It’s Been a Busy Week
After a week off, John Oliver began his sixth episode of Season 12 with a little catch-up. As the host noted, Canada is preparing for an election largely informed by the undeniable fact that their downstairs neighbor has turned deeply sketchy, Turkey has been cracking down on massive protests against dictator and Trump pal Recep Erdoğan after Erdoğan imprisoned his top political rival, and, over in Oliver’s homeland, two RAF officers were arrested and seriously scolded for attacking and maiming Paddington… or at least his statue.
Yes, Paddington, the marmalade-loving bear whose recent movies have become the go-to choices for those seeking feel-good, bear-themed entertainment, and who, the presiding judge stated, stands for “kindness, tolerance, acceptance, and integration.” (The li’l guy is from Peru, after all.) And while Oliver loves wee immigrant bears as much as the next Brit, he did suggest the judge needed to slow down, just a little. “He’s not Martin Luther Bear,” Oliver noted.
When it came to his adopted homeland, however, it wasn’t all bears and jam, as Oliver turned to the (many) excuses emerging from Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, and the rest of the Trump gang that couldn’t text straight. And while it’s fun to mock the semantic nonsense the Signalgate crew keep trotting out to dodge culpability for sending classified war plans to the reporter Waltz accidentally added to the non-secure app they were texting on, Oliver urged viewers to recall the real story—that the 40 civilians killed in the bombing in Yemen keep getting buried in the incompetent rubble.
He went on to examine some more innocents caught in the scattershot nature of the Trump policy of “deeply unserious people doing deeply stupid things with massively serious consequences” by showing how Homeland head Kristi Noem’s photo op in front of caged prisoners with forcibly shaven heads has some, let’s say, obvious historical parallels.
Apart from those “Nazi-adjacent visuals,” Oliver heaped scorn on Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan for scoffing at the notion that those men scooped up and deported to a notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison deserve due process, noting first that that’s not what the Constitution says, and second, it’s been proven that several of those people were arrested and deported not only illegally, but mistakenly.
One guy’s autism awareness tattoo was used as proof of gang membership while others were misnamed, misgendered, and otherwise just mistaken for other people, which didn’t prevent America’s most notorious dog-murderer from posing for Abu Ghraib-style photos meant to scare Americans into cheering the administration penning up brown people.
Thankfully, courts and public outcry have been pushing back hard, sending the message that the Trump crew could, as Oliver put, “Go f*ck yourselves, a**holes, love, America.”
And Now This…
The Last Week Tonight research crew headed to Atlanta for this week’s sampling of local news eccentricities. Specifically, morning show Good Day Atlanta and its number one fan and daily poll question respondent DeeAnne, who’s become something of a fixture on the show. Chiming in on everything from Halloween (DeeAnne doesn’t care for it), to MySpace (DeeAnne misses it), to air frying hot dogs (DeeAnne likey), to a sense of humor (DeeAnne says it’s good, but not too good), the frequent texter is apparently always at the ready to complain about everything. Which is only fitting for someone who’s name, according to DeeAnne the Wise, means, “Lady of Sorrows.”
Our Main Story Tonight
Oliver then turned to Last Week Tonight‘s own hot topic for this week: tasers. You know, those Fisher Price-looking stun guns wielded by every cop show protagonist as a punch line. “Ah, the effortless whimsy of a cop procedural made before 2020,” sighed Oliver at the spectacle of Rizzoli or Isles tasering the body hair off one convulsing suspect with a ready quip.
As viewers can only expect coming from Oliver, the reality of these ubiquitous (and for leading manufacturer Axon lucrative) “non-lethal” weapons isn’t quite as harmless as the SVUs, CSIs, NCISs, and the like would have us believe. Now he knows what you might be thinking—wait, sending 50 thousand volts through a human to “temporarily take away control of their body” is dangerous? Didn’t you see that training video from the 1970s where the inventor of the taser demonstrated it on his own son? C’mon, what sort of dad would do that if tasers weren’t as harmless as Nerf guns?
Well, steel yourself for a shock, since Oliver went on to spell out just how dangerous tasers actually can be, how their proliferation has transformed policing in unexpected ways, and how the pseudoscience excusing every negative outcome of a good old taser-ing is built on a foundation of industry-favoring, racist nonsense.
As ever, Oliver names names, with Axon founder and taser super-advocate Rick Smith getting aired thoroughly out for his company’s all-out blitz of sketchy PR, sketchier research, and legal maneuvering designed to blanket the country with pro-taser propaganda. Oliver even noted how Smith’s tear-jerking origin story about two best pals’ shooting deaths being the inspiration behind his billion-dollar industry appears to be completely made up.
He showed the “cult-like” nature of Axon’s taser-happy corporate culture, where interns and new hires routinely undergo a taser-ing (and occasional logo tattooing) as part of their company initiation. (One lady happily recalling how she took her mom for a mother-daughter corporate zapping.) And how Smith likes to eschew Zooming in to presentations in favor of using an “avatar.” Meaning a lithe and gesturing stand-in with a helmet camera strapped to their head so Smith can appear to investors “like a member of Daft Punk trying to sell you a time share.”
