After a few weeks off, Last Week Tonight returned to HBO on Sunday (following the premiere of Lovecraft Country) with an episode centered about jury duty in the United States. You can watch that segment here, but before host John Oliver got into how “the role of a court is not to make it f*cking easy by having cases heard by only a group of white people,” he touched on President Trump beating the birther drum. Yes, again.
“The big news was Kamala Harris being announced as Biden’s running mate, a decision that sent conservatives scrambling for attack strategies, from claiming it’s an ‘extreme, far-left’ ticket — which it absolutely isn’t — to a baseless accusation that she may not meet the citizenship requirements to hold the office despite being very much born in the United States. It’s a depressing resurgence of birtherism, so of course Trump jumped all over it,” Oliver said. Trump told reporters last week that he heard Harris “doesn’t meet the requirements. I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”
Harris was born in California.
“It’s frankly amazing how slow Trump is to respond to so many things like, I don’t know, public health crises,” Oliver cracked, “yet when it comes to amplifying racist conspiracy theories, suddenly he’s The Flash on cocaine.” The host then brought up the “batshit theories” being peddled by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right politician from Georgia who is favored to win a congressional seat, and QAnon supporters everywhere.
“Many QAnon supporters believe in a global conspiracy involving a ring of Satan-worshipping, child-molesting criminals led by prominent Democrats that includes everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks to a Mexican cement company. They also believe information about it is being leaked via cryptic posts on the internet by someone with very high Q-level security clearance, which sounds just as made-up as it definitely is,” Oliver explained. He then summed up the dangers of whack-a-doodle theories:
“It’s bad enough to encounter these conspiracy theories online, [but] it is worse to potentially encounter them in the halls of Congress. I would love to be shocked that the Republican leadership is embracing an ongoing troll with a history of racist comments but the truth is they’ve been doing that for years now because you can only see Greene as a disturbing anomaly if you ignore the basic facts that when it comes to the modern Republican party, where they go one, they go all.”
You can watch the entire episode here.
