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WATCH: John Oliver Tries To Separate Venezuela Crisis From Socialism

   DailyWire.com

John Oliver wants you to know just how bad it’s gotten under the socialist regime in Venezuela, just so long as you agree not to blame socialism. The real problem, he underscores in a recent segment on “Last Week Tonight,” is not the socialist ideology that has driven the decisions by Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicholas Maduro that have created the socialist dystopia — it’s really just “epic mismanagement.”

Oliver, who recently decided it would be classy to target a children’s book by Mike Pence’s daughter, devoted a segment of his show over the weekend to providing his audience with a sobering update on the nightmarish situation in Venezuela. But right off the bat he made clear one of his goals for the evening: separating the tragic situation from the socialist ideology that created it.

“Over the last few years, it seems like every time Venezuela has been on the news, it’s because something awful is happening,” says Oliver, cutting to footage of the ongoing food crisis, riots, and dictatorial crackdown on protesters. “It’s true. Things in Venezuela have been extremely grim,” he admits.

But then Oliver pivots to his underlying theme for the segment: “If you follow conservative media at all, you might have seen it frequently painted as the inevitable dire consequences of a socialist government.”

As an example of “conservative media” coverage, he rolls out a clip from the much-maligned right-wing conspiracy site Infowars — not exactly a mainstream representation of “conservative” coverage. After mocking both the Infowars infobabe and the “extremely chill” Bernie Sanders supporter she interviews, which he condescendingly describes as a “nice distillation of the current level of discourse in America,” Oliver moves on to explaining what went wrong in Venezuela.

“What is happening in Venezuela is not just extremely important, it’s absolutely worth paying attention to,” he says “because this is not just a story about socialism — there are plenty of socialist countries that look nothing like Venezuela — it’s a story about epic mismanagement.”

While Oliver does a solid job of presenting just how dire the situation is and highlighting the key policies that created the crisis, he downplays the issue of the ideology driving the policies, instead framing the economic implosion of the country as the result of a series of bad economic and political decisions by an inept government, which happens to be socialist.

Video below (warning: language):

Related: SHAPIRO: John Oliver Targets Pence Daughter’s Children’s Book. Then His Followers Spam The Book’s Amazon Page With Hateful Garbage.

H/T John Sexton

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