Oliver Freaks: ‘How the F- -k Did We Get Here and What the F- -k Do We Do Now?’

November 15th, 2016 9:24 AM

British comedian John Oliver remained in full denial on his Sunday night HBO show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, bitterly lashing out with expletives at Americans for supporting Donald Trump, demanding: “How the f- -k did we get here and what the f- -k do we do now?”

He proceeded to blame Trump’s win on “deep racism and/or indifference to it,” the media for going too easy on him as they failed to destroy “a serial liar,” argued that to “mitigate Trump’s damage” his viewers should support “actual journalism” by subscribing to the New York Times, Washington Post and ProPublica and what he saw as a bad year topped by the Trump “calamity” led him to end his show, the final episode – thankfully – until February, with a bunch of people, including some celebrities, declaring “f- -k 2016!”

All very high brow.

Warning: Video includes many utterances of the F word.

Two nights before, HBO’s Real Time delivered the same type of condescendingly lecturing, a compilation of clips which earned this week’s Mainstream Media Scream for Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner. The montage includes Bill Maher claiming repealing ObamaCare will lead to deaths as he mocked concern about Hillary’s e-mail, John Legend charging Trump sold “a load of bulls--t and racism” and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman calling Trump’s election “a moral 9/11.”

The clips in the video toward the top of this post, all from the November 13 Last Week Tonight on HBO. The video also includes the prodigious use of the word which begins with f and ends with a k, but which are not transcribed here:

> Well, clearly, there are many possible answers to that question [what the f happened?]:  including misleading forecasts that bred complacency, a flawed candidate who failed to appeal to rural white and working-class voters, and -- and this is worth repeating -- deep racism and/or indifference to it. And for those, including us, who were shocked by Tuesday, we’re going to be examining all of this for years. But for tonight, let’s look at one narrow element that may have helped bring us here, because it will be important going forward: That is our media. Specifically, how a system that is supposed to catch a serial liar failed. And I’m not just referring to mainstream TV news, although some did wait far too long to take Trump seriously, giving him billions of dollars’ worth of free media. CNN sometimes ran his speeches almost in their entirety....

> You need to support actual journalism by buying a subscription to outlets like the Times or the Post or your local newspaper. Or donating to groups like ProPublica, a non-profit which does great investigative journalism. The point is, if we don’t get actively involved to at least mitigate Trump’s damage, things will not be okay.