Bill Maher’s latest episode was a weird mix of commentary that both criticized the president and his response to Charlottesville, but also took a stand for free speech that seemed oddly timed so close to the white supremacist marches using the same logic around the country. Luckily Maher has a history of standing by free speech, but isn’t including the Nazis on that list.
Charlottesville likely provided the most interesting piece of commentary from Real Time this week, pointing towards who is to blame for the event and others like it in the past two years. Trump obviously get a fair share, along with certain sections of the internet, but the one that gets the biggest target from Maher is Fox News. We haven’t heard much about the network in the aftermath of the march in Virginia aside from support for the president and condemnation from the Murdoch family against his message, but for Maher the damage has been done long before this year:
“They are the Jurassic Park that took the DNA of the Nazis and reanimated it. I believe that without Fox News for years giving the kind of poison they give over their airwaves, putting it into people’s heads, and then the internet, I think, which you know––people say they get radicalized on the internet. Before if you were a neo-Nazi, unless you found somebody in a coffee shop––now you can find someone on the internet. And then the president gave permission to them.”
He calls all three together the “perfect storm” that helped lead to the violence in Charlottesville that took the life of Heather Heyer and contributed to the death of two members of the police. Political commentator Amy Holmes added that the white supremacists and Nazis were akin to pedophiles online, with social media “magnifying” what they do and who they can connect with.
And for those surprised at Trump’s response or the response of Fox News, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom from California pushed the reality that what we saw this week is who Trump truly is when it comes to race:
“Did they not pay attention to this past election? Did they not pay attention to Donald Trump’s entire career going back 44 years of discrimination lawsuits he was up against?”
He also jumped on Fox News himself, calling it the same as Russian state TV at this point for how much it shares exact wording with Trump policy decisions.
(Via Real Time)