ?
? And I'm-a be in my bunker. ?
I will say though, it really was moving
to see those former presidents together. You know?
Two Democrats, one Republican
paying tribute to the new kid.
Although there was one moment in there
that I-I really wasn't expecting.
I think inaugurations signal a tradition
of a peaceful transfer of power that is over two centuries old.
So this is an unusual thing-- we are both
trying to come back to normalcy, deal...
Sorry to interrupt you guys, but y'all seen any car keys
lying around here?
It's got a troll key chain.
Well, I think, uh, the fact that the three of us
are standing here talking about a peaceful transfer of...
I don't know if you're too familiar with the Troll movie,
but the key chain is of King Peppy.
Orange-red mustache. Butt naked. No dick.
If everybody could just check their general area,
I'd appreciate it.
I'll be right out of your hair.
We've got to not just listen
-to folks we agree with, -King Peppy, where you at?
-but listen to folks we don't. -America's a generous country
-Peppy! -With people with great hearts.
-All three of... -Hey, can one of y'all give me a ride home?
Uh, check your pockets, Roy.
All right, when we come back, we say goodbye
to one of President Trump's most vicious critics,
his wife.
And Jelani Cobb is still joining us on the show,
so stick around.
Welcome back to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Despite what the liberal media tells you,
a lot of people were upset
that the Trump presidency ended yesterday.
There was Trump himself,
um...
the Trump kids...
coronavirus...
probably others...
The one person who surprisingly seemed happy
about the end of President Trump was his wife, Melania.
And why shouldn't she be?
She got a lot done in her time as First Lady.
And so tonight, we say farewell to Melania
as we look back at all her achievements.
? ?
FEMALE NARRATOR: The First Lady of the United States.
She's the partner of the president,
hostess of the White House,
and backup Snuffleupagus.
Bu while #AllLivesMatter,
there's one First Lady who matters more than any other...
MAN: Melania, to your left, to your left!
...Melania Trump.
Wife.
Birther.
Fashion icon.
Animal lover.
Colonial explorer.
On January 20, 2017,
this third wife became America's First Lady.
It was a moment she celebrated with great joy
and instant regret.
And while public life can put a strain on a relationship,
it only made Melania and Donald stronger.
? ?
Since day one, they've been inseparable--
if you don't count the six months she stayed in New York
while she reportedly renegotiated her prenup.
But after that, it was a love story for the ages.
Those ages being a hot 50 and...
I don't know, 97?
During their time in the White House,
Melania and Donald were often seen
taking long, romantic walks, holding hands,
trying to hold hands,
and refusing to hold hands.
Yes, you could always see the look of fiery passion
whenever Melania was at her husband's side.
And it's easy to see why.
The First Lady's husband lived to spoil her.
DONALD TRUMP: It's Melania's birthday,
so Happy Birthday to Melania.
Do you want to tell us what you got her?
DONALD TRUMP: W-Well, I better not get into that,
'cause I may get in trouble.
Maybe I didn't get her so much.
There's nothing more romantic than a man of mystery.
But a First Lady's job is more than just being a devoted wife.
She's also in charge of turning the White House
into a White Home.
And Melania let nothing stand in her way.
NEWSWOMAN: Melania Trump is defending a tweet she sent out
about construction on the White House tennis pavilion,
which some have criticized
as tone-deaf amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Yes, even in the midst of a global pandemic,
and with less than six and a half weeks left in office,
Melania had the courage to do something
literally no one was asking her to do--
personally renovate the White House tennis court
in four-inch heels with a golden shovel.
And while this renovation was so masterful
it made the Property Brothers look like the Trump brothers,
amazingly it came just months after her previous masterpiece,
the new White House Rose Garden.
NEWSMAN: The intensely private First Lady
is facing the glare of the spotlight yet again.
Criticized for her recent renovation
of Jackie Kennedy's famous Rose Garden...
...the Rose Garden that she put some pretty dramatic changes to.
Good for Melania!
Who needs roses when a virus is destroying
everyone's sense of smell, anyway?
Besides, if there's one thing a supermodel knows,
it's the importance of removing unpleasant shrubbery.
And at no point was Melania's flair for design
more apparent than during the holiday season,
when every Christmas she chose a fun holiday theme--
like Ho Ho Ho movie
and The Grinch Who Murdered Christmas--
all while never losing the spirit of the season.
Yes, thanks to Melania,
America's saying, "Who gives a (bleep) about Christmas" again.
But perhaps Melania's greatest legacy as First Lady
was her celebration of all God's children...
whose parents could prove they were citizens.
NEWSWOMAN: This is a picture of Melania Trump
boarding Air Force One to head down to McAllen, Texas,
to visit some of the children being held in detention centers.
She's wearing a green jacket.
On the back, it's written in white:
"I really don't care. Do U?"
Wow. Only Melania could pull off a sleeveless dress
in a heartless jacket.
But other than that,
Melania overflows with love for children.
