Sacha Baron Cohen confronts Roy Moore with a beeping "pedophile detector"

I did. They called me a faggot. That’s why I moved out of the south.

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I can’t take this style of humor either, although I fully acknowledge that SBC is brilliant. My wife loves Borat a lot but I can’t even watch for a few seconds without involuntarily closing my eyes. So uncomfortable!

As a person of color, I can understand not wanting to dehumanize other people, even if they hold terrible, inhumane antisocial beliefs. But by the same token, I can’t bring myself to feel any sympathy for those who end up hoisted by their own petards.

May I humbly suggest that whenever you begin to feel those pangs of pity for such folks, just think of all the Emmett Tills, the James Craig Andersons, the Sandra Blands, and all the other countless victims of the exact same mindless racism and bigoted ignorance, throughout the history of this country.

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Oddly, there’s apparently not nearly as many racist, bigoted, Israel-obsessed pedophiles among progressive politicians. A mystery for the ages!

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I’m not sure I agree with that. The GOP put up a particularly weak field of candidates, the Democratic party shot itself in the foot by putting up a candidate who is known to motivating the opposition’s base (and actively worked to discredit the left wing of the party while doing so), we have some evidence of outside inference in elections (which we’re still supposedly trying to get to the bottom of), voter turn out is at an all time low, in part due to right wing attempts to suppress the working class and minority vote, among other things. I think that there was certainly some voting for trump for the LOLs, but I sincerely doubt if that was the key factor.

Additionally, SBC is making a TV show, not running for office… big difference there, I’d say.

Dude… the proud boys were started by Gavin McInnes, whose British and he lives in NYC. They’re not a product of the south, even if they’re inspired by some southern white supremacist groups. Racism isn’t a southern phenomenon only, it’s an American one.

11th-doc-this

And this list very long and actively being added to today.

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I’ve tried to count; it’s an impossible task for me, for 2 reasons;

  1. The number, as you stated, never stops growing; and many atrocities have never come to public light.

  2. It’s incredibly demoralizing and depressing when you even try to tally up all the immediate damage… let alone the collateral damage, which is even greater and more incalculable.

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I honestly don’t know how historians who study the history of lynching in American history do their work. I mean, it’s incredibly important, but it’s incredibly depressing. Real heroes, them.

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I had to look up Lake Oswego. Doesn’t sound like one of the “most liberal towns” in America. Compare: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/oregon/lake_oswego
with:
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/oregon/troutdale
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/massachusetts/lenox
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/santa_cruz
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/minnesota/duluth
https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/sebastopol
… I could go on and on. Your friend gets those looks because Lake Oswego is in a rural county where lots of people supported the nearby Bundy takeover and 46.8% of the people are Trump fans. Not a great example of a liberal town.

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It borders Portland. Their city centers are 8 miles apart. I would not call it rural. But yeah, just the bandwagon

Did… did I just witness a failed Turing test?

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I have friends around that area, and once you get outside Portland and into the lakes, yes, it gets rural and rednecky very quickly. Like Austin or Colorado Springs, the Portland city center is an isolated pool of liberal attitudes surrounded by backwoods Trump supporters.

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Ah, yes, Lake No-Negro.

I protested a Trump rally there last year and was arrested after MAGA truck driver literally drove his truck into me from a dead stop. Guess I shouldn’t have assaulted his truck with my stationary body…

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I just finished watching the full episode, and the Quinceañera bit set off my bullshit detectors big time.

I would wager we might be able to find these 3 men’s faces in a search of the local casting websites, since the Atlanta area is a hotbed for inexpensive actors. That’s why there’s so many faces from Adult Swim shorts that show up in The Walking Dead, and this was filmed in the same area. ETA: Pancho’s Mexican Restaurant & Cantina in Atlanta to be exact.

ETA (again): 2/3 of the fellows are identifiable. Joe Newton and Jack Staver are the real deal. But neither of those are the guy in the dress who I suspect to be a local Atlanta area actor by the name of Jeff Brochu

The clips with Bernie Sanders and Ted Koppel almost shouldn’t have been aired. There’s nothing “funny” there except the quizzical looks on the guests faces before they are fed up and leave. There’s nothing compromising. We’re mostly just to observe Cohen’s performance itself. Did he leave them in just to demonstrate that “Hey, I’m not just approaching right-wing politicians…”

EDIT: I"m going to call it now: right-wing apologists will claim Cohen told all his left-wing guests about his forged identity ahead of time; that, obviously, can be the only explanation for why the Left, and the Press, never come off badly.

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That and also that educated liberals and progressives aren’t easy marks like his other guests.

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I think it’d be easy enough to get a liberal politician or public figure to go along with some sort of crazy scheme. Like free beer for welfare recipients or some other crazy theories that conservative wingnuts accuse liberals of using to garner votes. After all, a successful mark for Cohen is generally scraping the bottom of the barrel, and it’s not hard to imagine what the bottom of the barrel liberal looks like (off the top of my head: Blago).

It’s my impression that Cohen did not attempt anything like this.

I doubt you’re going to get someone like Sanders or Koppel to agree to a crazy scheme. A conservative politician or journalist, though…they’re not all going to fall for it but if we’re working the odds it’s more likely. [ETA: which I believe is Cohen’s point for having Sanders and Koppel on]

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I believe they were left in for the stark juxtaposition with the unfettered lunacy many on the right are willing to engage in, because there was literally nothing funny in either exchange.

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Personally, I thought the bit with the public meeting in Kingman, Arizona was the best.

Cohen pretended to be a real estate developer and was revealing development plans for a massive mosque funded by Saudi Arabia. Hilarity, and eruptions of racism, ensued: one gentleman of the all-white audience feels comfortable to inform Cohen that essentially “Hey, we barely tolerate black people, why would we possibly want to allow large numbers of Arabs here?”

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