This … this is just …
The basic premise of this bit, which is essentially the idea of allowing the FCC virtually unfettered regulatory control over how the internet is operated, is anathema to a sizable portion of the conservative baseh. But that is not the point.
The point is that this one video has accomplished what months and months of debate, and news programs, and blog posts, and tweet campaigns, and facebook pages, and policy analysis have all failed to do. It presented an opaque issue in a way that has people not only understanding the issue, but getting fired up about it. Oliver encouraged people to comment to the FCC. And after the clip went viral, comment they did. By the tens of thousands. They crashed the site.
This is what you call narrative shifting.
What John Oliver did here was tell a story. He told it in an engaging way. He used familiar concepts to create points. He used humor to punctuate them and make them tolerable. In short, he has done what the right has been so terrible at for so many years. He made something that was good and interesting.
I don’t hesitate to say that this is what people mean about reaching hearts and minds through understanding the popular culture. If our movement can’t do this, or, worse, refuses to, then we will not only lose elections, we will deserve to lose them.