White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders‘ ouster from a Virginia restaurant this past weekend has sparked a divisive debate across cable TV and social media this week — a debate that The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah was eager to weight into.
“Is it right for people to protest government officials if they see them in public?” Noah asked in a segment from this Tuesday night.
He thinks the answer is clearly “yes.”
“Whatever happened to tolerance?” Noah asked, mocking a montage of people arguing for “civility.”
“Tolerance got grabbed by the p*ssy, didn’t you hear? You didn’t hear?”
“These people have more amnesia than the characters in a Lifetime movie,” he added. “Let’s not get it twisted: that restaurant owner didn’t ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave because of her opinions. She’s a senior official of the Trump administration, not some rando with a blog.”
“People in power would like to be insulated from the effects of their actions,” Noah said. “But if you’re in a position where you can influence other people’s lives, you shouldn’t be shocked when you hear from the people whose lives you affect.”
Noah said that “calls for civility always tend to come from people in a position of privilege,” referring to certain people’s suggestions that protesters model themselves after Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
“Don’t ever forget, in their time, people were not exactly happy with how they protested,” Noah said.
“The British called Gandhi an agitator. Governments around the world called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. What you forget is, back when Martin was marching, people were complaining about him the same way people are complaining about protesters right now.”
Watch the segment in the video below, via The Daily Show with Trevor Noah:
Featured image via screen grab
