Drinking From a Fire Hose

reports that are coming out about Uvaldi, Texas. One of the most disturbing things, folks, I will say as I just jump into conversation with all of you today, is that the reports that are coming out with regard to according to the Wall Street Journal, parents and Uvaldi who rushed to the scene of Robe Elementary School being handcuffed by police, being detained by police as onlookers were begging,

pleading with police officers to enter the building. Reports coming out and again by the time you listen to this, I'm certain that things will have changed, But initial reporting is saying that two officers arrived on the scene. Two officers we know mostly carry handguns nine millimeter guns. Bill, you've Aaldi shooter had an AAR fifteen, two AR fifteens with bump I believe bump capacity had three hundred and fifty some odd rounds of ammunition. These are the things,

these magazines that democrats gun rights rights advocates. Even gun rights advocates have said, you don't need to have magazine

capacity that lets off hundreds of bullets in a fucking minute. So, if you are a police officer, and I just want you to think about this for a minute, because Greg Abbott, the piece of shit governor in Texas, instituted multiple policies to make Texas with over the last year, the easiest state to get a gun in, no background checks, no trainings, no certificate, no nothing, basically allowing people like the gunmen to essentially grab an a R fifteen the way that

you would walk into seven eleven and grab a fucking surpie. And I will tell you that I have been and you all have watched, And again I want to thank each and every one one of you listeners and supporters who have DMed me, who have messaged me, who have tweeted at me, just with your thoughts and well wishes and your you know, directives of me taking needing to take a break and needing to you know, allow myself to grieve in this moment because what happened this week

for me. It was a compilation of so many things right for all of us, just so many goddamn things. It feels in this country like we are consistently drinking through a fire hose that is filled with acid. Right. Nothing is easy. There are no easy moments, There are no easy days, There are no easy weeks. Think to yourself, the last time that you went through a week and you were like, it was a great week in America, we haven't had one. And that weighs on people. It

weighs on me. I had somebody say to me recently, I can't believe that you do this, do these shows five days a week, You let off this type of passion and rage and frustration five days a week. And what happened this week is that I hit my breaking point.

What happened this week is that I just there was just not enough time between these two historic tragic events, Buffalo and Uvaldi, and then the shootings, the sentencing of the Wisconsin hate crime, the white man who threw acid on a Latino man talking about replace me, the shooting and killing of four teenagers in South Carolina, all of this sandwiched into less than two weeks, Less than two weeks and when you think about what has transpired before Buffalo, folks,

it's just exhausting, it's just too fucking much. But listening to the reporting, the initial reporting coming out with parents begging these officers to enter the building waiting sixty minutes

an hour, what would be the reason for that? And as many people in the community are saying that are being interviewed on cable news, you can listen in their voice that they don't want to go against the police in this small town, right, Because if you're living in this small time, chances are you know them, right, you

know somebody that is on the force. One, you don't want to make a target of yourself because I have said many a times over that police operate like an organized gang, right the blue wall of silence, the way that they stick up for each other even when and especially when not even when, especially when criminal activity has

taken place, they cover. But when you think about the fact that even police officers in the state of Texas said to Greg Gabbott, this is not a good fucking law because we are not going to be able to combat the ability of people carrying ar fifteens and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and being able to do so without a waiting period, without a background check, without anything, And so here it plays out, Greg Gabbott, it is

bullshit press conference that thankfully Beto O'Rourke interrupted said, Oh, the school just needed to have more doors. That's your solution to a gunman being able to access two AAR fifteens and three hundred and sixty three hundred and fifty six rounds of ammunition. Your feeling is that, Ted Cruz,

we need to arm teachers. You don't pay teachers enough to do what the fuck they do right now, Teachers out here doing bake sales and using their own small salaries to be able to supplement the fucking school supplies that the schools can afford, because our Congress would rather send billions of dollars to Ukraine, billions of dollars to the fucking Pentagon, but not billions of dollars to our

public education system. So now you want to turn around after villainizing teachers by the way, during COVID who were staging fucking walkouts and saying you don't have COVID protocols

to have us go back into the classroom. This is before there were vaccinations and you have governors like Abbot and Descantists telling people, open up, open up, open up, but you're not providing sanitizer, mass ventilation systems anything, and then turn around and villainize teachers for not wanting to put their lives on the line for the small salaries that they have in order to teach children. So now Ted Cruz's response and Republicans responses, let's give them guns.

Are we also going to provide hazard pay because now you're getting a degree in education and you need to have what military combat training as well as is bootcamp going to be a part of how elementary and secondary school teachers are supposed to be entering America's classrooms? And our members of Congress think that that is a justifiable fucking response to the second historic elementary school shooting in this country. I listened to a reporter and I don't

know where he's from. I can tell you that he had an accent, so I can assume, and a British accent, I believe, so I can assume that he was not from the United States. And I say that because a reporter from the United States, because he was saying specifically, people around the world, right and we know that America is very American centered. But he said to Ted Cruise, people around the world want to understand how this kind of massacre, these kinds of school shootings are uniquely American.

