On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that when you dehumanize someone, it does get used to justify violence, and the shooter at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner wasn’t insane to the point of delusion, but was listening to both social media “and media media.”
Maher said, “Once you start with Hitler, it’s like, any time you do — we’ve seen it in many places in the world where they make someone into, whether it’s Rwanda or the Hutus saying the Tutsi were vermin or the Hutu — somebody was vermin I remember…whenever you dehumanize someone to that degree, people are going to go, oh, I’m doing the — I’m a hero. This guy wasn’t crazy crazy, like, he wasn’t hearing — the dog wasn’t talking to him and the moon. He just was, like, watching the –.”
Kings College, Cambridge Provost and Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett then cut in to say, “Social media.”
Maher responded, “Yeah, and media media.”
Earlier in the show, Maher said that, as the president, Trump sets the tone for the country, and criticized his rhetoric.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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