He’s already caused a massive public feud with Sarah Palin, convinced a gun advocate to advertise weapons for toddlers and somehow made a Republican lawmaker drop his trousers and scream the N-word… but Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show Who Is America? isn’t slowing down any time soon.
In the latest clip for his political stunt programme, which airs at 10pm tonight (Monday 30 July) on Channel 4, Cohen bagged a sit-down interview with former Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.
You may remember Roy Moore, who was backed by Donald Trump, after he lost a Senate election in December 2017. Apart from his extreme, hardcore conservative positions like saying ‘homosexual conduct should be illegal’, Moore’s campaign was dogged by accusations that he had sexual contact with a 14-year-old when he was 32, which he denied.
Moore was (thankfully) defeated by 63-year-old Democrat Doug Jones – a man who built a reputation, as a US attorney, of vigorously prosecuting KKK members and fighting for civil rights.
In this clip however, which appears to have been filmed during the campaign, Cohen is again dressed as Israeli ex-Mossad agent Col. Erran Morad.
He begins the interview by saying ironically: “In Alabama, people have always been free, whatever their religion or race or sexuality.”
Moore then agrees: “It’s part of our heritage.”
In reality, Alabama was a slave state before the US Civil War and has a long history of racial inequality and violence. Martin Luther King led marches through the state in 1965 to protest against racial inequality. So, there’s that.
But the real centrepiece of this jaw-dropping clip comes when Cohen whacks out his ‘paedophile detector’ tool.
“It turns out that sex offenders and particularly paedophiles secrete an enzyme,” Cohen explains. “So the phrase ‘sweating like a rapist’ is actually based on science.”
Explaining how the tool is supposedly used in Israel, Cohen goes on: “If they detect a paedophile, the wand alerts the law enforcement and the schools within a 100-mile radius. It’s very, very simple to use. You just switch it on and because neither of us is a sex offender then it makes absolutely nothing.”
He waves the wand over himself and then over a nervous-looking Moore, where it beeps.
“It must be faulty,” Cohen says. “It’s malfunctioning. I’m sure it will do the same with the other guy.”
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Getting visibly angry, Moore says: “I’ve been married for 33 years and never had an accusation of such things. If this is an instrument, I’m certainly not a paedophile, okay? Maybe Israeli technology hasn’t developed properly.”
“I do not support this kind of stuff,” he says as he storms out of the interview.
Another interview assassination successfully achieved, Sacha. Bravo.
Watch the full clip here…
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(Images: Showtime / Getty)
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