John Oliver used his opening segment on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to talk about the “hard crackdown” on college students in the U.S. protesting the Israel-Hamas war.
He showed clips from a live Fox News report at Columbia University in New York.
“Police swarmed campuses in numbers so extreme; this student summed it up pretty well,” he said.
The clip started out with a reporter asking a student protestor, “What do you think about the NYPD moving in?”
Replied the student: “It’s insane. We have a right to protest. We have a right. Look at that. That’s fucking crazy.”
The reporter then asked: “What are you gonna do if you get arrested?”
The student replied: “I can’t really do much.”
The reporter pressed on: “Will you go with the police if they make an arrest?”
Shrugged the student: “I guess so.”
Cut back to Oliver: “Did that reporter just ask, ‘Are you going to go with the police if they arrest you?’ Kudos to that student for giving the calmest possible answer to what might be the dumbest question ever asked on TV. ‘If the guys with guns put you in handcuffs and drag you to the jail, will you go with them?’ ‘Yeah, I guess so.’”
He continued: “Also thoughts and prayers to the loved ones of the one boomer who was killed by hearing that student say ‘fuck’ on Fox News. Somewhere, a family’s writing [his] obituary. ‘Paul John Roberts passed away in his home when his eyeballs, heart and butthole exploded. At the same time, he’s survived by his wife and three adult children, who no longer speak to him.’”
Incidentally, Sunday night’s episode marked the 300th installment of Last Week Tonight. The show noted the milestone with an image of a cake topped with candles reading “300” at the end of the opening credits.
