Newt Gingrich and Ben Domenech:
The media elite will gather at a much-diminished White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week. The dinner grew to feature a glitzy parade of celebrities under President Obama, and has become an increasingly controversial event. This is in large part due to the entertainment.
Over the past decade, comedians Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Larry Wilmore have all delivered highly politicized remarks, with Meyers’ comments having the added distinction of directly targeting Donald Trump, who happened to be in the room at the time.
This week’s dinner will be a shell of itself given the absence of the commander in chief for the first time in 36 years. But it will also be marked by the absence of many who abhor the overly politicized nature of the event and expect more of the same partisan insults from this year’s comedian, Hasan Minhaj.
There are a host of talented comedians working today, including Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, and John Mulaney, who, while their politics does not match up with President Trump’s, are perfectly capable of entertaining without becoming stridently partisan.
Minhaj, unfortunately, is not in that category. He is a relatively unknown comedian—for good reason. His whole shtick is blatantly partisan and left-wing. Minhaj is perhaps best known for his segments on “The Daily Show” in which he referred to then-candidate Trump as “White ISIS,” claimed Trump and the overwhelming majority of Republicans are racist, and argued that conservatives should be banned from the White House.
Minhaj Is Precisely the Wrong Kind of Pick
Given that the president of the United States declined the invitation to this year’s dinner, you might think that the event’s organizers would extend an olive branch to invite him to at least attend next year’s event. White House Correspondent Association President Jeff Mason said on “Morning Joe” on April 11 that he wasn’t looking for someone who would “roast the president in absentia.” Yet he picked someone who does just that for a living.
Minhaj has also already proven that his approach to events like these is to grandstand and lecture. Last year, in remarks to the Washington Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, he performed an extremely partisan monologue that devolved into a full-blown left-wing critique of Congress. The mood in the room, which was comprised of people predisposed to agree with his political attacks, was awkward and uncomfortable. More than one audience member walked out. Minhaj even mocked those who express “thoughts and prayers” toward the victims of terrorism and crime, and claimed everyone in the room was responsible for the 2016 terrorist attack at a nightclub in Orlando.
The “punchline” of his remarks was a long-winded rant demanding gun control. He falsely asserted that Congress has effectively been bought by the National Rifle Association to the tune of $3.7 million over the past decade, and suggested that everyone in the room head to Kickstarter to raise $4 million to buy Congress back.
Even by the low standards of someone who plays a fake journalist on TV, this attempt at fact-checking was completely botched. His dollar figure was in error, but it was a revealing error: Minhaj apparently conflated donations with the fact that the NRA has 3.7 million members (itself an outdated datapoint, as they have far more today). The NRA’s political activity and strength is not because of the dollars it spends, but because it represents far more American voters than Minhaj recognizes.
This is the problem of an era in which groupthink blinds us to the way the world really is. It’s far easier to trivialize millions of American’s expressions of political action through elections and lobbyists than it is to grapple fairly with their ideas. This is the mark of a cheap shot rather than real artistry, and of bad faith argument: Minhaj assumes no honest person would believe in gun rights, so since it is an illegitimate opinion people only promote it is because they’re paid to. At its worst, this is a view that delegitimizes the American system of government because the results are not to the Left’s liking.
If you thought the left had any standards, you were mistaken. Alec Baldwin was banished from entertainment because of his serial attacks on blacks, gays, women and girls. He even self-imposed exile from entertainment because his PC buddies in entertainment would not look the other way.
But, all Alec has to do is an impression of Trump all is forgiven, all is forgotten.