I saw some of the tweets about the latest Sacha Baron Cohen prank video fly on Twitter yesterday, but as I’ve never found the British comedian even remotely funny, I avoided watching the clip. I saw that he’d managed to wrangle some pro-gunners into saying something stupid, but assumed that while it would no doubt be embarrassing for them, it couldn’t possibly be that bad. Right?
Well the joke was on me. It’s every bit that bad, and worse. Watch this, if you can stomach it.
It’s not terribly surprising that the smirking, smarmy Cohen could get a handful of politicians to spout this mindless garbage. They are, by nature, empty vessels with two primary motivations: PR and cash. And they have zero expertise in any real world pursuit or subject, so they’re willing to spout virtually any drivel that comes up on a TelePrompter in front of them as long as they expect that it might get them, well, more PR or cash.
But it’s difficult to comprehend what goes through the minds of people like Philip Van Cleave or Larry Pratt when they’re approached by someone like Cohen or his producers to participate in something like this. Maybe when the little red light goes on, some sort of break occurs along the Cardi B neural pathways between their brains and their mouths, causing them to parrot whatever inanities Cohen puts in front of them.
So assuming this isn’t subsequently revealed to be some kind of elaborate CGI-generated hoax (if only) these two long-time gun rights advocates have irreparably damaged their credibility. How they can continue to do what they’ve been doing for decades with this on their records is anyone’s guess.
But far worse is the damage that they’ve done to the larger cause of gun rights and the reputations of America’s law-abiding gun owners. People who value their rights and fight back against the never-ending attempts to abrogate them.
By allowing themselves to look like clueless buffoons, they’ve tarred all of us. Both of them should have been far smarter than this. That they weren’t has tangibly damaged the Second Amendment cause. Full stop.