John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight desk to talk about the ugly resurgence of birtherism. Via The Daily Beast:
“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,” said Oliver. “It’s a depressing resurgence of birtherism, so of course Trump jumped all over it.”
I heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements. And by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer. I have no idea if that’s right.“Oh, I’ll tell you if it’s right: it fucking isn’t!” exclaimed Oliver. “And it’s frankly amazing how slow Trump is to respond to so many things like, I don’t know, public health crises, yet when it comes to amplifying racist conspiracy theories, suddenly he’s The Flash on cocaine.” (Trump also led the racist birtherism campaign against Barack Obama.)
He then went after GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Qanon conspiracy nut.
He went on: “The [QAnon] conspiracy involves a range of batshit theories but very basically, 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 [Cemex]. 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.”
