Conan O’Brien and Zach Galifianakis take on Trump-era comedy: 'You've now put down your best weapon, which is being funny'



Comedy used to be about making people laugh first — not lecturing audiences about politics — and according to BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere, a few comedians are finally saying out loud what audiences have been thinking for years.

“You’re looking for funny first. You don’t leave out funny,” Stu says, arguing that modern late-night television has largely abandoned comedy in favor of partisan activism.

However, Conan O’Brien appears determined to resist that trend. In a recent interview, O’Brien criticized comics who go “the route of ‘I’m just going to say F Trump all the time.’”

“That’s their comedy,” he said.


“And I think, well, now a little bit you’re being co-opted because you’re so angry. You’ve been lulled. It’s like a siren leading you into the rocks. You’ve been lulled into just saying, ‘F Trump, F Trump,’” he continued.

“And I think you’ve now put down your best weapon, which is being funny, and you’ve exchanged it for anger. And that person or any person like that would say, 'Well, things are too serious now. I don’t need to be funny.' And I think, well, if you’re a comedian, you always need to be funny,” he explained, adding, “you just have to find a way.”

And Conan isn’t the only comedian that feels this way.

In an interview on his podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” comedian Zach Galifianakis recalled an episode he did of “Between Two Ferns” with Hillary Clinton.

“I remember when I interviewed Hillary Clinton, and I could tell she didn’t want to be there, and I totally get that. I get it. But before we had set that whole thing up, they wrote back, ‘Well, you can’t bring up those emails,’” Galifianakis said.

“And I go, ‘Well, we don’t have to do the interview. That’s fine. We won’t do it.’ When you tell powerful people no, it’s crazy. They were like, ‘OK, we’ll do it. You can ask,’” he said, adding, “Because it’s not that important to me to do it the way they want to do it.”

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‘Brazenly Dishonest’ Campaign Slogans Like The Ones Used By Dems To Gerrymander VA Don’t Belong On Ballots

Democrats in Virginia currently have the balance of power in their favor, but ballot language should not be.

The truth behind Democrats’ Virginia gerrymander



Once you burn your credibility, it’s hard to get back.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) deceived voters and concealed her true leftist agenda to win the governor’s mansion last year. Now she and her fellow Democrats are lying to Virginians about a new gerrymandered congressional district map they placed on the April 21 ballot as a constitutional amendment.

The new map ensures that most rural voters will be represented by people who live in Fairfax and were elected by voters in the DC suburbs.

It’s a naked attempt to make it impossible for Republicans to win election to Congress in most places in Virginia, and it’s why she was rewarded with the plum assignment of responding to President Trump’s State of the Union address this week.

The Virginia Supreme Court has already had one chance to stop the gerrymandering by upholding a judge’s ruling that Democrats cut legal corners to get the measure on the ballot. The justices, however, inexplicably chose to wait until the vote takes place.

I filed another lawsuit to bring new challenges, along with my Republican House colleague Morgan Griffith (Va.-9), the Republican National Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. We won in circuit court, blocking the referendum again, so our Supreme Court will have another chance to do the right thing.

As we wait for a ruling, it’s important that people have the facts.

Spanberger masqueraded as a moderate in her campaign and won ceaseless praise from the media for her focus on “affordability.” But she dropped that as soon as she was sworn in and went right back to what she truly believes.

She returned Virginia to the multistate, radical environmental scheme that artificially raises electricity rates by $500 million every year. She’s currently considering a variety of tax increases proposed by Democrats in the Virginia legislature, including bumps in the sales and income tax, as well as taxes on everyday services like dog-walking and gym memberships. She has yet to rule out raising taxes on anything.

All of this is the opposite of what she ran on.

Now Spanberger and her Democrats have turned to stealing congressional seats. Naturally, they’re lying about that as well.

It’s nothing complicated. They’re taking Virginia’s current congressional district map, which produced six Democrats and five Republican members, and redrawing the lines to twist it into a 10-to-1 map in favor of Democrats.

Kamala Harris won here in the 2024 presidential race with less than 52% of the vote, but this map would award her party 91% of our congressional seats.

They’re assigning new federal representation to Virginians who didn’t ask for it, and there’s every likelihood that some of the lines were drawn to benefit specific Democrat politicians. One thing that’s certain is that no one was thinking of the well-being of voters when they hatched this plot.

As an example, take Fairfax County, vote-rich and dominated by Democrats in Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C.

The new map carves Fairfax into five pieces and attaches them to districts that reach deep into Virginia’s rural regions. Picture the county as an octopus that has tentacles running throughout the state, and you’ll have an idea.

The configuration ensures that most rural voters will be represented by people who live in Fairfax and were elected by voters in the D.C. suburbs. It’s difficult to imagine what these groups might have in common geographically, culturally, or economically.

To top it off, just a few days ago, Democrats in the General Assembly decided they hadn’t cheated enough and twisted the screws even more to guarantee total victory in 10 of the 11 districts.