You see, she's not just the stepmom
of these four little Boss Babies.
She's been the nation's stepmom,
there for America every other weekend and on holidays.
So when she saw the bullying epidemic
that was tormenting the country,
she stepped forward with a...
grammatically courageous initiative.
Today I'm very excited to announce Be Best,
an awareness campaign dedicated to the most valuable
and fragile among us,
our children.
Melania told children across America to Be Best,
and Be Best, they Be'd.
Just look how much this bully learned.
Bernie Sanders, crazy Bernie.
Greatest loser on earth.
Crazy Bernie, one of the greatest losers of all time,
-this guy. -(laughter)
No, but I meant that in a nice way.
So thank you, Melania.
You made America smile.
And we hope we made you smile.
No?
There it is.
Wait. False alarm.
There we go.
Okay. Whatever.
? ?
All right, don't go away, because when we come back,
New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb tells me
when we can expect Donald Trump to return.
Don't go away.
Welcome back to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
My guest tonight is Jelani Cobb, an award-winning journalist
and staff writer at The New Yorker.
We talked about the last four years,
and what it's taught us, and where Trumpism goes from here.
Jelani Cobb, welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
(laughs) Thank you. It's good to see you.
Um, it is an interesting time to have you on the show
because you are easily one of my favorite... just thinkers.
You know, there are people who-who write,
and then, there people who think before they write,
and I consider you one of those people.
I really appreciate it.
Because whether it's talking about policing
or police reform, whether it's talking about politics,
whether it's talking about issues of race in America,
I always find that you-you... you tackle these ideas
from a really interesting place.
And so, as America begins this new journey
under a new president, in a new year,
my first question to you would be,
what do you think about America's future
as it stands right now?
I think that one of the things that came out of 2020,
if you can point to, you know, the small number
of really good things that did come out of that year,
was the fact that we had to think about our history.
Because it was reoccurring right in front of us.
You know, so much of it.
You know, people trying to overrun the Capitol--
that called back to, certainly for Black people
and people familiar with the history of race
in this country, you know, What happened after Reconstruction
and, you know, Wilmington in 1898,
where white supremacist mobs,
uh, deposed a government,
you know, because it was interracial.
And all those historical things were kind of piled up
like kindling, and then they just, you know,
burst into flames, and we had to deal with it in 2020.
-Right. -And so, I think that, you know, looking forward,
I'm hopeful, but I'm cautiously hopeful,
you know, that we can actually start thinking
about some of the problems that we have
and some of the mistakes that we made previously,
-and plotting a way to navigate forward. -Yeah.
Do you... do you think that there really is a way
to escape some of the mistakes that have been made in the past?
And I only ask that because I struggle with America's system
being a two-party system.
I feel like it's inevitable that you get another Trump.
And the only reason I feel like it's inevitable is because,
if you have one or two choices, I feel like, statistically,
it's more likely that people... it's gonna end up 50-50,
which means one side may win again.
I don't think everyone who votes Republican likes Trump,
but they may like a lot of the policies that are in the party,
but then, that enables another Trump to come up.
So do you think America can actually learn
if it maintains a two-party system going forward?
Yeah, I mean, well, here's the interesting thing about this
when we have this conversation, which is that, uh,
the founders of this country never wanted parties at all.
You know, they thought
that parties were gonna be destructive,
and that would be the quickest way that the republic would end.
Uh, and, you know, the two-party system
that we have has collapsed before.
It's collapsed twice in American history.
And, you know, some of those dynamics were present then.
And so, one of the things I think we have to bear in mind
in order to... The best hope
for avoiding that kind of situation is the reminder
of how fragile democracy is.
And also, the fact that you kind of win big or go home.
Uh-huh.
Republicans took a really big bet on Donald Trump in 2016.
And the lesson they could take is
that a demagogic figure like him could succeed,
uh, could be elected, you know, within particular constraints,
when against a specific kind of opponent.
Or they could take the fact that they lost the Senate,
they lost the House, they lost the White House,
they lost international regard
of virtually all of America's allies.
We've seen 400,000, and counting, people die
because of the mismanagement of a pandemic.
And all those things that, you know, could be warnings.
And you're right, though.
We have a disturbingly high possibility
that we could find ourselves in this position again.
I remember just before Donald Trump's ascendancy.
The Republican Party was having a conversation
in and around "we have to expand our tent."
Do you think the Republican Party will gravitate
towards a world of, once again, trying to actually appeal
to more diverse voters, or do you think
that they have now seen that there is enough,
you know, excitement and anguish and grievances
to maintain a vote and carry on the way they've been going
for the last four years?
That's the big question.
And the best I can tell is
that they have been confronted by this before.
In 1966, you know, it was just two years
after the '64 election,
where Barry Goldwater was just destroyed.
He lost by 430 something electoral college votes.
Uh, it just... You know, it wasn't...
If it was a boxing match,
they would have stopped it in the third round.
