Oliver is back — and he's slamming Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz and the Republicans' CRT lies
John Oliver returned Sunday night to a new season of "Last Week Tonight," railing against the Republicans' latest lie that some law school idea is being taught to kindergarteners.
He began with a smackdown of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who claimed at a right-wing conference that critical race theory was just as racist as the klansmen in the white sheets.
"I do not like that Ted Cruz man. I do not like him shouting klan," Oliver said in his own Dr. Seuss-style poem. "I do not like him in a room. I do not like him in Cancun. I do not like him playing ball. I do not like his face at all. I wish he'd lose his cushy job. That man Ted Cruz is a f*cking knob."
But the core of his message is that the helicopter parents suffering from white fragility are really nothing more than people who are sick of being called out on their racism.
He played one clip of a parent raging at school board meetings claiming that America wasn't racist anymore because it elected Barack Obama to the White House. Oliver noted it was an interesting claim because racists spent most of the campaign claiming he wasn't an American citizen and was actually a "secret Muslim."
"By now you probably know, it's a manufactured panic," Oliver explained. He walked through the founder of the anti-CRT campaign, who is actually an activist pushing "school choice." That movement comes from the white backlash from Brown v. Board of Education that decided segregated schools were a violation of the Constitution. Since then, racist activists have been pushing for tax-payer-funded education that protects their white children from being exposed to a person of color. As Oliver put it, it would be where they taught the Civil War like "antebellum fan fiction."
The host then brought up Glenn Youngkin who won the Virginia governor's race by promising he'd ban critical race theory. He then was forced to admit on live television that there's really no such thing as CRT in Virginia schools. Meanwhile, in multiple states, CRT laws have been passed that ban teaching, but some even go further. In Tennessee, for example, teachers can't teach anything that makes students upset or uncomfortable. That law is one lawsuit away from being destroyed after a parent complains that math is causing their child to feel bad. Another could sue a school because they feel that the C- their child got triggered them.
In Florida, they're taking it a step further, banning any talk about being gay. In Arizona, they're also mandating that teachers disclose the sexuality of a parent's child if they find out that they're LGBTQ, even if it means that the child could be hurt or abused.
But the best part of Oliver's takedown came when he showed a clip on the Fox network in which Tucker Carlson admitted he had no idea what CRT actually was.
"Well, I've never figured out what critical race theory is, to be totally honest with you, after a year of talking about it," Carlson said to Brit Hume, about railing against it for months."
According to Carlson, it's all about kids being taught "some races are morally superior to others that some are inherently sinful and some are inherently saintly, and that's immoral to teach that because it's wrong." In fact, that's not only what CRT isn't, it's what the anti-CRT laws effectively created.
Oliver closed by showing one of the Loudoun County, Virginia mothers, Patti Hidalgo Menders, who spoke to Showtime's "The Circus," and explained that some Black people just dress wrong and aren't respectful. She promised that she isn't a racist, though. A study revealed that Loudoun County, Virginia, "it is shocking the extent to which students report the use of the N-word."
"And I think as a society we've now agreed that white people should not be using the N-word a 'shocking' number of times, unless that is, that they have a lucrative podcast deal with Spotify," Oliver said, referring to Joe Rogan.
See the epic video below:
Leave a Comment
Related Post