Sacha Baron Cohen's second episode of Who Is America? was even more hilarious and scathing than the first: there was the already-infamous Dick Cheney interview, a segment where a Bachelor contestant lied about charity work, and some very angry Arizonians furious about a mosque coming to their town. Ted Koppel even popped in at one point, but he wound up looking pretty good.
But the most damning part of the season so far was Sunday's segment featuring Georgia lawmaker Jason Spencer. In it, Cohen's fake anti-terror expert character, Col. Erran Morad, somehow convinces the state representative that the only way to ward off terrorists is by shouting racist slurs, baring his butt, and using a selfie stick to snap upskirt photos under burqas—and Spencer gladly does it all.
"Because of who you are, you could be a victim of kidnapping by ISIS," Cohen-as-Morad tells Spencer. "You have two seconds to attract attention. How do you attract attention?"
"You start screaming, you take your clothes off," Spencer says.
"In America, there is one forbidden word," Cohen continues. 'It is the N-word. Now, I'm going to be the terrorist. You have three seconds to attract attention. Go!"
Then Spencer starts shouting the racist slur at the top of his lungs until Cohen stops him.
"Are you crazy? The N-word is 'noony,' not this word. This word is disgusting."
"Got it," Spencer says.
Cohen then convinces Spencer to pull down his pants and chase him around a gym with his naked butt, because Morad tells him terrorists are "scared of being seen as homo." Spencer also films "a message to terrorists" where he threatens to cut terrorists' dicks off and shove them in their mouths.
Spencer, who is currently serving his fourth and final term in office, is now facing calls for his resignation from politicians and the Council for American-Islamic Relations.
"Representative Spencer has disgraced himself and should resign immediately,” Georgia House Speaker David Ralston told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday. “Georgia is better than this.” Georgia governor Nathan Deal tweeted similar sentiments, though did not expressly call on Spencer to step down. "There is no excuse for this type of behavior, ever, and I am saddened and disgusted by it," Deal wrote.
Spencer has yet to publicly respond in the wake of the controversy, but he tried to preemptively dismiss his actions in a statement last week, accusing Cohen of taking "advantage of my fears that I would be attacked by someone" and "[exploiting] my state of mind for profit and notoriety." Fear of attack doesn't quite explain away the whole screaming racist epithets and pulling your pants down thing, though.
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