Bill Maher blames Fox News for climate that led to Charlottesville violence

HBO host Bill Maher is blaming Fox News for helping to create the political environment that led to the eruption of violence at a white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va.

In a panel discussion on his show “Real Time,” Maher on Friday said that Fox News, the Internet and President Trump created the “perfect storm” that led to the protests in the Virginia college town last weekend.

“They are the ‘Jurassic Park’ that took the DNA of the Nazis and reanimated it,” Maher said.

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“I believe that without Fox News for years giving the kind of poison they give over their airwaves, putting it into people’s heads, and then the Internet, I think, which you know – people say they get radicalized on the Internet,” he said. “Before if you were a neo-Nazi, unless you found somebody in a coffee shop – now you can find someone on the Internet. And then the president gave permission to them.

“The conservative network in tandem with the Internet and the president’s own inflammatory rhetoric has created a culture in which fringe views, like white nationalism, are normalized, rather than condemned,” he said.

The HBO host’s comments came less than a week after white nationalists and neo-Nazi groups gathered in Charlottesville to protest the removal a Confederate statue.

One person was killed and 19 others were injured when a vehicle plunged through a crowd of counterprotesters who had gathered to oppose the hate groups.

Trump has come under fire in recent days, after he said during a news conference earlier this week that “both sides” were responsible for the violence and equated white nationalists with the protesters opposing them.

He also slammed calls to take down Confederate statues and monuments across the country, accusing supporters of such proposals of trying to alter history.