One week after going in on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) over her delusional defense of her Trump impeachment vote, John Oliver kicked off Last Week Tonight with a blistering tirade against Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg—a man with an estimated net worth of $63.7 billion who’s purchased his way up the polls.
After referring to the Democratic primary—which Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) is running away with—as “a fun contest where the winner gets a new nickname from the president before ultimately losing the Electoral College,” the HBO host came for Bloomberg, a man with 40 sexual harassment or discrimination cases against him from 64 employees, most of whom have been muzzled by non-disclosure agreements.
“I know he technically does have two daughters but that doesn’t change the fact that Michael Bloomberg has big virgin energy,” joked Oliver.
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“Even if he drops in the polls, don’t expect him to go away anytime soon,” he continued. “He doesn’t have to. He’s personally spent more than $400 million, mostly on ads, over the last few months. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook have served up 2 billion Bloomberg ads, which has worked out to roughly 30,000 a minute.”
If that weren’t enough, the “charisma-impaired” candidate’s campaign is paying loads for some truly embarrassing sponsored content over many popular Instagram meme accounts.
But the biggest problem, as Oliver sees it, is the racist stop-and-frisk policy that Bloomberg enforced as mayor of New York City. Over 5 million people were affected by stop-and-frisk, while cops made 700,000 stops in 2011 alone (in a city of just over 8 million people).
“This policy was appalling, and fell disproportionately on black and Latino New Yorkers who were the target of over 80 percent of the stops at its peak—something for which Bloomberg was completely unrepentant,” Oliver explained, before throwing to a 2013 clip of Bloomberg telling a talk-radio host, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
And, “while Bloomberg eventually apologized for it, he only did it last November—just days before launching his campaign,” said Oliver. “It’s kind of amazing that Bloomberg thinks his money can make people forget all of this.”
With that, Oliver threw to a meme and implored his viewers that when it comes to voting for Bloomberg, “Don’t even fucking think about it.”
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