The Third Pole needs Sacha Baron Cohen to win. His new (heavily boycotted) film "Ali G"

Sacha Baron Cohen is a seasoned maverick. He takes a swipe at the Trumpian far right – the crudest and most violent sort – without, however, forgetting the radical and ‘woke’ left. The very same left that, in turn, has taken a swipe at both him and his new film Ali G: Who Iz I?, which has been the target of a massive boycott campaign by a media monitoring site called NewsCord (linked to the non-profit organisation ‘Tech for Palestine’), which this summer urged cinemas worldwide to refuse to screen the film, sending over 50,000 emails to major cinema chains. The issue? The character’s “discriminatory language”, described as “a constant caricature of Afro-British street culture by a white comedian”.

It is regrettable that the entire film revolves precisely around this. Ali G (one of Cohen’s best-known characters after the unlikely Kazakh reporter Borat and the gay journalist Brüno) is an Englishman obsessed with rap and chunky gold chains, and with his fake Jamaican accent (he claims to have roots there) he conducts nonsensical interviews with the world’s most famous figures. In 2003, even an embarrassed Donald Trump fell prey to him, but the party’s over: Ali G, penniless and with a child on the way, is forced to strike out on his own on TikTok and ride the wave of trends. Here too, however, the public is organising to boycott him and even erase him. And not just in the digital sense of the word.

Cohen’s mockumentaries blend reality and fiction, placing absurd and real characters in situations that are often bordering on the obscene. With Ali G, the London-based actor managed to capitalise on widespread hate campaigns, which were as much a feature of the screen as they were on social media. It certainly did not help that Cohen was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. A couple of years ago – as we wrote here – he lashed out at the BBC over its supposedly neutral headline regarding the worst attack Israel had suffered since 7 October: the one in Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights, where twelve children were murdered by a rocket fired by Hezbollah. He also accused TikTok of “creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the days of the Nazis”. This was far too much for social media users, who, shouting “Zionist”, rallied to block his film. “Although we expected some negative reactions for bringing a character from a different era back to life, we were deeply saddened to witness first-hand the attacks on Sacha, as a Jewish public figure,” said Monica Levinson, the film’s executive producer. The film was, in fact, only in cinemas for a couple of days before it was released on Prime Video.

But could an actor who managed to escape a frenzied mob of white supremacists armed to the teeth (Borat 2) ever be intimidated by a few social media posts? Sacha Baron Cohen has therefore joined the wave of hatred directed at himself by dressing up as Dr Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, a radical left-wing lecturer who, on a social media profile created specifically for this purpose, has begun urging users to boycott the film in every possible way, claiming it was “screened in cinemas without your consent”. 

In the film, this character attempts to undermine Ali G’s career by assembling a motley crew reminiscent of Ice, including several die-hard Trump supporters. The latter, however, are not actors. Cohen manages to persuade them to carry out the most obscene, reckless and gruesome acts imaginable. Among them are former Republican MP George Santos, as well as Michael Aboud, chairman of the El Paso County Republican Party, who, upon discovering he had ended up in the film, said he was ready to sue the actor.

Sacha Baron Cohen takes aim at the most narrow-minded left, but also at the most dangerous right. He dismantles extremism with a flair for the absurd and the exaggerated, ultimately earning the hatred of both sides. Add to that his focus on anti-Semitism (not exactly in vogue) and you have the perfect centrist to unite an increasingly divided ‘Third Pole’. What are they waiting for to hire him?