On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver on Sunday night, the host voiced his harshest criticism of Javier Milei, a right-wing liberal Argentine who is challenging that country’s finance minister in the upcoming presidential runoff.
Oliver introduced Milei to American audiences through a 2019 clip that featured Milei in cosplay and describing herself as “General Ancap.” Ancap, short for anarcho-capitalist.
“Yeah! “Just a classic, run-of-the-mill presidential candidate, dressed like Mr. Peanut, dressed like a wizard, dressed like Batman, promising to beat up the Keynesians,” Oliver noted. “If I had one comment about this superhero, though, it would be “The ones that John Maynard Keynes probably isn’t the most compelling super-enemy. Few economists are. There’s a reason the Avengers fought Thanos and not Alan Greenspan.”
Given Argentina’s high inflation and the fact that 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, Oliver said Milei has proposed cutting public spending by 15 percent of GDP, eliminating most taxes and exchanging Argentina’s currency for the U.S. dollar .
Milei has smashed piñata-shaped models of the central bank on television and in his own campaign videos and waved chainsaws in public to symbolize how he wants to cut up the government. A Milei supporter in a chainsaw costume told a reporter that he didn’t think it was a big deal that Milei and his ideas were untested.
“My only rule about not breaking and not arguing with a man dressed as a chainsaw, but many ideas have never been tested,” Oliver replied. “We also haven’t tried retirement homes based entirely on trampolines or putting a raccoon in charge of surgery. That’s because some ideas are just bad.”
Oliver suggested that the reins of “Latin America’s third-largest economy might not be handed over to a man who looks like he was escorted out of a Comic-Con panel for asking Scarlet Johansson too many questions.”
But Oliver also pointed out that Milei has been extremely vocal about other topics that no one has asked about, including revealing details about his sex life. In a television interview in 2018, he told several women that he only ejaculates once every three months. “I firmly believe that the guy we’ve seen screaming at dead economists, destroying miniature banks on TV and waving a chainsaw through the streets may have a little – and I’m sorry to say – support is,” said Oliver.
But with so many Argentines in economic distress, Oliver said he worries they might buy what Milei is selling them, even as the anarcho-capitalist dismisses climate change as a socialist lie and believes Donald Trump is one of the best American presidents of all At times even Pope Francis, who is Argentine, was offended.
“I feel the need to tell you that we didn’t invent this man for this show,” Oliver joked.