Beyond all the corporate shilling and shocking, however, Oliver examined how an entire cottage industry of deflection, legal threats, and deeply suspect “experts” have developed to explain away every potentially scandalous outcome of taser-related arrests, including a whole lot of deaths that Axon claims are in no way related to those 50 thousand volts. Remember, tasers are holy, blameless devices, despite the fact that they are, as Oliver notes, completely unregulated, and Axon’s self-proclaimed rigorous testing was deeply sketchy and similarly subject to no oversight.
As ever, Oliver paused mid-story to note how he has to say that Axos denies that their products are in any way harmful. Even though those wacky corporate taser parties require employee volunteers to sign a waiver explaining a full dozen times that they might die. (Oliver notes his audience is only forced to sign away their right to sue four times for in-studio wrongful death, presumably from excitable Brit-spittle.) Or that lawsuits have forced Axon to clarify that suspects should now not be shot in the chest or groin, and tasers should not be used against [checks list] the old, infirm, underage, agitated, exhausted, or possessed of various health conditions. “As someone who falls into five of those categories, go f*ck yourself,” noted Oliver.
But the real kicker comes in the form of “excited delirium,” which is used with alarming frequency as the diagnosis for pretty much every death where a taser was involved. Never heard of excited delirium? Does excited delirium sound like catch-all gobbledygook made up to cover the asses of a taser company and any officer who uses its product? Well, as Oliver puts it, that’s because, yeah.
Coined by one Charles Wetli, a deeply discredited forensic pathologist and “racist idiot” (Oliver’s words), excited delirium says that, in a state of heightened agitation and stress, the human heart can just, you know, stop. Wetli formed this theory after the suspicious deaths of six Black women in his jurisdiction, all of whom, according to Wetli, died due to a deadly mix of sex and cocaine and not—he repeated, not—due to being obviously strangled by what turned out to be a serial killer preying exclusively on Black sex workers. (Spoiler: the women were all killed by a serial killer preying on Black sex workers.)
Naturally, this sort of monumental, racist-coded, career-ending screw-up meant that Wetli became Axon’s number one expert witness who was trotted out on the witness stand to peddle excited delirium to explain away any death resulting from a police encounter, especially one involving a taser. (And yes, “excited delirium” was initially used to try and explain away the murder of George Floyd, as if you had to ask.)
Oliver himself brought forth various taser-related deaths including a teenager tased for painting graffiti, and another for shoplifting, both of whose deaths were blamed on this mysterious condition that apparently only afflicts people being tased by police. As Oliver noted, the ubiquity of the taser has changed police encounters so that it, rather than de-escalation, is officers’ first move, all but guaranteeing more of that heightened stress and trauma.
As ever, Oliver ended on solutions. Tracking taser usage and outcomes by entities not involved in selling tasers seems like a good idea. And he did note that some states have banned police from simply penciling in “excited delirium” every time someone dies in an altercation. But nobody knows that simple facts and logic will sway anyone.
That’s why Oliver closed out his show by making his final pitch in the form of his own avatar, a dancing, gyrating, and decidedly thicc stand-in with one of those Axon-preferred video screen helmets projecting the bespectacled host’s face. And if this sight doesn’t convince you of the clear and pressing need for nationwide taser reform, what will?
Cardus Endus
The personae non gratae in this week’s title card are, of course, Second Couple J.D. Vance and wife Usha, who were dispatched to shore up Donald Trump’s totally not delusional and super-villainous plot to capture sovereign ally Greenland. Or rather, J.D. went, since Usha’s planned trip to wow the Greenlanders with her pitch to become the 51st state (wait, that’s Canada), the 52nd state was scuttled when a door-to-door quest to find a single citizen willing to talk to the Second Lady came up empty.
Likewise, J.D. confined his big speech to a U.S. controlled military base, where at least the service members would have to attend.
Last Lines Tonight
“These clearly aren’t the right emojis to send after a bombing. Because the right emojis are no emojis.”
on the trump team’s emoji-happy post-attack texts
“The Fifth Amendment clearly says ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.’ That’s it. It doesn’t then add in the small print, ‘unless they seem guilty by association to a man who looks like Buzz Lightyear drowned a few days ago.'”
refuting tom homan
“That’s a pretty intense ad for what basically looks like a cheap toy that comes with a strip mall security guard costume from Spirit Halloween, set to music from Now That’s What I Call Hans Zimmer Falling Asleep on his Synthesizer.”
on axos’ taser commercial
“I’m not sure I would describe getting shocked with 50,000 volts as ‘nonviolent as you can get.’ It certainly doesn’t sound that relaxing. There’s a reason people unwind by taking a bath with lit candles or a book instead of with a toaster.”
“If someone dies during the struggle, it’s probably because of the struggle, not because of an unrelated syndrome. There’s a reason the San Francisco Chronicle ran headlines about the Zodiac killer being at large and not ‘People Dying of Spontaneous Stab Wound Syndrome, also, in Unrelated News, Some Random Guy Sent Us a Super Fun Puzzle.'”
