It’s Been a Busy Week
If only a week’s news from around the world could be as pure as a girl’s love of ducks. That was John Oliver’s implied message on Sunday, as he led off Last Week Tonight with an enthusiastic aside praising 14-year-old Australian Olympic gold medalist skateboarder Arisa Trew, whose on-camera tale of her parents’ begrudging promise to give in to the young champion’s desire for a pet duck is the sort of genuine, innocently pure and sweet moment only a reporter could unsuccessfully ruin.
Sadly, the world isn’t all ducks and medallions, as Oliver moved on from his unalloyed Arisa Trew fandom (“Somebody get that girl a f**king duck right now!”) to the sordid, interminable spectacle of an American election—all the more sordid since one party has gone all-in on a lifelong reality show grifter, unquestionable racist, and adjudicated rapist as their guy. Oliver characterized the taint-sweaty panic emanating from the Trump campaign after the entry of Vice President Kamala Harris into the race as desperate, with the promise of “vicious and hateful” in the 85 days ’til Election Day, and it’s not hard to see why.
There’s Trump’s incoherent choice of “Kamabla” as his opponent’s latest insulting nickname, leaving Oliver wondering just how racist the (he speculated) a portmanteau of “Kamala” and “Black” truly is, or whether the increasingly hazy Trump merely misspelled the Vice President’s first name one time and then had to double down so nobody would laugh at him. (Trump’s spokesperson and human meatball who doesn’t get the concept of Venn diagrams Steven Cheung was no help, with inquiries into the matter from Last Week Tonight receiving only the stubbornly blockheaded one word reply “Kamabla” on repeat.)
And then there’s Harris’ choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. On the one hand, Oliver showed a clip of GOP Veep pick J.D. Vance answering a reporter’s softball question, “What makes you smile?,” with a dead-eyed pivot to how much he hates Harris’ (entirely fictional) “open border” policy with Mexico, complete with a tuneless laugh Oliver could only guess was the result of Vance, having only ever seen the act printed in Archie comics, trying out this “human mirth” thing in real time. As Oliver noted, genial Midwesterner Walz is basically “the exact opposite of J.D. Vance.”
Now that could mean that Walz, seen chumming around with his teen daughter at a state fair, cuddling piglets, and hugging the kids he just legally ensured would have free school lunches is a decent person with a human laugh. Or it could refer to the empirical fact that Vance is polling the absolute worst of any Vice Presidential pick in American history, laughs like a malfunctioning crypto-bro hate-bot, and has allied himself with the person he once publicly called “America’s Hitler.” Meanwhile, Walz can boast of his 24 years of military service, his career as a trophy winning, shockingly enlightened high school football coach, and a Saturday Night Live arms race to see who gets to play him on TV. As Oliver put it, Tim Walz is basically “your friend’s nice dad.”
Oliver further noted how the Trump campaign’s stridently laughable attacks on Walz include [checks notes] being in office when Minnesota’s flag was changed from a vaguely racist one to a bland version Fox News shrieking heads claim indicates him surrendering to Sharia Law; for mandating that all bathrooms have sanitary products available in defiance of TERF-Y bigots’ “only one gender!” hissy fits; and for retiring from military service after two-plus decades. As Oliver explained, even the shamelessly right-wing Wall Street Journal opinion page called Vance’s lies that Walz abandoned his unit to get out of going to Iraq “thin gruel,” leaving Oliver to make a confession. “After 11 years of this show, and despite my best efforts to resist it, we’ve somehow reached a point where I, a British Oliver, have inadvertently demanded more gruel. It seems that some stereotypes are just deserved.”
Our Main Story Tonight
Like the duck, John Oliver kicked off his main story on Hawai’i lamenting that any discussion of that island state’s problems could not be disposed of with the hilariously satisfying spectacle of Tom Selleck shooting a nun right off a ladder. (Oh Magnum P.I., they can update you, but they can never change you.) Instead, Oliver marked the grim one-year anniversary of the devastating and deadly wildfires on the island of Maui with one of his soul-crushingly in depth and meticulously researched overviews of just how much racist, greed-headed injustice has been heaped upon the shoulders of the native Hawai’ians, how those fires were the result of that ongoing exploitation, and how white people’s entire approach to its forcibly colonized 50th state is, as one Hawai’ian woman summarized, “pretty f**ked up.”
