Sacha Baron Cohen's "KinderGuardians" Gun Stunt Is Almost Too Bleak to Believe
Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America?, like every Sacha Baron Cohen project, is hard to have conclusive feelings about. Like we said in our review, it's a show that evades sentiments like "good" or "bad" and goes all-in on varying degrees of "uncomfortable." Whether or not you like it depends on how much you like Cohen's particular brand of cringe satire, but if there's one indisputable success in the show's premiere, it's the sick genius of its final ten minutes.
The segment depicts Cohen as Erran Morrad, an ex-Mossad agent who believes arming children is the solution to gun violence in schools, on a mission to convince Washington lawmakers to get behind a program he dubs KinderGuardians, which will train pre-school age children in the use of firearms to kill assailants. What's incredible about the act isn't merely that Cohen gets gun nuts and Republicans to buy in, but the method he uses to do it.
Cohen starts where our nation's gun obsessions starts: with the gun lobby. The first person he visits is Philip Van Cleave, a gun rights activist who frequently appears on news networks and advocates for fellow activists to openly carry firearms. That Van Cleave advocates for arming preschoolers isn't as shocking as it should be in a post-Sandy Hook America, but Cohen's satire strives to re-align the depravity of such a sentiment by having Van Cleave record a promotional video where guns are disguised as stuffed animals in order to teach children about how to kill people. It's truly see-it-to-believe-it stuff.
From there, Cohen visits an actual lobbyist, Larry Pratt, who not only laughs along to rape jokes on camera (believing the footage wouldn't be used) but also agrees to give Cohen-as-Morrad a list of lawmakers who he believes will be supportive of the absurd KinderGuardians plan. It's a quietly stunning moment, the tacit admission that there's a group of officials that are expected to be sympathetic to any argument, no matter how absurd, as long as it involves putting guns in the hands of people.
The rest of the segment is what Who Is America? became notorious for before it even premiered, a parade of lawmakers who are more than happy to read along to prompts that endorse the unconscionable, like the empty opportunistic husks they are. Ironically, it's Matt Gaetz, a Trump-endorsed junior congressman from Florida and a conspiracy theory-shilling hack who is unafraid to defend sexual abusers, who is Cohen's ace in the hole. Gaetz, a man who demonstrably is not above peddling depraved absurdity for political gain, is the only subject that meets Cohen with the level of skepticism that a human being ought to have for anyone who wants to give toddlers guns, and therefore denies his Republican colleagues the absolution they seek in their pre-emptive statements about how they were tricked by Sacha Baron Cohen, peddler of fake news and deceiver of honest American people. The truth is far more damning, and it's there for all of us to see.
