Full Frontal's Samantha Bee opened her show Wednesday by taking apart the Republican fearmongering strategy for the midterm elections: to paint Democrats as the “angry mob” in the latest version of their “terrifying culture wars.”
Republicans have absolutely nothing to run on besides the failure of their huge tax cuts for corporations. With inflation “eating out wage increases,” they've returned to their old playbook, fear and right-wing victimhood.
Republicans control all three branches of government! How do you play the victim when you’ve won everything there is to win? Well, they’ve found a way: telling people that Democrats will eat them.
After playing a sample of some of the ads they're running this cycle, including one calling the Left “Crazytown,” Bee responded:
I wish the Left were Crazytown! By the way, you know what is actually nuts? Conflating Nancy Pelosi with a handful of masked anarchists who hate Nancy Pelosi more than any Republican. Although if that is Nancy Pelosi under that mask, I would happily pay her bail.
Bee went onto take on Ted Cruz, Fox "news" and Trump for their demonization of people of color and women:
Bee also shared an ad from Ted Cruz that attacks his opponent Beto O’Rourke for supporting kneeling football players. Highlighting a supportive tweet from Ellen DeGeneres, Bee joked, “Ah yes, the one thing white America fears most: Ellen. Watch out America, because Ellen is going to dance on your fucking graves.”
“But as much as Republicans love to fear black people, there’s another scary group that’s shooting up the charts: women,” Bee added later, demonstrating how the right is demonizing female activists who protested Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. “Screaming women?” she asked. “My ears are burning. I haven’t felt this hated for being a woman since literally every day that I’m a woman.”
“Stop making it sound like sexual-assault survivors are this vastly powerful cabal. They are not,” she continued, putting a photo of Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford on the screen. “You know how I know that? Because one of these people became a Supreme Court justice and the other can’t go back to her fucking home.”
And in response to a coordinated effort by Trump, Republican candidates and Fox News to paint liberals as a “mob,” Bee said, “If anyone would know about the mob, it’s Donald Trump.”
“It’s a little hard to take Republicans seriously on this,” she said. “The only time I’ve ever seen an unhinged mob of Democrats is when NPR runs out of totes. Plus, thanks to Trump the GOP is pretty much the party of frenzied radical mobs.” Bee added, “It is tremendously ballsy for the slow-motion rage aneurysm that is the GOP to accuse the left of being a mob.”
