On Sunday night, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight took on a truly chaotic week. President Trump sweated and bellowed through an unhinged NBC town hall where he voiced his support for the baseless QAnon conspiracy-theory crowd, who allege that Democrats and Hollywood are trafficking and murdering babies. He resumed his COVID superspreader rallies and shared a batshit-insane conspiracy theory that Barack Obama and Joe Biden did not kill Osama bin Laden in Operation Neptune Spear and instead had SEAL Team Six killed. Never mind the fact that the SEALs who took out bin Laden are still very much alive—including Robert J. […]
Oliver
20 posts
“It has been a genuinely extraordinary week for the White House,” said John Oliver at the top of Sunday night’s Last Week Tonight. There’s been so much chaos this past week that the HBO host said they didn’t have time to even address the $750 Trump paid in income tax for two years (as revealed by The New York Times), Melania Trump “essentially saying ‘fuck Christmas’” (recordings dropped by former Melania aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff), and Trump refusing to condemn the Proud Boys during the first presidential debate, telling the far-right anti-masturbation hate group to “stand back, and stand by.” All […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver returned from a brief Emmys-timed break to the Last Week Tonight desk. And the Emmy winner began by addressing the news of President Trump nominating Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late, great Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Barrett, a disciple of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is anti-LGBT, anti-reproductive rights, and anti-immigrant. She belongs to a fringe Charismatic Christian sect called People of Praise, which believes women are second-class citizens to men and the highest level they can attain within the group is that of women’s-issues advocate, which until recently they called “handmaiden.” […]
DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. A new documentary about Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author, will begin streaming on Wednesday. Sacks was a physician and a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. His beautifully written books, such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” examined the mysteries of perception and consciousness by drawing on his observations of his patients. His 1973 book “Awakenings,” which established him as a writer was adapted into a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. “Awakenings” was […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver dedicated all of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to two stories: the Republican National Convention and the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The portion of the chaotic, low-rated RNC that Oliver seemed to take particular issue with was the testimony of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a couple who were there purely because they pulled guns on non-threatening, unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters for walking by their home in St. Louis, Missouri, on the way to protest outside a different home. “They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning. This forced rezoning would […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver dedicated the opening portion of his Emmy-winning HBO series, Last Week Tonight, to the Democratic National Convention—a star-studded four-day affair filled with the Bidens, Obamas, celebrity emcees, Billie Eilish, and Diplo DJing in front of a CGI White House. Curiously, the 2020 DNC also featured a number of #NeverTrump Republicans voicing their opposition to the president, including Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain; former New York Rep. Susan Molinari, who was the keynote speaker at the 1996 RNC; former Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the architects of the Iraq War; Meg […]
The US Senate report on alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia should not be taken at face value, film director Oliver Stone has said, angering people who perceive the US president as a tool of the Kremlin. The document released earlier this week is the final report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Russiagate saga. Democratic members of the committee discovered “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives” in the same set of findings that their Republicans colleagues interpreted as proving otherwise. Also on rt.com Not with a bang, but a whimper: Final ‘Russiagate’ […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver returned to the Last Week Tonight desk after a few weeks off to tackle the biggest news of late. “The big news was Kamala Harris being announced as Biden’s running mate—a decision that sent conservatives scrambling for attack strategies, from claiming it’s an ‘extreme, far-left’ ticket—which it absolutely isn’t—to a baseless accusation that she may not meet the citizenship requirements to hold the office despite being very much born in the United States,” said Oliver. “It’s a depressing resurgence of birtherism, so of course Trump jumped all over it.” Yes, in a press conference this week […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver took a break from dunking on Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson’s racist news coverage to address what was sadly one of the biggest stories of the past week: President Donald Trump’s continued spreading of misinformation surrounding the novel coronavirus, which has killed over 157,000 people in the U.S. “Recklessness is abounding right now, heightening the need for strong leadership. And unfortunately, we’re getting the opposite of that,” said John Oliver, before pointing to Trump’s “shockingly reckless” co-sign of Dr. Stella Immanuel, aka “Dr. Demon Sperm,” whose video of her cosplaying as a “frontline doctor” racked up […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver kicked off the latest edition of his acclaimed late-night show Last Week Tonight by addressing the ongoing brutalizing of Black Lives Matter protesters by Trump’s federal agents in Portland, Oregon. “The protests in Portland have actually been going on daily for nearly two months now, since the killing of George Floyd,” said Oliver. “But the deployment of federal agents was a sharp escalation of questionable legality, and yet, to hear the president tell it, he had no choice and it was a terrific idea.” Yes, in a press conference with reporters, Trump announced, “We’re doing a […]
