On Wednesday’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee welcomed viewers to a “semantic vortex” in a black-and-white world where words mean their opposites, or nothing, or everything.
In a piece about the harm President Trump has inflicted on language, Bee greets her audience to say that she has come to talk about what has happened to words. She recalls when words had meaning and then plays a clip of Trump stringing together a series of words and half-completed sentences in a speech.
The first word to go, according to this nihilistic futuristic Bee, was “lies.” She tried to search for it in the media when they spoke about Trump but was greeted with a string of synonyms or Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” explanation. (In Bee’s world, Conway is a word sorceress.)
Fellow victims include: “leak,” “classified” “fake news,” and “complicit.”
The constant misuse of “fake news” starts to tear down Bee. “Resistance is futile. Government is the deep state. Expertise is dangerous elitism. Language is dead,” she proclaims.
With Ivanka Trump’s incorrect definition of “complicit,” Bee starts to question if she even knows the meaning of words anymore. “I guess it has whatever bullshit new meaning you decide to architect for it.”
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