As if late night television needed another liberal comedian, along comes comedian Jordan Klepper, set to host his own Comedy Central talk show that will to take aim at the average American and the “alternative” media. It's called The Opposition.
Debuting on September 25 in the old Colbert Report slot at 11:30pm, the new host will apparently try a new version of the Colbert shtick, as an idiot-conservative and “alternative” news correspondent, making fun of conservative media and their wacky conspiracy theories.
In a press statement, Comedy Central announced “The Opposition with Jordan Klepper will satirize the hyperbolic, conspiracy-laden noise machine that is the alternative-media landscape on both the right and left. The Opposition is the voice of the new America. It is the America that defines its own reality. It’s the America of paid protestors, Obama’s birth certificate, and the certainty that CNN is fake news.”
Klepper plans to send “foot soldiers … my confederacy of paranoid dunces, who will be born out of this alt-media culture,” to do giggly segments from the field.
Ironically, everything Klepper has said doesn’t mention a thing of addressing the “alternative-media landscape” on the left. During last week’s summer press tour, Klepper told the Television Critics Association:
“I’ll be playing a know-nothing provocateur who fights for the forgotten man and I may, at times, also forget that man…The outsider is the new thing. Donald Trump calls himself the outsider as he tweets inside the Oval Office. Breitbart was the outsider but Steve Bannon now is in the West Wing. Who is the outsider other than somebody who is upset and anti the mainstream, anti-facts,” Klepper said. “That’s why we are the opposition. We are not mainstream, we are not establishment, we are not listening and we are definitely not helping.”
Inspired by what Klepper says is the influence of conservative media on Trump supporters, he says: “I watched this normalization happen…They weren’t parroting the sounds of CNN or even midday Fox News. Their information was coming from Infowars and Breitbart and The Blaze.”
It's typically sloppy to blur Breitbart and the The Blaze in with InfoWars like they're all the same when it came to conspiracy theorizing. like Alex Jones and Alex Marlow and Dana Loesch are the same thing. But then, doesn't it get disorienting when a fake-news show on a comedy channel poses as fighting fake news instead of making it?
In another interview with KTLA-5, Klepper warned the "fringe" of the “alternative” media has become mainstream and is making its way to the Oval Office: “So we decided that was a world we wanted to explore — and kind of do a satirical news show that sits in this world, this world of Breitbart News and InfoWars and The Blaze who is anti-mainstream, anti-the establishment, anti-listening, anti-helping....We have our own facts and our own truth.”
So what the world desperately needs right now is a show mocking Trump voters as morons who can't handle the truth? I'm sure we can all agree the mainstream media and late night talk shows do enough of that every day already.