Uh, so... uh, one of the...
They did a report then that came out in 1966
that said, "We have to expand.
"We have to bring different kinds of people into the party,
"and we can't go down the road of just appealing
to, basically, angry white people,"
who, at that point, were angry about the Civil Rights Movement.
But the other part is that they are really getting
an increasing share of a decreasing population.
About 80% of their voters are white.
And white people, every single election since 1996,
have been a smaller share of the electorate.
And so, the math is not on their side.
And so, one of the things that, you know,
political scientists think is that they make themselves into,
you know-- no pun intended-- a minority party.
Right.
You've always had your finger on the pulse
of law enforcement, for instance.
Not just criticizing police, but rather saying,
"Hey, here's a system that's broken.
"Here's how it needs to be fixed,
and here's why it needs to be fixed."
Is there a path to a world
where law enforcement becomes equitable?
A world where law enforcement no longer maintains its ties
to what it was meant to be from the past?
Sure. I mean, I think that that's possible,
that the things that we've seen,
you know, two things in particular--
George Floyd and that excruciating
eight-minute, 46-second video that we saw last Memorial Day,
-Mm-hmm. -and the storming of the Capitol grounds,
and how many off-duty police officers were involved in that.
And for people who are just kind of thinking
in a knee-jerk fashion, or, you know,
kind of accepting the slogans that, you know,
that the police are the thin blue line that divides us
from anarchy and so on, that's shocking.
Now for anyone who's actually looked at the data
around policing in the United States, it really is not.
The first people whoever talked to me
about defunding the police--
and they didn't use that language,
but they expressed that idea-- the first people whoever talked
to me about that were cops themselves,
-saying that they do too many things. -Right.
That they are involved in all kinds of actions,
that they are fundamentally not trained
to handle mental health crises, which is...
It makes perfect sense,
if someone's having a mental health crisis,
-you call the police. Why? -Right.
We wouldn't call the cops if somebody had a heart attack.
You know, a heart attack is not illegal.
-Right. -Uh, so, you know, they show up,
and situations go downhill, uh, predictably.
And when you're really talking
about creating different kinds of structures
and infrastructures in cities
so that 911 is not the only thing
that you call for every single problem
-of every shape, size or orientation. -Mm-hmm.
And so, uh, if we have a more kind of broadly-based system
of how we manage our communities,
that goes a long way to reducing the footprint of policing.
Uh, and, you know, in 1968,
when the Kerner Commission Report came out,
they said-- and this is 1968-- they said that we should think
about creating different kinds of ways of providing services
to communities, besides just police,
-especially... communities of color. -Right, right.
It's not new. We know... we know some of this stuff.
As somebody who writes about the present
and looks at it through the lens of history,
what do you make of the future now?
Are you hopeful at where America has gotten to now
on this day, or are you trepidatious
in considering where America still needs to get to?
I'm hopeful, but... as I describe it,
I have the optimism of a boxer going into the late rounds.
(both laugh)
And what I mean by that is...
you know, if you haven't been knocked out yet,
if you're still upright, the thing that kept you
throwing punches and-and staying in the fight
for this long, is the thing that will bring you
all the way to the finish line.
Uh, and so, you know, as James Baldwin said,
I have to be an optimist because I'm alive.
That said, I don't think we should underestimate
the scale of the problems that we're confronting.
The dynamics that produced Trump
are still very active in this society.
The anxiety around immigration, the anxiety around race,
uh, the ways in which those compound,
uh, you know, the economy that truthfully
-does not serve many people, uh... -Right.
...uh, you know, struggling just to get by from day to day.
Uh, and the way that that has been weaponized
and-and used, uh, you know, to-to fuel xenophobia
and racism and so on, those are very real dynamics
and very problems and they will not be easily defeated.
Uh, but I don't think that they are permanent.
And I don't think we have to always presume that we can't
surmount those obstacles.
Well, it's gonna be an exciting 12th round.
Uh, hopefully we get to chat to you again, uh, afterwards.
and we haven't been knocked out-- Jelani Cobb,
thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Thank you.
All right, we're gonna take a quick break.
But we'll be right back after this.
Well, that's our show for tonight, but before we go,
as you know, the coronavirus pandemic
is as bad as it has ever been.
But luckily our first responders are still out on the frontlines
saving lives.
Now if you want to help them out, then please consider
a donation to First Responders First,
which offers first class medical and psychological treatment
for first responders.
If you want to find out more, then all you got to do
is go to the link below.
Until next time, stay safe out there,
wear a mask and remember,
if you're redecorating your house and you need some stuff,
just ask the White House.
They've got tons of old shit laying around.
Now here it is, Your Moment of Zen.
The chair lays before the senate two certificates of election
for the state of Georgia and a certificate of appointment
to fill the vacancy created by the resignation
of former Senator Kamala D. Harris of California.
(laughter)
(cheering and applause)
Yeah, that was very weird. Okay. (laughs)