Is this what American exceptionalism looks like? Because it's not great. Ted Cruise then has the audacy to delay his hands on this reporter and says, well, clearly you have a political agenda. He said, no, I don't. I just want to understand why you can be so calm massacre after massacre and offer no solutions. Ted Cruze says, we don't need to politicize this moment. He said, this is not politics.

People around the world, and particularly in your country, want to know what you were going to do to keep children safe. Ted Cruz walks off and goes ahead and shakes hands with police officers. This is a motherfucker who decided that to look like a man, he was going to cook bacon on the end of his AR fifteen Look at me. Let me tell you something that seems to be small dick energy. And yes, I said, what the fuck? I said? These white siths, fundamentalist Christian men

don't give a fuck about families. They don't give a fuck about children, because there is no way that in a country that is industrialized, in a country that is supposed to be quote unquote free, that you have nineteen children grades two through four go to school on a motherfucking Tuesday and then not be able to come home. Not because there was some natural disaster, some act of God. No,

it is the inaction of Congress. It is the inaction of our politicians that allows for our children to consistently be mowed down in their classrooms. They haven't even reached their prime. So I can't say, oh, they've mowed down, lost their lives in their prime. No, because we're talking about fucking seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven year olds. Picture after picture that I see being put up on cable news and going around social media showing these beautiful children's faces.

And what I said, and I stand by it, is that until we have one of these parents right from new Town to Uvaldi, to Columbine to Parkland and all over, because there have been too many, decide that they're going to do what Mammy Till did in nineteen fifty five, which is show the world what an AAR fifteen does to the human body, does to a child's body, and then you allow these politicians to sit around and tell you that they can't do anything. This is what I want.

I want an open goddamn casket. I want them to see that these parents are being forced to get dental records to identify their children because the flesh has been ripped off of their bones because of an AAR fifteen. There is no other place on this planet where this is justifiable. I watched a TikTok video where they said, you know, there was a school shooting in Scotland once they banned assault rifles. There was a mass shooting in

New Zealand once they banned assault rifles. Because you see, you can own a gun, right, it's in the constitution, but you don't need to own a weapon of war

that's not in the Constitution. Because, frankly, if we want to go back to as Justice Alito wants to do with fucking overturning Roe v of way, if we want to go back to what is foundational to the Constitution, then let us make it legal for you to have the musket that they were fucking using when the Constitution was written, because they weren't slinging AAR fifteens able to shoot a hundred bullets in less than a minute. That's not what they said, Oh, the right to bear arms.

They were talking about fucking bayonets and muskets that you have to stop and then stuff the bullets in and pack it right and then crank it and then let off. So, if we want to be constitutionalists, as a Supreme Court now decides that they want to be, then let them use the weapons that existed during that time. You still have your right to bear arms, which you do not have the right to declare war on the nation's children.

New report came out in Axios to say that now the number one cause of death of children ages one and up gun violence. Gun violence, not cancer, not heart attacks, not heart disease, not diabetes, No gun violence. But Republicans would have you believe that that's necessary. That's what freedom

looks like. It looks like the freedom to murder. It looks like the freedom for people to be able to access weapons of mass destruction and open fire in grocery stores, open fire in school buildings, open fire at churches, synagogues. The thing that I'm watching as you have hosts of television shows and shout out to the Miami Heat and the announcer at the game this week, who through the moment of silence on the jumbotront as they are going

through the pictures of the slain children. They said, right before they started the game, put up the number to Congress on the JumboTron and said, call your senators because this has got to end now. To me, NBA, NFL, NHL, soccer leagues, all of the major sports, this is all that they should do. They should take each and every game, take five minutes and do the same thing that the

Miami Heat announcer did every single show. Take five minutes at the beginning and run the faces of the slain victims, not just of Vivaldi, but start with Columbine and go over the last What is it now close to thirty years of massacres. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes and original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests

and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday.

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This country is in so many crises, so many crises, and this week for me, it was too much. At some point in the coming weeks, I will be taking

a break. And the reality is that, through conversations with my therapist, with my friends and family, is that as an EmPATH, as a person who, as I said on Woke Wednesday, has dedicated their lives to democracy, to our functioning government, to educating the citizenury, whether it was as a classroom teacher at the beginning of my career, as an education lobbyist, right as an activist, as an LGBTQ activist, as a writer, as a communications person, all of it,

