Fox News harbored sexual harasser Bill O'Reilly, whose offensive show pandered to the gaggle of dopes his former network still attracts. The pre-2016 presidential election segment featuring correspondent Jesse Watters going to New York's Chinatown to denigrate and ridicule the Asian-American people living there, and the Daily Show's Ronny Chieng's response, was revisited recently in this current time of hate received by Asians. Watters' trip to Chinatown was his attempt at doing comedy Daily Show-style–like a Bizarro World cookie cutter–it was backwards. It reinforced the notion that conservatives generally struggle with comedy because they so often "punch down" at the innocent rather than skewer those who have it coming.
Ronny Chieng's answer to the ignorant Watters video is a partial map of where we were and how we got here when it comes to the hatred Asian-Americans have faced and has recently intensified. The hatred is in no small part due to the right's normalizing of terms like "China virus" and "Kung Flu", propagated by the disgraced former buffoon-in-chief Donald J. Trump. No, Trump did not invent Americans hating Asians, those atrocities are well documented over the last 200 years in our country. But he certainly rekindled it by pointing all of the Covid blame at China, and sent the not-so-subtle message to Americans that we're only in this mess because Asians brought a disease to our shores, so…
Look at Watters' video work here as the continued sowing of the Trump seeds of anti-Asian sentiment from the 2016 campaign. Also see how comedy is done poorly, and then watch how it's supposed to be done. Fabulous work Ronny Chieng.
