Samantha Bee Doesn’t Want Your Prayers, Politicians

“Is it okay if instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes?”


In the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, Samantha Bee opened Full Frontal Monday night without the usual music and applause. She began her show by saying that although protocol after a mass shooting is usually to offer well-meaning words of support, she was too angry.

“Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems,” Bee implored, before cutting to a C-SPAN clip of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), an outspoken proponent of gun control, speaking on the floor to Congress about the number of victims lost to gun violence in 2015.

She then focused on the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, who “beat his ex-wife..had been reported multiple times to his employer as homophobic and unhinged, and the FBI had twice questioned him for ties to terrorism—but none of these things disqualified him from legally buying a gun that shoots 45 rounds a minute.”

“But hey, who could have predicted letting suspected extremists buy guns was a bad idea?” Bee says, cutting to a video of President Obama explaining only two weeks ago that although he could put U.S. citizens suspected of having ties to ISIS on the no-fly list, he was powerless in restricting their access to legally obtaining a weapon, “because of the National Rifle Association.”

Pointing out that Australia (“also hated by ISIS,” reads a graphic onscreen) has not had a mass shooting since the country’s parliament passed strict gun laws in 1996, Bee then criticized Florida Governor Rick Scott, who said the most important thing to do in the wake of the shooting was to pray.

“There is no shortage of troubled twenty-somethings out there, and whether they’re radicalized by ISIS, or homophobia, or white nationalism, or a dislike of movies,” she said, “we are making it far too easy for their derangement to kill us.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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