
It’s Been a Busy Week
With a beyond-momentous election night looming now less than a month away, the mesh on the net John Oliver uses to filter anything but news about the very possible end of America democracy at the hands of Christian nationalist zealots and kleptocratic would-be fascist dictators gets wider and wider. Sunday’s show-opening catch-all segment, for example, glossed quickly past Hurricane Helene, a storm that’s wreaked havoc on the Southeast to such an extent that Donald Trump and his Republican minions have had to work tirelessly to bring emergency shipments of conspiracy bullsh*t and dangerous lies to beleaguered MAGA voters there.
Instead, Oliver jumped right back to Tuesday’s Vice Presidential debate, and specifically how Trump running mate J.D. Vance has been ludicrously over-praised by commentators across the spectrum for his supposed “civility” toward Democratic counterpart Tim Walz. Which, as Oliver noted, is sort of rich when Vance spent the entire week preceding the debate appearing at a far-right evangelical get-out-the-vote event hosted by one Lance Wallnau. Now if you know anything about John Oliver, it’s that he’s never more happy than when letting verbatim quotes from fringe loonies and other assorted religious bigots hang their owners, and with the fiery fanatic in this case, Oliver had plenty to choose from.

Along with a clip of Vance complaining to Wallnau that kids today can’t do basic math in favor of learning there are “87 different genders” with the sort of condescending smirk that’s seen Vance named cover boy for Punchable Face magazine for 3 months running, Oliver turned to Wallnau himself. Some winners from “one of the key Christian mobilizers for January 6th” include calling Kamala Harris a “witch” and a “seductress, and if you’re thinking that Wallnau’s being metaphorical there, you haven’t done your reading on how white, right-wing Christians literally demonize strong Black women. Oliver also showed Wallnau, noting how Vance’s appearance at the Pittsburgh stop of his little let’s-stop-the-vote revival tent tour was only possible because Vance’s scheduled North Carolina campaign stop was washed out by Helene, praising God for, I guess, wiping out hundreds of homes and businesses so J.D. Vance could rant about gender-political school indoctrination. Picking up on the underlying message there, Oliver exclaimed, “If you believe in a God who’d unleash a devastating hurricane just so J.D. Vance could spend an afternoon outside Pittsburgh, your God sounds like an asshole.”
Speaking of assholes, Oliver, returning to the whole “civility” narrative noted that playing relatively “Midwestern nice” while advocating for women to lose their bodily autonomy, for mass deportations of both illegal and legal immigrants (all of whom happen to have brown skin), and refusing to commit to upholding the Constitution is not the sort of transparent bullcrap trained media professionals should fall for. As Oliver put it with signature clarity, “It’s like reading a ransom note and going, ‘This cursive is so lovely. Just look at the capital Y in ‘You have 24 hours before he dies.’ There are some people who were raised right.'”
Nor should, as Oliver began the show by highlighting, local news anchors persist in trying to force segues where no segue should ever be. Like the local talking heads tasked with bridging the terrifyingly rising prospect of all-out Middle East war with one of their colleagues in a taco hat happily proclaiming, “My passion is for tacos.” Maybe there is some journalistic hero out there who could pull that tonal shift off, but they’re probably not broadcasting at 6 a.m. in Tampa.
And Now This…