States usually redistrict following a census, but Democrats claim they must act now to balance Republican activities in other states. This excuse falls apart because most observers agree that Virginia’s new map is a particularly egregious example of partisan gerrymandering.

And Democrats lie when they talk about it.

RELATED: Democrats made Trump’s case for him Tuesday night

Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

The party that told us that Joe Biden was mentally sharp now wants us to think a 10-1 congressional map promotes “fair elections,” as the advertising claims.

Democrats were even dishonest in the ballot question they wrote, which says it will temporarily “restore fairness” — without explanation or context — to elections in Virginia until the regular redistricting occurs in 2030.

We shouldn’t let politicians select their own voters, and Virginians were wise enough to see this coming.

Just six years ago, a whopping 66% of voters approved a constitutional amendment creating an independent redistricting commission. Unable to resist the lure of unchecked power, Virginia Democrats are trying to trick voters into undoing that so they can burgle those congressional seats.

National Democrats are paying attention.

House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has already sent $5 million to the campaign to support the new map and pledged to spend “whatever it takes” on top of that.

Democrats hilariously claim to be restoring fairness.

But a party powerful enough to ram this down everyone’s throat isn’t the victim of unfairness. It’s the cause of it.

Editor's note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

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Obama claims the country is now less tolerant of differing opinions than when he was in charge



Former President Barack Obama expressed concern in a CNN interview Thursday that the United States has become less tolerant since he left office, stressing that this is a problem shared by both Republicans and Democrats.

Obama told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that "democratic institutions are creaky." He made clear he wasn't necessarily referring to the indictment of the Democratic incumbent's top rival ahead of the 2024 presidential election, which he suggested serves as evidence that no one is above the law.

Rather, the former president indicated he is more concerned "with the fact that not just one particular individual is being accused of undermining existing laws, but that more broadly we’ve seen — whether it’s through the gerrymandering of districts, whether it’s trying to silence critics through changes in legislative process, whether it’s attempts to intimidate the press — a strand of anti-democratic sentiment that we’ve seen in the United States."

"It’s something that is right now most prominent in the Republican Party, but I don’t think it’s something that is unique to one party," said the former president. "I think there is less tolerance for ideas that don’t suit us."

Obama stressed that the "habits of a free and open exchange of ideas and the idea that we all agree to the rules of the same game ... even if the outcomes aren't always the ones we like" have "weakened since I left office, and we're gonna need to strengthen them again."

The former president attributed the breakdown of bipartisanship and tolerance, in part, to the isolation of information.

"If you're watching Fox News or following some right-wing radio host or getting Facebook feeds within that bubble, your reality is different than if you read the New York Times or watch [CNN]," he said. "When people are getting such fundamentally different facts, or what they think to be facts, and their worldviews are so skewed in one direction or another, and it's very hard for democracy to work."

Although Obama intimated in his CNN interview that intolerance, anti-democratic sentiment, and the silencing of critics are on the rise, these trends appear to have preceded his departure from office.

The Pew Research Center found that partisan polarization surged in the Obama years, which he led into with the suggestion that elements of the working class, frustrated with economic conditions, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The Internal Revenue Service, under the Obama administration, discriminated against hundreds of conservative groups in their applications for tax-exempt status. On the basis of their names and politics, these groups' applications were singled out, delayed, and denied.

The Obama Justice Department determined in 2015 that no one at the IRS would be penalized in the scandal, and key proponents retired with full federal benefits, reported PBS.

Only after Obama left office did the IRS get around to expressing its "sincere apology."

While Obama indicated critics are now being silenced by elements of the state, at least more than they had been when he was in charge, Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalist Matt Apuzzo underscored at a Duke University event in 2017 that nothing in the years following Obama's tenure came close to the "chilling effect" the former president's crackdown on journalists and leaks had on the profession, reported the Duke Chronicle.

The New York Post indicated that Apuzzo, who like the Times' Adam Goldman had his phone records seized, called Obama "the most oppressive" for journalists since Richard Nixon.

Obama suggested to the New York Times in 2009 that Fox News, which had been critical of his policies and leadership, was not a legitimate news organization.

The Washington Post reported that the Obama Department of Justice obtained telephone records for then-Fox News journalist James Rosen, who was suspected of obtaining leaked information about North Korea. The Obama administration "used security badge access records to track the reporter's comings and goings," perused his personal emails, and traced the timing of his calls with the supposed leaker.

The Times editorial board wrote, "With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible 'co-conspirator' in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news."

The Obama DOJ also secretly subpoenaed phone records from Associated Press offices in Washington, Hartford, Connecticut, and New York, again trying to determine the nature of reporters' sources.

"The Obama administration has pursued more such cases than all previous administrations combined," reported the Washington Post.

Depreciated tolerance on racial matters was also a feature under Obama's presidency.

A 2016 Rasmussen Poll found that 60% of likely U.S. voters believed race relations had worsened since Obama's inauguration.

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The Most Vicious Attacks Of The 2024 GOP Primary Won’t Come From Presidential Rivals, But From The Press

While the Trump campaign’s attack was tough, the ensuing partisan articles made it seem comparatively tame and conventional.