Samantha Bee Explains Why Brexit Is Really About White Supremacy Just like Trump's rise.
By Jack Holmes
Jun 28, 2016
Plenty of late-night voices have weighed in on Brexit. But Samantha Bee's Monday night take really got interesting when she got into the effects of the referendum's success on British society—namely, the empowerment and (at least self-perceived) normalization of white supremacists. Racial and ethnic slurs on social media and in the real world, along with calls to "get out of our country" and even a "make Britain great again," have threatened minority populations in one of the world's great strongholds of diversity.
Of course, all this is familiar to us here in 'Murica. Donald Trump's lasting success has mainstreamed white nationalism and breathed new life into the trembling voices of retrograde hatemongers like the KKK's David Duke. We should be mindful, Bee implores us, of a Trump victory in November, not just because his presidency would be disastrous, but because it would make these people feel that there is a place for them and their toxic rhetoric in our politics.
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"It has to be a fucking landslide, 50-state repudiation of this," she said, before showing a clip of some shirtless neanderthal yelling about tortillas and his love for Trump.
One place the segment went awry, however, is when Bee claimed that anti-immigrant sentiment is a recent European import. Just ask the Irish and Germans in the 19th century, the Chinese and Southern Europeans in the 20th, and Hispanic immigrants in the last two or three decades. All these groups have been victimized by organized nativist politics in our country's relatively short history. We'd do well to remember that Trump is just the newest model.
Poster Comment:
Really? That is if there were any white British left in Britain besides the Royal Family.