It’s Been a Busy Week
It’s always alarming when John Oliver speeds through his top-of-show rundown of the week’s events. You just know that the week’s main story is going to be a doozy. And so it was that the host rushed through a week that saw GOP grifter George Santos get sentenced to prison and the Pope die (after talking with J.D. Vance, which Oliver noted was understandable).
Our Main Story Tonight
We’re all about to die. Or at least that was the not-all-that-exaggerated takeaway from Oliver’s main story this week, which was an even more impassioned than usual exposé on Health and Human Services head and guy who routinely walks to and from airplane bathrooms in his bare feet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (That last detail might sound trivial, but really think about it for a second.)
Noting how Donald Trump promised that RFK Jr. would “go wild on health,” Oliver could only concede that Trump has really come through on that promise. If Elon Musk famously brandished a literal chainsaw to represent his approach to cutting federal spending, Oliver could only sum up Kennedy’s rip-it-all-out method as “finding out what each of your organs does as someone removes them one by one.”
Showing a stammering Kennedy being confronted with a journalist’s facts about how his bone saw cuts to medical research had just severed a study into adolescent diabetes, Oliver suggested gently that the HHS head shouldn’t be finding out what necessary programs he cut after the fact. Further dismantling Kennedy’s defense that to actually find out what vital programs and research are being cut before cutting them would “take too long” and “lose political momentum,” Oliver compared his attitude to a hypothetical bris, noting of that delicate medical procedure, “It is crucially important what you are cutting—speed is not the most important thing.”
Oliver exposed how Kennedy’s cuts have, in accordance with Trump’s anti-DEI purge, eliminated all studies even mentioning topics like minorities, transgenderism, AIDS, and vaccine hesitancy. He showed how Kennedy’s slashing has wiped out food safety protocols, cancer research, Alzheimers studies, combatting the rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea, assisting schools with removing lead paint, rural heating and cooling assistance, oversight of the tobacco industry, and even the Meals on Wheels program. As ever, Oliver named the names of some of Kennedy’s staunchest and most callous henchmen, in this case one Senator Jim Banks (R-IN), seen telling one irate fired health care worker that “he probably deserved” termination for daring to express his concerns to his elected representative.
(Banks also called the worker “a clown,” a comparison Oliver took particular umbrage to since, as he complained, “Can you imagine how disappointed people would be if they thought they were going to see a funny clown and instead got a guy lecturing them about the dire lack of social services for people with disabilities? Trust me, they wouldn’t like it. Sure, they’ll tolerate it for around 12 seasons. They’ll even come and see it filmed every once in a while. But that doesn’t mean they like it. Believe me.”)
And that’s just Kennedy’s first 100 days. Per Oliver, things are about to get a whole lot worse, as the cascading failures of literally life-saving government services and the recklessly shuttered research projects in every area of science and public health are set to play out in the months and years ahead. As Oliver noted, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonsense has already brought back measles and whooping cough (a couple of kids dead from each already this year), while his alternative treatment quackery has seen parents pumping their kids full of toxic levels of vitamin A rather than getting them vaccinated.
All that misinformation is part of Kennedy’s own poisonous brand of crazy according to Oliver, calling out Republican Senator and medical doctor Bill Cassidy (R-LA) for giving a confirmation pass to a guy who claims that Anthony Fauci’s Covid leadership amounted to “a coup against democracy,” that mental health drugs cause school shootings, and who “won’t take sides” on 9/11.
The host also taxed his research staff with debunking a montage of statistical “bullsh*t” from Kennedy, including claims that 50 percent of Chinese people have diabetes (it’s 12 percent), that Americans purchase 70 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals (it’s 6 percent), that 1 in 2 American kids have diabetes (it’s 1 in 285), and that 15 percent of American children are on ADHD meds. (RFK was only off by 10 percent on that one.) Regarding his staff’s workload, Oliver pined for the days when all they had to do was reach out to the Vice President’s office about whether or not their candidate had ever had carnal relations with a sofa, or any other piece of household furniture.
