This post mentioned how cameras from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were going to be at Thursday night's
Hacienda La Puente Unified School District Board of Education meeting, where activists planned to protest a “Confucius Classroom” coming to a middle school.
]
Kai Chen, the Chinese-American activist who claims Confucius
Classrooms are a front for a Communist Chinese government bent on
warping young American minds–believed he would be interviewed for The
Daily Show piece.
But in an email to the Weekly, Chen–who first came to our attention last
September when he organized
demonstrations over the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and
Museum's Mao
Tse-Tung statue–says he was snubbed by Comedy Central's fake newscast.
“After I made my speech, wearing my Olympic Freedom T-shirt, The Daily Show crew avoided me,” Chen writes. “Another TV crew from a Japanese TV station interviewed me.”
He
suspects Stewart's band of merry mischief-makers “could not find
anything in me they can make fun of,” so they turned to others to
interview, including the district's former superintendent.
“They recorded my speech,” Chen writes, “but I doubt they will air it.”
Chin up, Chen, there's always Colbert.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.