Samantha Bee wanted to talk about something more important than the 2016 election on Monday night: money. Or, as she described it to her younger viewers, “Venmo for old people.”
In the week since Bee was last on the air, the Treasury Department announced it will be moving President Andrew Jackson to the back of the $20 bill and replacing him with Harriet Tubman. “Yes! Finally, a black woman making a white man move to the back,” Bee said. But it wasn’t all praise for the historic switch.
While the media touted “uniform acclaim,” Bee called attention to the “Republicans dismissing the decision as rampant political correctness,” “the bigots planning to protest by defacing the bills with racist slurs,” and “the assholes complaining that seeing the un-botoxed face of an American hero, as they stuff their wages into a stripper's g-string, will instantly melt their tiny, thumb-sized boners.”
“When we make such a dramatic change to something no one ever looks at, we have to consider the fragile feelings of white men, who tragically appear on only seven out of seven bills currently in production,” Bee continued. “Where on earth could I find a white man sharing his feelings?”
Exhibit A was Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, who called “ousting a past president who has done so much in the founding of our country” an “unbelievable sign of disrespect.”
“Hate to break it to you, Sparky,” Bee told him. “Jackson wasn’t involved in the founding of our country, because the Revolutionary War happened before Old Hickory’s pubes came in. He was not a Founding Father, he was a genocidal prick who forced the relocation of nonwhites and fomented populist rebellion—kind of like a Trump with better hair!”
Bee’s team even dug up footage of Kilmeade defending a proposal to replace Ulysses S. Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill. “Hey, look, I get it, we all want to jack off to our money,” Bee said. “That's why we call it the trickle-down economy!”
Then there were those like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and others who thought Tubman should go on the rarely used $2 bill, or even a denomination that has not yet been invented. Perhaps a $12 bill, one man suggested to reporters.
“Yeah, that would be something,” Bee concluded. “Make the black person worth exactly 3/5 of the white person’s value. Gee, why hasn’t anybody ever thought of that before?”