Now, it’s easy to joke, as one contacted expert did, about all this exaggerated nonsense stemming from Kennedy’s infamous brain worm. But as Oliver noted, it’s a lot less funny when you see where Kennedy’s lies are leading. Noting how Kennedy’s long crusade to link vaccines to autism has now got the backing of the entire Trump administration behind it, Oliver examined how RFK Jr’s boast that he’d establish the definitive causes of autism by this September is as ludicrous as it is pre-ordained.
That’s because Kennedy, while denigrating the abilities and dignity of people with autism with grotesque callousness, has put one David Geier in charge of finding the debunked link between vaccines and autism. In a mini-exposé simultaneously shocking and deeply unsurprising, Oliver showed how Kennedy’s go-to “expert” is a “basement quack” who was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license and who, with his equally fraudulent dad Mark, has seen his theories thrown out of every court he’s testified in. Taking in Geier’s complete lack of qualifications, Oliver couldn’t hide his bafflement that one of the most prioritized and controversial healthcare initiatives in the country is now in the hands of “just some f*cking guy.”
Summing up all this anti-science hackery, Oliver couldn’t do much more than prepare viewers for the worst. And that includes himself, as he expressed terror at the burgeoning comeback of preventable pandemics like bird flu forcing him back into that white, featureless Covid void from which he had to host his who for the better part of a season. “Don’t send me back in there!,” Oliver pleaded, even if his signature appeals for sense and reason felt more than ever like screaming into that emptiness where he suggested Robert F. Kennedy’s brain should be.
And Now This…
Last Week Tonight continues to prove that local news anchors really are all just a pack of Ron Burgundys. Deprived of teleprompter copy and asked to fill even a few seconds of airtime with banter about—in this case—National Siblings Day saw a succession of talking heads spinning out in forced laughter, awkward pauses, and buried resentments that coworkers never bothered to find out how many brothers and sisters they had. When one interaction ends with the question, “Was he planned?,” it was the sort of cringe comedy than Last Week’s Tonight‘s lead-in The Rehearsal could only strive for.
Cardus Endus
Bridgette and Paula Powers are adult Australian twin sisters whose in-unison response to a reporter’s questions about a witnessed carjacking has provoked the sort of 15-minutes fame the internet exists to publicize. Apparently, the sisters are just in-synch to the extent that they don’t even realize they’re speaking as one human until it gets played back to them. They’re also apparently very cool animal lovers who run the exquisitely named Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue in their home country, dedicated to helping out wounded birds. Presumably, while speaking soothing words of comfort in stereo.
Last Lines Tonight
“And I know that sounds almost offensively Italian, but keep in mind every last name in Italy means ‘pizza dance.'”
on potential new Pope, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa
“Which is bad because you don’t have to be a scientist to know that lab mice are a key part of research. I’m pretty sure the full scientific method goes, ‘Observation,’ ‘Hypothesis,’ ‘Order a mouse,’ ‘Don’t name the mouse!,’ ‘Don’t get attached to the mouse!,’ ‘Experiment,’ ‘Analysis,’ ‘Conclusion,’ and finally, ‘Cry because you got attached to Colonel Nibbles.'”
on HHS spending freezes
“The health secretary shouldn’t be learning what he just did like some guy at a bachelor party being told what happened the night before. ‘Do you not remember, bro? You spoke French! Well! Then you p*ssed on a grave, f*cked a bike rack, and cut $750,000 of research money for kid diabetes. You went wild!'”
on RFK finding out about the programs he’d just cut
“And not that we should be investing in health research purely for economic gain, but it is worth noting that kind of return on investment would make the sharks on Shark Tank sh*t in their Eames chairs.”
on the fact that every dollar spent on NIH research returns $2.56 in economic activity
“I’ve gotta say it’s pretty telling that you’re so divorced from any semblance of humanity that ‘paying taxes’ is your first example of a fulfilling life. It may surprise you but most parents don’t hold their newborn baby for the first time and say ‘There’s my future taxpayer. I can’t wait until you get your first 1099 and therefore have any value as a human being! A-coocheee-coochee-coo!'”
rebutting kennedy’s demeaning assessment of people with autism
