On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, host Bill Maher tore into Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, deriding him as a "prick" and a "smirkface" who has a "s***-eating grin." He ended up making a pedophilia joke as he cracked that he doesn't know "what Catholic priests see in these kids."
After beginning his opening monlogue by making his latest attacks on President Donald Trump, he then segued to the controversy around video of Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips standing face to face amid a group of protesters while Phillips beat a drum.
In spite of video that surfaced later showing that it was Phillips who approached Sandmann and got in his face, Maher still blamed high school student Sandmann for their proximity as the HBO comedian made snide comments to supposedly poke fun at the story.
Maher referred to the episode as "the smirk heard round the world" as he showed viewers the shortened video that gave the impression that Sandmann was getting in the face of Phillips and taunting him. As he recounted the story, when he recalled the role of the Black Hebrew Israelites in stoking tensions, he only mildly jabbed the radical group:
There's not many of them -- there aren't. They've been in New York -- I remember. They stand on the corner calling white people crackers, and they finally got some attention. They believe African Americans are the literal descendants of the Israelites in the Bible. Except we have DNA, and they're not. They did "23 and Me" and it came back, "You're kidding, right?"
He then related that the group "began to mix it up" with the Catholic high school students, and, without clarifying that Phillips deliberately stood in front of Sandmann, Maher just vaguely stated that Phillips "got in the middle to mediate."
As he began to take aim at Sandmann, Maher first suggested the teen was suffering from lead poisoning before launching into him:
I don't blame the kid -- the smirking kid. I blame lead poisoning and bad parenting, and, oh yeah, I blame that f*****g kid. What a little prick -- smirkface. Smirkfaces. Please, I mean, like that's not a dick move, stick your face in this elderly man's (face).
After dismissing Sandmann's explanation that he was "trying to defuse the situation" with what Maher then called a "s***-eating grin," Maher brought up Catholic boys being molested by priests as he added: "I don't spend a lot of time -- I must tell you -- around Catholic school children, but I do not get what Catholic priests see in these kids."
