John Oliver blasts Meghan McCain for call to stop Asian hate after saying people can call it the China virus

At the top of his show Sunday evening, John Oliver addressed the mass shooting in Atlanta this week in which eight people were killed, six of whom were Asian Americans.

Oliver began by calling out the sheriff's deputy who seemed to sympathize with the shooter by saying he was having a bad day.

"You get that this press conference is about mass murder, right? You don't get to minimize what happened like that," said Oliver. "Alexander had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and what he did was shrug it the f*ck off and go to bed while managing to murder zero people. "

While authorities seem to not want to call it a hate crime, Oliver said that when a "white man, driving across two counties, going to three Asian-owned businesses, shooting and killing six Asian women in a city that is 4 percent Asian sure as sh*t seems a lot more like a hate crime than a bad f*cking day."

While President Joe Biden called attacking Asians "unamerican," Oliver explained that it's about as American as one can be.

"Anti-Asian racism has long been a fact of American life," Oliver said. "From the treatment of Chinese railroad workers in the 1800s to the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the Watsonville riot in 1930 when a white mob rampaged through a Filipino farmworker community, through the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2, through deadly cases of racial scapegoating like the murder of Vincent Chin, killed in 1982, by two white autoworkers in Detroit." The men mistook Chin as a Japanese man who they blamed for taking their jobs. Chin was from China. The men who killed him said that they weren't motivated by racism.

So racism against Asian Americans is probably as American as denying that you're racist.

Given our history, it was one of the reasons that many were sounding the alarm about an increase in Asian-American hate and President Donald Trump's keen ability to scapegoat China for his own failures on the coronavirus. So when the right began complaining about liberals taking issue with Trump calling it "the Wuhan virus," the China virus," and the "Kung flu."

That's when Oliver singled out Meghan McCain, who, in 2020, said, "if the left wants to focus on PC labeling the virus, it's a great way to get Trump reelected. I don't have a problem with people calling it whatever they want. It's a deadly virus that did originate in Wuhan. I don't have a problem with it."

"Oh good! Meghan McCain doesn't have a problem with it," said Oliver. "Listen, not to the scores of Asian Americans telling everyone that the term is dangerous and offensive. Instead, gather around and take the word of a white woman who's dressed like she's about to lay off 47 people over Zoom. Now, I will say, Meghan McCain, posted this week, 'Stop Asian Hate,' with three broken hearts emoji. Which is a fine sentiment to throw up on Twitter after the fact. But there has to be an understanding that saying, 'I don't have a problem with calling it the China virus,' is very much giving space for hate to grow."

See Oliver's takedown below:

meghan mccainwww.youtube.com