That woman, seen being allowed to gingerly tour her ancestral land with a U.S. military guide since that sacred ground was annexed for use as a live fire target range, immediately apologized for the salty language, but, as Oliver showed, some f**cking profanity is entirely called for. Prefacing his deep dive into Hawai’ian history by noting how, for some reason, U.S. history books don’t cover the topics, Oliver ran through how missionaries to the already thriving island quickly established a beachhead for sugar companies to despoil things; how the progressive native King Kalākaua was forced at literal gunpoint to cede power to American corporate barons (including the still-despoiling Dole corporation) in 1887’s aptly named Bayonet Constitution; and how his sister Queen Liliʻuokalani (seen in condescending American newsreels seemingly happy about the annexation of her homeland by America) was similarly bulldozed into a figurehead. Forget Florida, try finding any of that racist mess in your local history text’s rosy account of our 50th state.
Naturally, statehood born of something named after the pointy part of a rifle has been—let’s call it “one-sided.” Oliver showed how the 2023 wildfires can be traced directly to virtually all Maui’s water being shunted off to make sure those lucrative tourist putting greens stay green. And how, while the smoke was still dissipating and rescuers were looking for the bodies of the missing (over 100 people were eventually confirmed dead), Hawai’ian Governor Josh Green quickly attempted to usher tourists back to the state, while speculators swooped in to snatch up locals’ still-smoldering land for themselves. Or how decades of monomaniacal sugar production have destroyed Hawai’i’s native ecosystem to the point that the state now has the highest (almost entirely import-based) food prices in the nation. And don’t get John Oliver started on the military presence.
Okay, he’s started. About how native Hawai’ians were booted off ancestral lands to secure those fun free fire zones for the U.S. military to practice on and never, ever clean up. (The clip of a military spokesman stammering his way past the truth that there are decades of unexploded bombs littering the lush Hawaiian countryside that nobody has any plans to deal with is pure, molar-grinding institutional indifference.) Or how a military base poisoned the water of an entire community of 93 thousand people. And about how current day Hawai’ians have sued to be allowed—under heavy military guard—to walk their own, forcibly seized land, leading Oliver to note that normally when you have to ask someone for permission to visit the stuff that was stolen from you, you’re visiting the British Museum. Cue the nice old lady apologetically cussing, and Oliver unapologetically backing her up with some choice words of his own.
Speaking of stuff that traditionally gets John Oliver worked up: billionaires. Over 11 percent of Hawai’i is owned by 37 such wealthy plutocrats, from Oracle founder Larry Ellison, to Mark Zuckerberg (“a real boy who wished upon a star to become a wooden puppet”), to Oprah Winfrey, who at least had the lowest-bar decency to allow people fleeing an earlier wildfire to use her gated private road to escape a fiery death. (Oliver did explain that it’s, again, pretty f**cked up for the people who live in Hawaii to beg a mainland billionaire to escape across her private preserve, but, hey, at least she said yes.)
After mocking the face-stretched septuagenarian Ellison (who now owns literally the entire island of Lanai) for dating someone Oliver easily faked his audience into thinking was the billionaire’s granddaughter, Oliver reserved some special time to roast Zuckerberg. Not only for the Facebook head’s planned land-grabbing enclave (complete with massive underground anti-poors bunker and elaborate treehouse network), but for exploiting the native Hawai’ians’ traditional paperless land-passing to sue people out of their birthrights. Oliver also did the HBO (or Max, I suppose now) legal dance of proclaiming that he is in no way stating that it was Zuckerberg who fronted the $2 million to a retired college professor to carry on the ultimately successful legal land-bullying after bad PR caused Zuck to back away. But, you know, c’mon.
