In the first episode of Full Frontal since the police killing of George Floyd and the global uprising that has followed, Samantha Bee went straight at the heart of the problem.
“Like everyone, I’m feeling angry and devastated that our country continues to fail to confront police brutality against black people,” Bee began from the woods behind her house. “It is so fucking frustrating that this keeps happening and that it took a nine-minute video of a man being killed to get people to understand that this is an emergency.”
Calling attention to the protests that have swept this country and the world, the host said, “A sea change is happening and it is step one—the first of many—to upend white supremacy. We have to change the infrastructure of police and justice in this country. It all comes down to this: Black lives matter.”
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“Protesters are taking a stand against the horrors of police brutality,” Bee continued. “And to show how not brutally violent they are, the police have responded with absolutely brutal violence.”
For a late-night monologue, the jokes were few and far between, but when they came, they were pretty devastating. In response to GOP Sen. Tom Cotton’s call to “send in the troops” to stop what he called an “orgy of violence,” Bee said, “The best way to stop an orgy of any kind is to bring Tom Cotton into it. He definitely makes his wife say grace before they have sex.”
The host also criticized the mainstream media for too long characterizing violent cops as nothing but “bad apples.”
“A police officer who murders someone isn’t a ‘bad apple,’” she said. “A police officer who murders someone is a murderer.”
With the photos of the four Minneapolis officers who collectively killed Floyd on the screen beside her, Bee added, “George Floyd’s killers calmly executed him, fully aware that they were being recorded, confident they wouldn’t lose their jobs because they knew the MPD didn’t hold officers accountable for brutality.”
But while it may have been the video of Floyd’s murder that spurred the massive protests this month, Bee said that “to see how fucking awful it can be when cameras aren’t rolling” all you have to do is look at the case of Breonna Taylor, who was shot at least eight times by police in her own home and did not become national news until two months later. “It’s abhorrent that it took two other high-profile murders to make Breonna’s death a national story,” Bee said.
“Look, we have to value black lives all the time, every day,” she said. “Not just when we’re confronted with visuals of police brutality.”
Bee ended her segment by reading just some of the names of the many black Americans killed by police who we’re not talking about right now.
For more, listen to Samantha Bee on The Last Laugh podcast.
