On the latest episode of Full Frontal, Samantha Bee digs in to why sitting Republican lawmakers seem to be calling everyone pedophiles all of a sudden.
The Senate hearings for the now-confirmed next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ketanji Brown Jackson featured a number of Republicans focusing hard on Jackson’s record regarding her sentencing of child pornography offenders. They pushed bad-faith, completely misleading arguments that she has shown a pattern of going easy on those offenders, which is simply not accurate at all.
Bee doesn’t get into it but Republicans are also using terms like “pedophile” and “groomer” to describe anyone who opposes anti-LGBTQIA legislation like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and the copycat bills popping up across the country.
Bee sums up what’s driving these accusations being lobbed at Jackson and anyone who supports her, saying, “Republicans are intentionally making baseless accusations because they have nothing else on which to fault her and they know they’re arguing in bad faith.”
She also explains how all of this is, at its core, one big QAnon dog-whistle.
“Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way for Republicans to score points with their base, especially with the recent rise of debunked child abuse conspiracy theories,” Bee says, because “as nonsensical as this all sounds, it’s becoming more and more mainstream.” So Republicans are cashing in on that, no matter how ludicrous, offensive, and legitimately dangerous it is—since calling everyone groomers and pedophiles makes it more difficult to protect children from real threats, by which, I of course mean the Republican party.
Watch Bee’s full monologue here:
