
It’s Been a Busy Week
At the time of this writing, Election Day is a mere 92 days away. And with the unexpected candidate switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris throwing this already beyond-pivotal election into chaos (actually, the transition has been both smooth and energizing, but old expectations die hard), John Oliver is no doubt planning a raft of Last Week Tonight main stories around the candidates, issues, and stakes over the next three months.
Oh sure, Oliver had a few minutes on tonight’s show to throw to the Paris-set Summer Olympics, where conservatives, the woefully ignorant, and the hair-trigger offended (the Venn diagram of whom describes a perfect circle) collectively freaked out over a supposedly trans boxer who is not and a Christianity-mocking opening ceremony that did no such thing. Oliver also popped in on Donald Trump’s staggeringly, laughably, sickeningly terrible performance at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, at which Trump attempted to school a roomful of Black female journalists on how his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, wasn’t really Black. As Oliver noted in response to the shocked silence and barely suppressed rage-laughter of the conference audience, “I mean this in the most disparaging way possible—that went about at well as could be expected. “
But all that desk clearing took a quick backseat to Oliver’s main story, a blistering takedown of one particular presidential candidate Oliver maintained was woefully unqualified, hideously misinformed, ethically and morally unfit, and all-around, to use Oliver’s words, “dangerous.” Weirdly, Oliver was not talking about Donald Trump this time around.
Our Main Story Tonight

No, John Oliver set his sights on also-ran third party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has a worse chance of becoming president of the United States than he does the dog community’s man of the year. Some may question why Last Week Tonight is spending an entire episode focusing on a fringe candidate when Donald Trump, just to pick one example from the last few days, openly praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (again), this time for the prisoner swap that brought home American journalist Gershkovich and fellow unjustly detained Americans Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva while undermining President Biden for actually brokering the deal.
But, as Oliver explained at length (and with a show-long threat to pop open the box of poppers he says he legally purchased a few blocks from his New York studio), Kennedy is not only polling at around six percent, but could siphon votes away from Harris in swing states like Michigan. Here’s the part where readers of a certain bent (largely privileged white people with—pardon—no skin in the game should Trump be reelected) scoff that Oliver is merely a partisan tool of the two-party system who’s afraid of a straight-shooting independent thinker.
And here’s where Oliver demolishes such a stance as the glazy-eyed, entitled, willfully blinkered jibber-jabber of people who don’t remember how Ralph Nader performed a similar spoiler’s role in 2000 which netted Americans eight years of George W. Bush, a couple of bloodily illegal wars, and a whole lot of smug Nader voters assuring everyone else that voting their conscience was worth all the dead people and government-sanctioned torture. Oliver noted how RFK, while resting his campaign on a past record of left-friendly environmentalism, is massively bankrolled by GOP mega-donor Timothy Mellon, has discussed taking a cabinet post in a second Trump administration, and, as Oliver lays out, harbors enough right-wing positions and conspiracy idiocy to be, well, a modern-day Republican. (Oliver’s studio audience audibly gasped at the report that noted anti-vaxxer Kennedy is being considered to head Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.)
You always know Oliver has a taste for blood when he returns from a clip with a witheringly loaded, “Okay…” Here, he does that multiple times to underscore Kennedy’s penchant for saying one thing to mainstream audiences and quite another to the sort of fringe podcasters and hand-selected nutcases who make up his chosen speaking audiences. (The inventor of the easily concealed camera phone has truly done a number of politicians who talk out of both sides of their mouths.) So Oliver was able to play multiple interviews where Kennedy assured nervous voters that he’s “only asking questions” about topics like vaccinations, AIDS, and the nonexistent connection between school shootings and psychiatric drugs, and that he’s prepared to change his mind as soon as he’s presented with the facts.
Only, as Oliver went on to document while eyeing those poppers, Kennedy is a whole lot less accommodatingly rational when he’s convinced his interlocutor is on the same, science-denying, brain-wormy wavelength. You know, like when he ranted about the long-debunked and deeply offensive conspiracy that AIDS was not caused by HIV but by those irresponsible gays abusing amyl nitrate (aka poppers). Or how he went on fellow meathead conspiracy kook Joe Rogan’s improbably influential podcast to tout the nonexistent link between the Covid vaccine and a supposed epidemic of young people deaths in America.
Here an aside: there is nobody more fearsomely deadly than John Oliver when it comes to some loudmouth’s dribbling nonsense actually hurting real people. Showing a Rogan clip of RFK putting the hard sell on a sketchy book on that subject—to which Kennedy provided the foreward—Oliver cut straight to the anguished parents of a pre-teen whose football practice death was traced to a malformed blood vessel in his brain, who tearfully explained how the book’s author used their son’s completely unrelated death to push his irresponsible agenda. Oh, and the boy’s picture was used on the book’s cover without their knowledge. Plus the boy wasn’t even vaccinated, completely negating the author’s spurious connection, joining with other cited examples where it turns out the young people committed suicide, choked on alcohol-related vomit, or in one case, died years before the Covid vaccine was ever created.
After repeating Kennedy’s interview where he claims willingness to change and apologize in deference to facts, Oliver angrily condemned the fact that Kennedy continues to promote the book, noting, “Huh, that’s weird. But I guess it does make sense. Saying, ‘If somebody shows me a fact and I’m wrong I’m going to totally ignore it and force grieving parents to relive the worst thing that ever happened to them’ doesn’t really have the same right to it, does it?” (Oliver’s Brit rage also cited the times that Kennedy’s anti-vax zeal, coupled with his disproportionate family cred, contributed to deadly disease outbreaks in South Africa and Samoa.)

Oliver also loves to bait his audience with a god old mid-rant comic fake out. Playing a clip of Kennedy (on one of those receptively loony podcasts he hopes mainstream voters never heard of) urging fellow anti-vaxxers to follow his lead and harangue parents in public, Oliver pointed to one happily agreeing host as looking like the sort of person who went around licking supermarket items to build up Covid immunity. He then revealed that she was, in fact, a notoriously proud Instagram Covid licker. He also refuted Kennedy’s beyond-irresponsible link between Prozac and school shootings by offering up the alternative theory that excessive dairy consumption is the real culprit—before revealing that all his supposedly authoritative and confidently delivered sources are as made up as RFK’s.
Oliver also made several detours to document Kennedy’s Trump-ian trail of terrible personal behavior, just to slam home that this candidacy isn’t so much third-person as worst-person. Like the fact (again, not a conspiracy) that RFK was proven to have been a guest on infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s private underage rape plane. Oliver, after playing a clip of Kennedy explaining away his association with lots of other terrible people (including former dinner guests like double murderer O.J. Simpson and sex criminals Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Harvey Weinstein) as just a New York thing noted, “Having a Rolodex that turns out to be part sex offender registry, that is a you problem, Bobby.” Oliver also played Kennedy’s non-denial concerning a former babysitter’s claim that he had raped her, proclaiming “I am not a church boy” and that he had “a rambunctious youth.” Oliver gave it up to Kennedy for overcoming a youthful heroin addiction problem, but buried the axe by noting that the alleged sexual assault happened when Kennedy was 40 f**king years old.
Oliver himself was obviously wearied by having to apply reason to the task of debunking the ignorantly manipulative gibberish of an opportunistic conspiracy wingnut poised to possibly throw the election to Donald Trump. Presented as evidence, Oliver ranted, “I could litigate Kennedy’s stupid arguments all night long, but I do not want to do that to myself, or to you. There are not enough enough poppers in the world to take the edge off this.” He then made reference to the actual medical fact that Robert Kennedy was discovered to have had a worm eating his brain by concluding, “And to quote Kennedy’s neurologist, ‘I really don’t have time to go down all these wormholes.'”
And Now This…

Who doesn’t like cheesecake? Apparently about half of local news anchors, who Last Week Tonight showed getting unexpectedly heated during the quintessential American holiday that is National Cheesecake Day. “Why do you hate America?,” one anchor jokes/not jokes, underscoring how there is literally no subject Americans can agree on. Not even slightly gelatinous, unconscionably fatty desserts. We are truly doomed.
Cardus Endus

Likely a reference to universally disliked GOP Veep candidate J.D. Vance proudly confessing that he told his young son to “shut the hell up” about his favorite Pokemon, tonight’s title card included a litany of Pikachu facts you might delight in hearing your child excitedly babbling on about in childish enthusiasm. You know, if you’re not a terrible parent.
Last Lines Tonight

“‘Not a church boy?’ If the implication is people associated with the church don’t commit sexual assault, boy do I have bad news for you and your massive Catholic family.”
On RFK’s non-denial denials concerning sexual assault allegations
“Given that we have over 40 thousand deaths from car accidents in the U.S. per year, the most dangerous aspect of vaccinating children is driving to the doctors office to get them.”
In response to RFK’s easily and thoroughly debunked claims about the dangers of vaccines
“Got it. So you just popped in to one of the most remote countries on Earth and just happened to encounter all your anti-vax buddies along the way. It is the ultimate conspiracist’s cult: ‘Nothing is a coincidence except when I do it.'”
On RFK’s, again, laughable denial about the purpose of his anti-vaxxer crusade in American Samoa
“Calling a Kennedy anti-establishment is a stretch. It’s like calling the Windsors anti-hat. That’s just not true. The Kennedys are the very definition of the establishment, and the Windsors are, famously, hat bitches.”
ON one RFK voter’s questionable reason for his support