Say what you will about former right-winger turned anti-Trump morning show staple Joe Scarborough. Like how the former Republican Congressman acts for all the world like a Michael Showalter parody of a half-smart talking head, or how all “never Trump” GOP media figures are eyed with understandable suspicion, or how he really, really likes to talk sports on Morning Joe, much to the eye-rolling contempt of co-host and spouse Mika Brzezinski. Schtick or not, Last Week Tonight‘s carefully culled clips see Brzezinski contemptuously steering the conversation back to the news and, at one point, being shown actively looking through her purse while her husband babbles on about baseball. At least Scarborough wasn’t wearing a taco hat.
Our Main Story Tonight
There are some things privilege truly blinds white Americans to. As Oliver showed in his truly infuriating (what else is new) main story on Sunday, one of those social ills is the terror of a routine traffic stop. After all, as shown in one piece of telling dash cam footage, a belligerent white guy can storm out of his stopped pickup truck, storm toward the car of the police officer who pulled him over for (belligerently) honking his horn, and snottily pull some “Do you know who I am?” grandstanding before being allowed to (belligerently) peel away from the now-apologetic copper. Said driver was a judge, naturally, and his whole caught-on-camera catch-and-release tirade played out, according to Oliver, like that scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts gives some snooty clothing store clerks the what-for with the judge’s same “righteous bitch energy.”
Naturally, not everyone gets that sort of sheepish bowing and scraping and bowing when pulled over for a non safety-related traffic stop, especially, as Oliver explained to his white viewers, if you’re a Black driver. Pulling the statistical card, Oliver showed how Black drivers are disproportionately pulled over, how those stops for often petty infractions like loose bumpers or expired stickers more often result in citations and financial penalties, and how—wait for it—that’s exactly how the system is set up.
As ever, you can miss the host with your, “Well, Black people must be worse drivers, etc” nonsense, as Oliver provides ample and damning documentation of how law enforcement has been empowered to apply deeply subjective personal double standards when it comes to pulling Black people over at more than twice the rate of whites. (Of course, some police departments refuse to track racial data in traffic stops for some reason, but Oliver doesn’t do anything without a handful of receipts.) When one police administrator proudly claims that traffic arrests in his jurisdiction break down almost evenly among white, Hispanic, and Black drivers a reporter responds by pointing out that that means Black people in his district are being disproportionately stopped by population, the cop alllmost gets there when he explains that’s only because “of how police are deployed” in different communities. So close.
And here, before really launching into the depressing meat of the systemic matter, Oliver helpfully played a truly horrifying period-specific public service announcement where the cats from Cats prance about urging everyone to drive safely, lest their beloved children become nothing but… “Memorieeees.” In a signature rant, Oliver noted, “And let me just say this, that musical is an abomination. If there is ever a day that Andre Lloyd Webber has no haters, that means that I am dead and so, by the way, is Patti LuPone.” Call it an anticipatory palate-cleanser for the all too predictable injustices to come. Same goes for Oliver’s hazy memories (see what we did there?) of all the characters featured in the nightmare-inducing ad, like: Anjelica-Splat, Turnip, Zazzle-Skunk, Old Colostomy, Skeetlejizz, Nipple Twister, and Mr. Bublef*ck. He’s almost certain those are correct.

Back to the injustice, Oliver, as is his way, traced back the roots of just how easy it’s become for police to stop literally driver for any reason. There’s good old “because I feel like it” bigotry, of course, with Oliver playing the radio recording of the officer explaining that he stopped infamously soon-to-be-police-murdered motorist Philando Castle by noting how the beloved school workers’ “wide-set nostrils” fit a recent criminal profile. Then theres Whren v. United States, where courts gave free reign for police to make what are knows as “pretextual stops,” basically using any pretense whatsoever to pull someone over if they think they can find a larger crime. As Oliver puts it, it’s essentially, “shaking people down to see what crimes fall out,” and it’s become the bane of disproportionally non-white drivers as much as it’s become a lucrative cash cow for cash-strapped police departments in need of an influx of funding.
Oliver, anticipating the ire of the crowd who put bumper stickers featuring the logo of an overrated Marvel Comics character who routinely and violently violates suspects civil rights on their largely un-pulled-over vehicles to “back the blue,” conceded that traffic stops are of course dangerous for police. He also noted that the dangers of traffic stops are statistically blown hyperbolically out of proportion to justify police violence, and that—just follow him here—reducing the number of said stops (especially when most are made for minor reasons that have nothing to do with public safety) is a way to make policing safer. (Oh, and The Punisher—nerd alert—only went on his decades-long rampage because the cops in the comics were terrible at their jobs in solving his family’s murder.)

