Even if you’ve never been to an NRA-sponsored event, you can probably imagine the kind of people it attracts—read: old white guys. But South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is here to tell you how dead wrong you are to think it isn’t a diverse organization. And John Oliver is, fortunately, looking right over her shoulder, ready to point and laugh when an attempt to paint the gun-loving group as an exemplar of heterogeneity went perfectly horribly wrong.
“The NRA held its annual convention, at which… Kristi Noem tried desperately to dispel stereotypes about the group,” Oliver explained, “only to be undercut by a brutal cutaway.”
While speaking to convention attendees on Friday, Noem did her best to attack the mainstream media, which she claimed “would have us believe that the NRA is only made up of old white guys. But there’s a lot of other people—a lot of diversity within the NRA… I may be a mom and a grandmom, but I am the NRA.”
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Oliver nearly lost it when the camera then cut away to the cheering crowd… full of almost exclusively old white dudes (plus a wife or two). “That’s an Oscar-winning edit right there,” a tickled Oliver exclaimed. “Nothing undermines her point better than the cutaway proving the diversity in that crowd ranges somewhere in between Antiques Roadshow and Friends Reunion.”
Oliver went on to describe the scene as “a version of Guess Who? That’s just Oops! All Peter.”
But Oliver had other stories to get to, which is probably a good thing for Noem—who, during the same speech, proudly announced that her TWO-YEAR-OLD granddaughter is already packing heat. “I wanna reassure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles, too,” Noem assured the crowd. “So the girl is set up.”
Whatever that means.
