HBO host John Oliver had no problem mocking his network’s own brand extension on Sunday night, even as he defended the cable and streaming provider’s recent decision to temporarily remove Gone with the Wind from HBO Max.
“I’m told that no longer can you find on HBO Gone with the Wind, because somehow that is now offensive,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said last week. “Where do you draw the line? Is it, should George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison be erased from history? What about FDR and his internment camps? Should he be erased from history? Or Lyndon Johnson, who has a history of documented racist statements?”
“The answer to ‘where you draw the line’ is literally always ‘somewhere.’ You draw it somewhere,” Oliver said in response on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight. “Also, HBO is not permanently pulling the movie—it’s going back up with additional context. And finally, who gives a shit if something’s not on HBO Max? In fact, there may be no better way to obliterate all evidence of something’s existence than to put it on HBO Max, the only ash heap of history that costs $15 a month.”
Last week, WarnerMedia announced it had removed the 1939 Oscar winner from the new streaming platform, with plans to put Gone with the Wind back on HBO MAX with more contextual material at a later date. Said the company, “Gone With The Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible. These depictions are certainly counter to WarnerMedia’s values.”
While the main crux of Oliver’s weekly broadcast focused on facial recognition software, the host used the opening minutes of Last Week Tonight to comment on the previous week’s social justice efforts. Of a viral video in which the president of the New York Police Benevolent Association yelled about how law enforcement has been “left out of the conversation” on police brutality, Oliver said, “Yeah, you have been left out of the conversation. But I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’ve been fucking terrible at conversing. If a high school debate team argued their rebuttals by tear-gassing the other team, they probably wouldn’t be invited back to regionals.”
Of former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who said in 2019 that he wanted to allocate an additional $300 million into police reform (a policy proposal he has not yet changed), Oliver called his position “an example of whatever the precise opposite of reading the room is.”
And then there was Tucker Carlson. The Fox News host has become a weekly punching bag for Oliver, and his vitriol didn’t abate on Sunday. Last week, Carlson complained about a recent special episode of Sesame Street that sought to explain racism and inequality to children. “It’s a children’s show. Got that, Bobby? America is a very bad place and it’s your fault. So no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain,” Carlson said.
“First, obviously: Fuck off, Tucker, you one-man homeowner’s association,” Oliver said in response. “And second, that unspecified ‘they’ in ‘what they do to you when you grow up’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There’s basically two options for what that could mean. One, that Tucker and his viewers have benefited from a racist system that renders any specifications of who ‘they’ are unnecessary; or two, that his show is a badly-written piece of garbage.”
He added, “So which is it, Tucker? Are you a racist, or are you a total fucking moron? The answer can be, and indeed is, both.”
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