While watching Sacha Baron Cohen's new show, I had to hit pause every couple of minutes. The new Channel 4 series, Who Is America? relies on the exact type of humour that makes me cringe, duping people into saying and doing extremely stupid things. In the case of the first episode, however, it's more like: duping people with problematic opinions into saying those opinions on camera. For instance, arming children with guns.
Cohen adopts various characters and disguises on the show, but the most memorable occurred during the final segment. Playing a character named Colonel Erran Morad, Cohen interviews various gun control advocates about the need to arm children as young as four years old in order to protect them from school shootings and other forms of gun violence. Alarmingly, almost none of the people we see Cohen pitch this to — including former senate majority leader Trent Lott and current republican California congressman Dana Rohrabacher — are shocked or wary of the proposal. In fact, they heartily support it, and agree to endorse the project via teleprompter. That's where Cardi B comes in.
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Larry Pratt, the Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America, ended the episode by reading off a list of "scientific" "facts" supporting children using guns, but that are actually just a bunch of made up words the writers of the show inserted in order to make (even more of) a display of him.
"The science behind this program is proven," Pratt says, adding, "Children under five also have elevated levels of a pheromone Blink-182, produced by the part of the liver known as the Rita Ora. This allows nerve reflexes to travel along the Cardi B neural pathway, to the Wiz Khalifa, 40% faster saving time and saving lives."
While biology class would have certainly been a lot more exciting had these actually been the names of pheromones and neural pathways, this is clearly actual fake news that Pratt was willing to recite to the world.
Not even Cardi B can make the true reality of this less depressing, but we have reached out to her, Blink-182, Ora, Khalifa, and Pratt for comment.