On Tuesday night, The Daily Show With Trevor Noah tackled a topic currently sending shock waves through red states: critical race theory. Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. attempted to get to the bottom of the obscure, graduate-level theory of the American legal system that no one seems able to correctly define—at least, nobody who’s affiliated with Fox News.
“Does literally anyone on the right actually know what critical race theory is?” a trench-coated Wood Jr. asks in the segment, before an X-Files–inspired parody title sequence plays, pondering other right-wing mysteries—including “Matt Gaetz’s Venmo” and “Ivanka’s job.”
Wood Jr. begins his deep dive by explaining the origins of CRT, dating its roots back to legal scholars who began to study the influence of institutional racism on the nation’s laws in the 1970s. “Who’s down with CRT? Not the GOP,” Wood Jr. says, before wondering aloud whether any conservatives have even taken the time to Wikipedia the subject. This leads directly to a montage of Fox News pundits defining critical race theory in a bevy of sensationalized ways, calling it “a religion of secularism and guilt,” “a device designed to capture white guilt,” and, perhaps most intensely, “an ideology that threatens to overturn the advances of human civilization over the last 500 years.”
“This thing’s got more unnecessary features jammed into it than Microsoft Word,” Wood Jr. quips, highlighting the liberties conservatives have taken. Wood Jr. goes on to show a clip from a Newsmax segment in which a guest posits that CRT might “reinforce the Oedipal notion” of children wanting to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, specifically for interracial couples. “Next week on Unsolved Mysteries: Is that dude trying to smash his momma?” Wood Jr. says.
The absurdity and fervor surrounding the right’s objection to critical race theory, Wood Jr. determines, might all be a fever dream. “Is it possible critical race theory is a mass hallucination we’re all having—the result of 15 months spent locked in our apartments and spraying Windex on all of our groceries?” Wood asks. “Nobody knows.” But Wood Jr. seems at least somewhat hopeful that the true definition of critical race theory might eventually make its way to conservatives: “If you see an actual definition of critical race theory in the wild, please contact your local Republican. They seem confused.”
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