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In the aftermath of a March 16, 2021, shooting rampage in which eight people, mostly Asian-American women, were shot dead at three Atlanta-area spas, attention turned to the scourge of anti-Asian bigotry, violence, and harassment in the United States. In the March 21 episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight, the English comedian John Oliver highlighted that absolutely terrible trend and outlined the long record of anti-Asian rhetoric, violence, and discrimination in American history. Oliver also brought up widespread concerns about former U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated insistence on referring to COVID-19 with inflammatory labels such as the China virus and the Chinese virus, despite guidelines that discourage naming diseases after nations or regions because it can cause baseless stigmatization and vilification of entirely blameless ethnic, racial, and national groups. Oliver said the argument against using those labels was one that not everyone seemed to find convincing and segued into a clip of the commentator Meghan McCain, daughter of former U.S. Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, speaking on ABC's The View. In the clip, McCain could be heard to say: Oliver mocked McCain, pointing out that in the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, she had posted on Twitter STOP ASIAN HATE along with three broken heart emojis, which he described as a fine sentiment to throw up on Twitter after the fact, adding: But there has to be an understanding that saying 'I don't have a problem with calling it the China virus' is very much giving space for that hate to grow. The day after Oliver's criticism, McCain apologized on Twitter, writing: I condemn the reprehensible violence and vitriol that has been targeted towards the Asian-American community. There is no doubt Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric fueled many of these attacks and I apologize for any past comments that aided that agenda. The episode formed the basis of news reports by various outlets including Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Yahoo! News. We examined the original source of McCain's remarks and checked the context leading up to and following them. Our conclusion is that Oliver fairly and accurately represented her pronouncement that she had no objection to various labels for COVID-19, including those used by Trump. Though stripped from a longer discussion, the editing of McCain's comments did not misrepresent their sense. As a result, we are issuing a rating of True. However, later in the same discussion, McCain did emphasize that she did not support any kind of racial targeting against Asian Americans. The clip shown by Oliver originally came from a discussion on the March 18, 2020, episode of ABC's The View. That conversation can be watched in full, below. The panel debated Trump's use of the term Chinese virus, and at one point Dan Abrams, ABC News chief legal analyst and a guest on that day's episode, provided the following political assessment of the controversy: Host Whoopi Goldberg appeared to condemn the use of such labels because it could lead to attacks on Asian Americans, saying We need to stop calling it, or labelling it like it's — 'they did it to us.' Mother Nature really did this to us. At that point, McCain intervened. In the interests of thoroughness and transparency, the following is a lightly edited transcript of her remarks: The fact that McCain later emphasized that she did not support any racial targeting of Asian Americans does not cancel out the sense and effect of her other remarks or inoculate her from criticism. However, it was a relevant stipulation and one that the Last Week Tonight segment did leave out. McCain later made a rather telling remark when Goldberg brought up Trump's inflammatory rhetoric from the 2016 presidential campaign:
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