After ripping America’s gun-lovin’, race-baitin’, late-night host-attackin’ gun lobby shills the National Rifle Association for—among other things all but guaranteed to leave a blood trail—using their army of relentless right-wing propagandists to “make a bunch of people in pussy hats look like Vietnam,” Samantha Bee got serious. Well, not serious, so much as satirically self-serious, as the Full Frontal host gave NRA spokesperson and “shiny-haired panic button” Dana Loesch a taste of her own provocative poison.
Running down the suspicious internet silence of traditionally tireless troll Loesch in the wake of revelations that the GOP and the NRA were—with laughable ease—infiltrated by now-arrested Russian spy Maria Butina on behalf of her boss, thoroughly mobbed-up Russian oligarch Aleksandr Torshin, Bee speculated that Loesch is laying low. You know, since Butina—dropping a sexily accented pro-gun spiel while bedding Republican power player and “Kevin from Dunder Mifflin,” Paul Erickson—quickly became every gun-fetishist’s heavily photographed dream girl. Putting on her black leather jacket and “scary shark eyes,” Bee then mimicked one of Loesch’s signature “tell people to make out with your guns or whatever” videos.
After accusing the melodramatically inciting Loesch’s to-camera warnings of “having no chill,” the straight-facedly hyperbolic Bee asked Loesch and the no-doubt sweatily strategizing NRA just how they can justify whipping up their gunpowder-scented brew of xenophobia, racism, and veiled threats—all while figuratively and literally being in bed with Russia. “I challenge you to tell me how it’s American for the NRA to take money from foreign agents who want to see our democracy burn,” Bee railed in perfect imitation of Loesch’s perpetually clenched fury, having noted earlier in the show that the IRS has just made it easier for the group to hide its donors’ identities. (Just a coincidence, certainly, even though, you know, that’s exactly the sort of thing Butina and Torshin were lobbying the NRA and GOP for.) Calling out Loesch’s reliance on “false context” to “fear-monger your followers into thinking they’re in a civil war,” Bee closed out by escalating Loesch’s infamous “your time is running out” warning to those crazy liberals like Bee who think that putting gleefully unregulated firepower in the hands of literally anyone who wants it is worth even a second thought. “You’re the NRA’s spokesperson,” chided Bee, “So start spoking,” before upping the ante on Loesch’s ominous hourglass prop with an increasingly bananas series of others. Including, appropriately, a banana.