Ta-Nehisi Coates gives Colbert the most soft-peddled version of reality possible, but Colbert still pushes back on it.
And his gun control opener was literally a promise of collaboration with anything the GOP proposes.
Very good episode:
Most of the comment thread on this is just bitter sarcasm, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Lively gun control debate on Black Twitter. Splitting at least partially on gender lines.
It’s also bringing up some strange arguments; seeing Killer Mike cite the Revolutionary War as a part of his personal history of liberation was a bit weird.
There are times when I adore the British left. 
https://twitter.com/man_in_radiator/status/915038849281220608
Completely depressing set of threads. Between this and health care how does the US get to call itself a developed country?
Developed doesn’t equal civilised, unfortunately. As the developing world has been vigorously shouting for a long time.
It ain’t just about the guns; US gun violence is the symptom, not the cause.
Fascism and militarism are at the root of it all, IMO. And that dates from long before Trump; the USA has always been a somewhat fascist country. It’s just more visible now.
Trump is the natural consequence of American history.
TLDR: white Americans are terrified that if they surrender dominance, non-white America will do to them what they’ve been doing to everyone else for hundreds of years.
Not the only reason for the emergence of US fascism, but an important one.
Australian protests against the camps peaked around 2002. Protests there were not easy to organise; the government built the camps in the middle of the desert precisely in order to disrupt protests and keep them out of public view.
The Easter protest in 2002 was vigorous and large. A thousand people drove thousands of kilometres to camp on the desert stones for a week.
Anyway, in the years leading up to the 2002 protests, many of the refugees had gone on hunger strike. When that didn’t work, some of them began sewing their lips together.
This was both a way to reinforce the hunger strike, and a symbolic protest about how they were silenced. There is virtually no outside access to the camps, journalists included.
Then some of their kids started doing it too.
The Australian right declared that this demonstrated why these people shouldn’t be let into the country. The right wing media framed it as “violent terrorist illegals trying to blackmail Australia”.
That was (and is) the view of about half of the country. Including some of my family.