Meanwhile, all this rampant and historically consistent rapaciousness has wiped out the housing market, leaving Hawai’i to cope with a massive homelessness problem. (One not assisted by hotel owners successfully legislating away homeless people from public spaces, lest their plight impact online tourism reviews.) Oliver noted how this housing crunch, driven by expensive absentee short-term vacation rentals and a lack of affordable housing, sees a massive yearly exodus of Hawai’ian citizens to the mainland, while carpetbagging mainlanders make bank remotely on the dwindling available land. Essentially, centuries of predictably unjust and violent exploitation are turning Hawai’i into an exclusive playground for rich white people, which is so on the nose it might as well be a pair of absurdly expensive designer sunglasses.
As ever, Oliver tried to offer up a glimmer of hope—and action. He gamely displayed the names of several local organizations (pictured) who are advocating for change which he admitted people should be listening to over a British white guy on TV. Cancelling the up-for-renewal sweetheart military land leases couldn’t hurt anyone except guys who love bombing palm trees. And while Oliver noted that many Hawai’ian jobs do depend on tourism, he also urged would-be vacationers to at least make the effort to school themselves on that long-exploited state’s ugly history of imperialism before kicking back with that Mai Tai. Oh, and do stop stealing lava rocks. They’re protected, and it’s burdensome and creepy when people guiltily send them back once they hear about the rumors of a Brady Bunch-style curse awaiting those who swipe pieces of Hawai’i. Would that the Dole company were so superstitious.
And Now This…
Two very different media figures were singled out for the Last Week Tonight interstitial treatment tonight, one infinitely more annoying than the other. Fox News host Rachel Campus-Duffy‘s signature move of plugging her podcast in every alternate sentence gets taken out for an airing. (In clips, even her obliging co-hosts can barely maintain their practiced bland politeness.)
The second segment was all about beefy former MLB slugger turned color commentator John Kruk’s habit of saying whatever random thought pops into his head live on the air. From musing why babies aren’t born with chest hair, to complaining about giraffes, to a truly harrowing story about just how an prison team opponent wound up where he wound up, all we (and Kruk’s eternally forbearing play-by-play broadcast partner Tom McCarthy) can do is marvel at them like one of John Kruk’s career 100 homers. God speed, you weirdo.
Cardus Endus
Breakdancing became an Olympic event in Paris this year. It will also apparently not be one ever again. Is that a shame? Well, if you thrill to the sight of a white Lithuanian in a durag winning silver and a white, middle-aged Australian unsuccessfully whipping out some kangaroo moves (pictured), then contact the Los Angeles 2028 committee now. (They’re going with first-time events like squash and flag football, for crying out loud. You try incorporating kangaroo moves in either of those. People will laugh at you.)
Last Lines Tonight
“Now that clip leaves out a lot. But you probably already knew that the second you heard the most ominous line in any historical film, ‘The flag was English.’ It’s like seeing oranges in The Godfather. When the British flag appears on an old newsreel, you know someone’s about to die and sh*t’s about to go down.”
After a narrator cheerfully explains how Hawai’i wasfoundedstolen
“Hawai’i’s long been used as a strategic military base in the Pacific. Thanks to Michael Bay, we all now know about the tragedy suffered by beautiful white people at Pearl Harbor.”
John Oliver with the sneak attack
“Grapes are terrible. In three days, they just shrivel into skanky little sugar-blooms. Let me be clear about this: You either be a raisin or you be a grape. But I have no patience for your fruit-puberty.”
sure, food in hawai’i is absurdly expensive, but John oliver just hates grapes
“Which really makes you wonder if that famous Jesus and the footprints poem should have ended, ‘And I turned to Jesus and asked, Then why was there only one set of footprints in the sand? And Jesus said, Because, my child, that was when I JUMPED UP ON YOUR SHOULDERS BECAUSE THERE WAS NO F**KING WAY I WAS GONNA STEP ON A BOMB. NO WAY, MY GUY, THEY’RE F**KING EVERYWHERE!'”
ON the U.S. military’s target practice ensuring live ordinance routinely washes up on hawai’ian beaches
