On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee performs The Racist Music Man about hate-peddling Kris Kobach
Why, it’s a genuine, bona fide mini-musical about a “law they didn’t need for a problem they didn’t have” from Full Frontal host Samantha Bee! Sandwiched between a segment about Donald Trump and the Republicans’ new plan to scuttle the seriously not-death-spiraling Affordable Care Act and part one of her field piece to faraway Kurdistan (where the perpetually beleaguered Kurds she talked to expressed hope that Trump’s insanity and recklessness might accidentally provide them some relief), Bee and her staff took on the long history of shitty, racist actions by Trump’s current voter suppression czar and perpetually losing lawyer Kris Kobach. Starting off with a more or less conventional Bee smackdown of Kobach’s career path of working with those down-home racists at anti-immigrant zealot organization The Federation for Immigration Reform (self-branded as FAIR for maximum Orwellian irony), Bee showed how Kobach and the gang (who are classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) have peddled some seriously poisonous legal snake oil to small towns around the country.
As the prejudiced flim-flammery was exposed, however, Bee, noting the suspicious similarities to a certain musical huckster (and his monorail-hawking animated equivalent), launched into an energetically pissed off riff on The Music Man’s “Ya Got Trouble.” With Bee as a glad-handing Kobach (and a little surprise help from Broadway’s current Hamilton, Javier Muñoz), the jaunty number followed FAIR’s racist carnival barker strategy to the letter. First, stir up local anti-immigrant sentiment among the small town white population. Next, get mayors and city councils to pass “the nuttiest immigration laws ever passed” (according to Bee), that are invariably challenged in court by those sticklers for the Constitution, the ACLU. Send in “shitty lawyer” Kobach to fight for the towns’ right to party like it’s 1899 (as far as small-minded xenophobia goes) even though he has gotten consistently trounced by the ACLU. Finally, after sticking the towns they’d sent scurrying for their pitchforks with massive legal bills and punitive settlements, move onto the next bunch of racist-adjacent rubes.
As Bee gamely croons away as the slimy Kobach (currently head of Trump’s completely farcical voter fraud task force), Muñoz’s downtrodden immigrant townsperson attempts vainly to sing about the very human cost of Kobach and FAIR’s race-baiting hate-making, to no avail. Even when the townsfolk realize they’ve been left in a shameful multi-million-dollar pickle, there’s nothing anyone can do but pick up the pieces of yet another small town wrecked by Bee-Kobach’s mendacious musical scapegoating.