I have dedicated to making this country a better, safer place to exist in. And when you wake up and you realize that everything is crumbling around you, everything that you have taken to heart, to know to be true is crumbling around you. Some days I can't breathe. Some days I question abandoning all of this and finding something else. But you see, when you have a calling, you don't just turn off that message, you don't just stop hearing it. It is something that pulls at you, that says, for me,

your voice matters, your voice is needed. I don't care if one person listens to the show or one million people listen. The fact is, I do believe that a small group of people can make considerable change an impact in this country. But it has to be consistent. We have to have discipline, we have to have focus because the reality, the reality is that our tension spans because we are so overwhelmed with so much right now, are that of a gnat? How do you keep track of

everything when it is one fucking crisis after another. We're dealing with another uptick in COVID and at the same time, fucking monkey pocks. You are grieving the hate crime that happened in and Buffalo, and now the news has completely shifted to another fucking massacre in Uvaldi. Once you get over one hump and you think, oh god, there lies the oasis, No it's not. It is a mirage. People

have said to me so many times. Your safety is in fact an illusion, and it is It's a necessary illusion, because if we all operated from a place of fear and anxiety, we would never leave our homes. So we have to we have to believe, even if we are lying to ourselves that no, it is safe for me to go to the grocery store. It's safe for me to go and worship at my house of worship. It's safe for me to send my kids to school, because

what is the alternative, first all, to become reclusive. The fact that's the thing that scares me is at the only time then where we were all collectively safe was in COVID, in quarantine at the beginning of COVID, And even during that time, they didn't stop killing Black people. Amand Aubrey was murdered in February of twenty twenty, George Floyd was murdered in May of twenty twenty, Brianna Taylor was murdered Rachiard Brooks. There are so many fucking people

black people that were murdered. That's why folks left their homes with masks on to take to the streets in the summer of twenty twenty, because not even during that time could black people exist and live free. But it was the only time since Columbine that we hadn't heard a series of school shootings because school was at a session. It was the only time that we hadn't heard about a mass shooting at a concert or a grocery store.

Parties or wherever because people were inside. But you see here, people are not the problem, as Republicans would love to tell you, Oh, it's you just need a good person with a gun to battle the bad person with a gun because we all want to live in the wild, wild West. I know, I fucking don't, folks. I will tell you that today's show is going to be a short one. And why is that? Because I have felt unwell.

I have felt unwell, and I have been pushing myself to continue to do the most and realizing that when I spent an entire day in tears, that I was not well and it was time for me to admit that to myself that my work was making me sick. And it's not really my work. It's the country and my job is to cover, to have deep analysis, to have thoughtful perspectives, to provide solutions and pathways, and I

opening analysis to wake people up. But to be at that level of high alert all the time, to never put my phone down, to never close a computer screen, and even when I do, I still get dms and texts and tweets about things and stories that I've missed. And so on this Friday, I'm giving myself a break, and I want, what would be the initial time for the show, for you all to do something for yourselves. Call your strong friends, right, they always say, check on

your strong friends. You know, the ones that seem to always have it together, that seem to always be able to power through and plow through. Check on them, make sure that they are actually okay. And if they are not, and you are that strong friend, then just sit with them, whether it's on FaceTime in a park. Check on your family. Right. We need to build up our sense of community and togetherness and thoughtfulness with one another because things are just

so dreadful. They're just so fucking awful. So if you are not actively daily, multiple times a day, seeking out those pockets of joy, connecting with your friends, your family, your children, if you're an auntie in, an uncle right, a godparent, a caregiver, say a prayer, a meditation, a moment of silence for all of these fucking families man, who are only at the beginning of trying to put together the pieces of a life that is now shattered

and didn't need to be. No one, not the families in Buffalo, not the families in Uvaldi, not the families in Parkland, not the families in Newtown, not the families in Columbine, not the families in al Paso, not the families of the Pulse nightclub victims in Florida, not the families in South Carolina, not the families from Las Vegas. Nobody should have to figure out how to put the pieces of their lives and their heart back together because

of gun violence. We shouldn't have to live like this. Hey, I'm David Plots of Slates Political Gabfest. As another election season accelerates, it can be tricky to sort through all the noise and the news. Each week, on the Gapfest, John Dickerson, Emily Bathlon and I decipher the headlines, break down the races, and tell you what issues really matter. We do not always agree, We definitely do not always agree, but we always deliver thoughtful debate and we always have

a good time. So subscribe to Slate's Political Gapfest, new episodes every Thursday. So, if you do nothing else, check on your friends, on your family, on your community. Figure out how you can get involved and just feel connection. Whether it's through a community garden, if it's through religious services, if it's through volunteers, just a kind smile to somebody on the street, Be a light. Be a light because

there is just too much darkness. That's what I wish for all of you as we head into this weekend and God knows what will unfold, but what I will say to you is that we all have the capacity to be a light for ourselves and for those around us. It is the only way, the only way that we are going to make it through this darkness. I thank you all again, so so very much for your support,

your encouragement, your patronage, empathy, your strength. We'll continue to move through this, whatever this is, dear friends, together as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power. Get woke and stay woke as fuck. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy

Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday.