The Daily Show will have a new host later this year, Trevor Noah. Some people have gotten upset at some of his more inflammatory zinger-tweets. The Nation has a pretty good round-up, sans links.
Look. I don't know the man. I've seen him on his three TDS appearences and in each case he has displayed intelligence, razor sharp wit and excellent timing. I know the jokes are mostly written in advance, but delivery matters.
While I cannot fully judge a person's personality based on a stage presence, I will say that his stage presence did not indicate a serious dislike of women or Jews. I admit he might have missed the memo, the newspaper articles, and the big Superbowl blimp declaring that Jon Stewart is a Jew--and, quite probably, a poorly disguised woman. However, Trevor Noah's has shown no trouble working with Jon, and presumably the writing staff is not up in arms at the announcement.
As for the tweets... how do I put it? There are multiple interpretations you can make for many of them. The worst of the bunch in terms of offensiveness to me was somewhat insulting to overweight women.
Now, I prefer inculcating a culture of respect, and that tweet definitely didn't. But I've seen far worse, and frankly it was more in line as a zinger than a deep and thoughtful look into the man's psyche. It didn't scream, "I hate fat women!" It said, "I will make a joke at fat women's expense." Stephen Colbert made all sorts of offensive jokes on The Colbert Report, and I laughed. Some of Colbert's jokes were disrespectful to women, but if you ever thought that he himself was generally disrespectful of women you must have missed most of his appearences.
Other zinger targets of Trevor Noah in these tweets include Jews (he apparently has Jewish relations, so that's actually not unusual), jaywalkers, prostitutes and McDonalds--the last two in the same tweet, and probably more of a dig at the Home of the Big Mac. I'll be honest. I laughed at most of those tweets, partly because I took them as zingers instead of Life Mission Statements. None of these tweets were along the lines of "Die you sunuvabitch!" or particularly inflammatory.
Look. People looking for his personality in his tweets will probably not find deep insights in a format designed for surface thoughts. His appearences on TDS are probably more indicative, and he showed wit and insight comparable to Jon Stewart. I don't know when he'll take over the helm of the show, but I am looking forward to more looks at how American infrastructure utterly fails compared to good bits of African infrastructure. Seriously, we need more of that. And I actually expect he'll show that for all of his digs, he respects people as people. That's all we can really ask for--and frankly, I doubt Jon Stewart would hand over the reins to somebody who wouldn't.