After showing how a major police training seminar from frequently sued company Street Cop Training recently trotted out a douche-bro former commando who longed for the good old days when you could drink from your enemy’s skull and proudly proclaimed, “I love violence, I love shooting,” Oliver explained how on-the-books police guidelines explicitly outline the reams of pretexts upon which police can pull you over. These range from having an air freshener hanging from your rear-view mirror, to having “dreadlocks and gold jewelry,” to either looking at—or not looking at—a passing police vehicle.
And no, Oliver’ not just plucking out obscure nonsense to pile on the police, as one high-profile traffic stop of Black teenager Tae-Ahn Lea in 2018 demonstrated. After being stopped for a supposedly too-wide turn in his mom’s car while buying a Slushie, the teenager was handcuffed, frisked, and then subjected to one of the most infuriatingly condescending lectures from Louisville officer Kevin Crawford, all of which was captured on camera. (Lea was also handcuffed for having a 6-ounce miniature souvenir Louisville Slugger baseball bat in the car, which considering the locale is just too perfect for words.)
As Oliver notes with wrenching interviews to back it up, Black drivers live in constant fear of being pulled over for no reason, a daily inevitability that puts tremendous wear and tear on people’s psyches. And while Crawford demands to know why the handcuffed and terrified Lea is so scared of the police, it’s pretty much that fact in deeply unnerving action. Thankfully, Lea’s taking-no-crap mother came upon the scene and stood her ground in the face of the same self-justifying police speech (in which Crawford brags that he’s going to do the exact same thing to at least 30 more Black drivers that same day), and nobody ended up being shot. (Oliver doesn’t note the happy ending that Lea was eventually awarded $375,000 for Crawford violating his 4th Amendments rights, but that’s not how most of these things turn out.)
Oliver goes on to show how this constant, draining gauntlet of warrantless (in both senses) traffic stops ensure that many Black drivers wind up in a never-ending cycle of fines and ultimately incarceration for being unable to pay fines, with one woman telling a reporter how she managed to drive to work every day knowing there were 11 warrants for her arrest over unpayable fines for minor infractions. “Carefully,” is her answer, something Oliver notes is how you should approach “giving a porcupine a handjob” more than just driving to work.
Since we could all use another refreshing laugh, some more Cats from Oliver: Rumpleweasel, Crunkebutt, Jumblescat, Lickety-Flop, Jazzlebanger, Jingle-Sphincter, and of course, Old Tinkle-Sh*t. He’s, like, 87 percent sure those names are right.
Solutions? Well, as Oliver noted, police could stop pulling people over for petty reasons completely unrelated to public safety, something the city of Ann Arbor mandated thanks to a Black elected official who championed the new law by explaining how she understandably feared for her sons’ lives every time they got behind the wheel. We could stop locking people up for unpaid fines related to such minor offenses. Also, forcing police departments to stop hiding racial data on traffic stops would make exposés like Oliver’s that much less necessary. And, as Oliver notes with a glint in his eye, if putting a stop to officers needlessly endangering and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of drivers each year means there are fewer police officers required while the police we do have are freed up to investigate actual dangerous driving and other real crimes, then, well, “what a happy accident that would be.”

Oh no, John Oliver said “accident,” thus summoning what seem like the exact same, frozen-in-time Cats cats from the anti-accident PSA. Thus surrounded by his body-suited musical nightmare, Oliver could only seemingly pray for death before waving goodnight while fending off these furry abominations with a spray bottle and some string. Damn you, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Damn you all the way to hell.
Cardus Endus

Jimmy Carter turned 100 this week, and got the title card tribute to prove it. Carter, the Democratic President whose administration had the bad luck to inherit a terrible economy, OPEC run wild, and an endless stream of comedians’ crappy impressions, may have been a one-term head of state, but the Georgia politician has become one of the most beloved former Presidents in American history, his tireless efforts to provide housing for the needy (and, you know, actually picking up a hammer to do so) a shining riposte to those self-proclaimed Christians whose version of “blessed are the meek” involves NIMBY syndrome and demonizing anyone who needs government help.
Carter, still defiantly alive after the death of his beloved wife Rosalynn last year, has stated that he wants to make it long enough to vote for Kamala Harris next month, a final act of patriotism from a guy who truly walks the benevolent and patriotic talk. Hang in there, Sir.
Last Lines Tonight

“And this guy clearly shouldn’t be commenting on the election. He should be standing in a tent in 1856 selling children mercury tonics he claims will let them talk to ghosts.”
on ranting evangelical kook lance wallnau
“‘I’m focused on the future’ is one of the most generic, store-brand, f**kboy deflections there is.”
on J.D. Vance’s debate non-defense of Trump “peacefully” leaving the white house
“And if I’m ever found out that I lied so badly that Donald Trump muted the call to say, ‘This is some crazy sh*t,’ you would never see me again. I would walk directly into the ocean.”
on special counsel jack smith’s damning January 6 report which was trump mock conspiracy loony Sydney powell
“No one is reading that whole thing. Not even me, and I have resting ‘reads traffic codes for pleasure’ face.”
on New york’s 135-page list of reason why police can pull you over
“Which is profiling both Black people and, I guess, very occasionally white girls named Branch who make their own tampons. But she’s gonna be fine, her dad is a Senator.”
on racially coded traffic stop guidelines on dreadlocks
“Of course it’s that cop’s fault. He’s playing dumb while creating the problem. It’d be like me asking you, ‘Why are you so bummed out right now”, as if I haven’t been professionally bumming you out for the past 25 minutes.”
on the cop asking “why are we in this situation?” to the black teen he just pulled over