According to Vanity Fair, Sacha Baron Cohen crashed a pro-gun rally in Washington on Saturday, taking the stage in disguise and performing what seems to be an extremely racist and just generally offensive song that advocated for attacking people in masks, killing people in Asia, and injecting Barack Obama and Dr. Anthony Fauci with the coronavirus. Vanity Fair says the song was met with “hollerin’” from the attendees of the rally, while local news outlet The Olympian quotes a man named James Blair who is apparently a city councilman in the area as saying that the crowd turned on the bearded, overall-wearing singer after they “realized what he was saying” and tried to rush the stage. He also categorizes the song in a Facebook post as a “bullshit stunt” and suggests that people in the crowd who were singing along were paid actors and that they “DO NOT” represent the other attendees or the event itself.
Speaking of the event itself, Vanity Fair says this rally, March For Our Rights 3, was first organized as a “response” to the March For Our Lives gun control demonstrations that students organized after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, so what this event does represent is people who think that children who don’t want to be murdered in school is something that requires a response.
Here are some videos from the event:
As for how this happened, that actually seems to be an interesting story: As the organizers explain it, they received a surprise donation at the last minute so the event could hire this singer (who everyone now agrees was Sacha Baron Cohen), set up sound equipment, and pay for security. The security was actually there to keep people away from Baron Cohen and to facilitate a secret getaway, though there are photos going around of him returning in a different disguise after the performance so he could listen in on interviews with the press trying to figure out what happened.
Variety has now confirmed that it was Sacha Baron Cohen at the event, which means he really did manipulate the organizers of a gun rally into letting him take the stage and sing a racist song, with at least some people in the crowed “hollerin’” and singing along. But… why? The easy guess is that it was being filmed for something, potentially a return of his Who Is America? TV series on Showtime, but Baron Cohen was adamant back in 2018 that the show was done and would not be coming back. Considering how secretive Showtime was about Who Is America? the first time around, we might not even know if this was for that until it’s already on TV—if this particular stunt ends up on TV at all, since the show’s much-publicized Sarah Palin interview didn’t even air.