It’s day two of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, but Full Frontal With Samantha Bee still had some choice words for the Republican National Convention, which the host and her staff crashed last week.
Watch: Full Frontal With Samantha Bee tries to get Republican delegates to say “black lives matter”
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
GOP delegates talked to Full Frontal about how they’re excited for a president who doesn’t care for “political correctness,“ who “talks like I want to talk,” and how “he says the things we’ve been thinking for years, that no one had the guts to say.”
But the most interesting Full Frontal segment from the RNC floor was the one that tackled the idea that — in Bee’s words — “Donald Trump didn’t bring the racist potato salad to the GOP’s church picnic.” Well actually, she corrected herself, “He did, but they were like, ‘Oh, man, we already have so much potato salad!’”
In a verbal game of cat and mouse, Bee’s correspondents tried to get RNC delegates to say the words, “black lives matter,” leading to a montage of the interviewed delegates insisting that “all lives matter.”
But then the segment pivoted to the interviewees expressing real confusion and fear about what Black Lives Matter means.
“I don’t know what they’re saying,” one woman mused, “I just know there’s a lot of anger there.”
“It has no more place in our body politic than the KKK or the skinheads,” a man said.
“But most people we talked to did want to understand,” Bee’s voiceover eventually cuts in, over a montage of black correspondent Ashley Black talking to nervously smiling Republicans, “at least when faced with an actual black person, forcing them to think critically about what they were about to say.”
“Would you say black lives matter?” Black asked a convention attendee decked out in an elaborate hat featuring the American flag as ear flappers and an elephant headdress.
“Yes, of course black lives matter,” he said, but with the caveat that he doesn’t “know enough” about the movement to support it.
Black nodded. “So you would say, ‘black lives matter, pending research’?”
