“Like I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
No MAGA rally would be complete without big ugly attacks from the left, and last night the Kamala campaign did not disappoint. MSNBC spliced clips of the event with clips of actual 1940s era Nazis. The DNC projected a message on the side of Madison Square Garden comparing Trump to actual Hitler. Yet out of all the speakers, the worst thing Kamala and the Democrats could come up with was that a comedian made some jokes.
The rally at MSG in New York City Sunday night went on for some six hours and was chock-full of speakers from guys Donald Trump went to school with growing up in Queens to Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Dr. Phil, who made his political views known in an epic speech about how the Democrats are a party of bullies. Despite all that, the one thing the Democrats and the media minions decided to descend upon was a joke made by Tony Hinchcliffe, host of the Kill Tony podcast, which is ranked in Spotify's top 20. In so doing, the Democrats did little more than prove Oprah protege Dr. Phil right.
Hinchcliffe made a bunch of jokes and got big laughs from the crowd. As he did so, he said "Republicans are the party with a good sense of humor. Free speech is under attack, people, I host a show and each week I get updates on what words we're allowed to use and not use anymore. It's happening right now, the past few years, it's a real thing."
In one of his jokes, the joke that got everyone up in arms, he said "It is absolutely wild times, it really really is. And you know, there's a lot going on. Like I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico." The crowd wasn't crazy about this joke, which conflated the north Pacific garbage gyre, a literal swirling island of the world's trash and waste, with Puerto Rico, an island that has such poor waste management that AccuWeather has written about it and how hurricanes serve to exacerbate that problem.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1850743884348883385
Hinchcliffe even joked that his Ohio "boomer" mom is "eating the dogs" and "eating the cats." Obviously, that was a joke. The entire point of having him on stage was to tell jokes, which he did, to mostly raucous laughter.
New York Rep AOC was live streaming on Twitch with Kamala's running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in a desperate attempt to appeal to male voters and the two were watching the rally. They didn't like the joke, either.
"This is terrifying," Walz said, watching the comedian deliver an 11-minute set. Walz didn't know who it was and AOC had to clue him in. "I actually think that's Tony Hinchcliffe," she said, "which is super disappointing. I don't, he's a comedian, I don't follow this crew very closely." The clip of AOC and Walz live streaming while watching the rally was posted by the official Kamala HQ account on X.
Walz brought up hurricane management, saying that Minnesota "sent helicopters" down after Hurricane Helene, a storm that ravaged North Carolina, Georgia and eastern Tennessee. He complained about Trump's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and said that those in Puerto Rico are citizens, as if that status were under attack by the jokester on MSG's stage. "It's super upsetting to me," AOC said, leaning into her own family's history in Puerto Rico.
"When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico floating garbage, know that that's what they think about you, it's what they think about anybody who makes less money than them," she said. AOC's Bronx district was recently cleaned up by federal agents as prostitution and crime were so rampant that they were compelled to go deal with it.
"These people have no sense of humor," Hinchcliffe said. "Wild that a vice presidential candidate would take time out of his 'busy schedule' to analyze a joke taken out of context to make it seem racist. I love Puerto Rico and vacation there. I made fun of everyone…watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim…might be time to change your tampon."
https://twitter.com/tonyhinchcliffe/status/1850641658599399587
You can check out the whole set for yourself. No one was spared in his set, which sent up everyone from Mike Lindell and his promo codes to Latinos to his own mom to people in the audience.
Meanwhile at a Kamala rally in Phoenix, comedian George Lopez joked that Mexicans are thieves. "Donald Trump said he was going to build a wall," Lopez said, "and George Lopez said you better build it in one day because if you that material out there overnight..." then shook his head, indicating that Mexicans would steal the leftover materials.
https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1850641353769943092
Ever the environmental whistleblower, journalist Michael Shellenberger pointed out that Puerto Rico literally has a trash problem. And this isn't a new issue, it's an old one. In 2017, NPR wrote an article called "After Maria, Puerto Rico Struggles Under the Weight of Its Own Garbage." It discussed a 3-story pile of trash right outside the capital.
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1850708355654033751
In 2021, Puerto Ricans were upset because their landfills were overflowing. That was under the Biden-Harris administration, and it looks like they haven't done anything to help ease that problem. Back in the 1980s, Manhattan island, jewel of New York City, was the island that was most referred to as an island of trash. Rats were everywhere, sanitation workers kept going on strike, and mountains of black trash bags lined the sidewalks.
https://twitter.com/GlobalPress/status/1362719841656975363
"Of course, if it wasn't this one Puerto Rico joke, which is pretty much the only thing they could find to harp on, it would have been something else. The best they could come up with: attempting to cancel a comedian over a joke."
"Amazing to see how many soft conservatives don’t get how this works yet," Jack Posobiec posted. "If Kill Tony hadn’t been there, the media-left would have found something else to gripe on. They were always going to. This is what they do."
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CNN got so ruffled they said they couldn't even show one of the Hinchcliffe jokes because it was too bawdy. Hint: it was about the high birthrate among Latinos, and harkens back to the same kind of jokes made about the Irish. Of course, they are all basically Catholics. Catholics don't seem to be mad about it though.
The attempted cancelling of Hinchcliffe over the joke won't work, and attempting to paint Trump, Republicans and MAGA as racists for a joke about Puerto Rico won't work, either. For not only months but years, Democrats have been calling Trump Hitler and have been leaning into the idea that he's a fascist. For the people who believe that, this Puerto Rico joke kerfuffle will just be confirmation. For the people who don't believe it, Hinchcliffe's joke was just that: a joke.