After several weeks away from the steaming pile of shit that is the news these days, John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight to recap our present hellscape. First, he aired a short segment focusing on President Trump’s insane proclamations concerning schools reopening amid a pandemic that has claimed over 140,000 lives, including how the president is presently ignoring CDC guidelines and his health officials in pushing for this, and that he’s threatening to defund schools who don’t obey his demands (thereby cutting education funding for lower-income and developmentally-disabled kids, which is where the bulk of the federal money goes). The […]
Watch the video, John Oliver is brilliant, and of course, utterly truthful and very well informed Daily Beast: The comic then threw to Vice President Mike Pence’s press conference, in which the man who once allowed a horrifying HIV outbreak during his stint as Indiana governor lied through his teeth. “The truth is, we did slow the spread,” he said. “We flattened the curve. We were able to stand up the resources and the capacities in our health-care system to be able to meet this coronavirus, uh, in a way that would put, um, the health of all of our country first.” […]
In lieu of mocking President Donald Trump’s embarrassing rally attendance in Tulsa or continuing his war on the “racist” Fox News troll Tucker Carlson, John Oliver kicked off the latest edition of Last Week Tonight by addressing the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. The numbers are at record highs nationwide, including in red states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas that were quick to flout social-distancing rules and reopen. “The U.S. is now setting records for daily new cases as the virus surges around the country, which makes it both startling—and frankly, infuriating—that on Friday, the vice president made this declaration,” offered […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver took a break from his ongoing flame war with “racist” Fox News host Tucker Carlson to roast President Trump over the embarrassingly low attendance at his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday night. Prior to the event, White House officials—along with Trump—boasted repeatedly that over a million people had registered for the ego-stroking endeavor, and that the crowd would be so large that they needed to construct an overflow area outside the Bank of Oklahoma Center arena to house all of the accused serial sexual abuser’s adoring fans. And yet, according to the Tulsa Fire Department, […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver took some more shots at his new favorite target: Tucker Carlson, the white nationalist-adjacent Fox News anchor, former bow tie enthusiast, and heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune. Two weeks ago, when Carlson claimed that the protests in Minneapolis were worse than “police brutality,” Oliver said, “OK, first: Fuck you, Tucker… people like Tucker love to venerate order at moments like this, and that’s easy to do when order in its current form is designed to benefit and protect you.” Carlson’s George Floyd protest rant (and all the dog-whistle-filled rants in its wake) cost the […]
On Sunday night, after one of the more chaotic weeks in recent memory, John Oliver returned to the stripped-down set of Last Week Tonight to recap the madness. “All week long, protesters have continued to fill the streets in all fifty states in the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd by the police,” he said. “And in response to those protests, which have been a stirring pushback against institutional racism and brutality, it’s been frankly sickening to see them met with this.” The comedian then aired a montage of police using military-style tactics on protesters—drowning them in tear gas, […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver kicked off his Last Week Tonight monologue by addressing the protests that have spread across the nation in response to the captured-on-video killing of George Floyd, who begged and pleaded for his life as then-Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin grinded his knee into his neck for nine excruciating minutes. “Look, it’s been a truly brutal week with protests across the country in response to the horrific killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, and there is clearly a lot to discuss here: How these protests are a response to a legacy of police […]
Buffalo Bills star Ed Oliver is the latest NFL player to land himself in hot water with the law this week after the former first-round NFL Draft pick was arrested on charges of DWI and illegal possession of a firearm. Oliver was arrested late on Saturday in Maryland and booked in the Montgomery County Jail for the two charges, both of which are misdemeanors. According to the Montgomery County Police report, a member of the public reported that a white Ford Superduty vehicle was being driven erratically through a construction zone and was described by the caller as “failing to maintain […]
On Sunday night, after briefly touching on immunologist Rick Bright’s whistleblower testimony in front of Congress, accusing the Trump administration of ignoring his warnings about the novel coronavirus and their lack of preparedness, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver tackled “a major scandal brewing in Washington”: the curious case of Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. This past week, Sen. Burr was forced to step down as Intelligence Committee chair amid an FBI probe into his stock dealings—confiscating his cellphone in the process. “It’s true: The FBI seized Burr’s cellphone on suspicion that he may have used […]
“Refreshingly, one of the biggest pieces of news was not actually coronavirus-related,” offered John Oliver on Sunday’s edition of Last Week Tonight. The comedian then cut to coverage of Attorney General William Barr’s Trump-friendly Justice Department dropping its case against Michael Flynn. “A crime cannot be established here,” Barr told CBS News. “They did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage…People sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.” For the uninitiated, Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, was forced into an retirement from the military (his subordinates told The New York […]