It’s Been a Busy Week
“Can you even remember a time when that would be disqualifying?”
That was the question John Oliver asked at the top of Sunday’s first post-Emmys Last Week Tonight. (And congrats there, mister—never let them play you off.) Oliver could have been referring to any number of things the modern Republican party has deemed a-okay since the MAGA movement gleefully stripped away even the facade of “principled conservatism” to reveal the actual bigotry, cruelty, and disdain for anyone standing in the way of white supremacist exceptionalism beneath. In this case, however, he was singling out the ongoing lie from three-time GOP presidential nominee, two-time impeached former president, 34-time convicted felon, and legally adjudicated rapist Donald Trump and his chosen running mate, J.D. Vance, who definitely did not f*ck a couch.
Unlike that final cheap shot, born as it was out of a low-blow internet joke based on the right-wing Vance’s generally creepy vibe, the lie in question—that the Haitian immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio are a secret cabal of pet-cookers—is based on pure racism, rather than the fact that a vice presidential candidate thinks that women should be hunted across state lines for seeking abortions, among other deeply weird and woman-hating views.
As Oliver laid out in his pre-main story story on Sunday, Vance and Trump’s lie is merely the latest in a long, ugly tradition of white people demonizing recent immigrants (invariably of the not-white origin), accusing them of bringing their “savage,” pet-eating ways to unsuspecting white Americans communities.
And “savage” is the operative, hateful, slimily operative word here, as Oliver revealed when playing a clip of an opportunistic neo-Nazi, inspired by confessed liar Vance’s anti-Haitian rhetoric in Ohio, scrubbing the burnt cross soot off his face and showing up to a Springfield city council meeting to spew the word when threatening the Haitian community, only to be shown the door by an admirably contemptuous council member. If you don’t think Oliver brought back the city official’s dismissive, “Thank you, you’re done. Not really ‘thank you,'” then you’re not on the Emmy committee.
As Oliver showed with signature cutting-through-the-bullcrap clarity, Vance and Trump’s squirmy pitch to their GOP base of racist yahoos all too happy to accept third-hand social media propaganda as reason to smear an entire marginalized group, the origins of this latest right-wing attack are as predictable as they are easy to follow. Vance, smelling an opportunity to raise his deeply unqualified political profile, deliberately cherry-picked a quote about the stresses of Springfield’s social services by an influx of Haitian workers—ignoring the fact that Springfield actively recruited its Haitian population to fill jobs native Ohioans weren’t interested in doing. (Vance has also gone on to attack these legal Haitian immigrants as “illegals” and lied about them spreading disease and upping Ohio’s murder rate, but that’s a subject for another Emmy-winning exposé.)
Picked up by Fox News and right-wing internet trolls (led by their incel king, Elon Musk), the lie bloomed like toxic mold (that’s where the be-suited white supremacist comes in, with Oliver translating the city councilor’s terse dismissal as, “Get f*cked, you dime store Nazi. Enjoy shoveling sh*t in hell—you look like you already shop there”), forcing Republicans to make the easy-for-them decision to fall in line defending their chosen cult leader after he repeated the ugly, racist falsehood in a nationally televised TV debate.
Oliver had some fun mocking clips of Ohio’s MAGA contingent happily parroting what they’ve seen on the inter-webs about their Haitian neighbors. (Oliver debunked that whole “visual proof” picture of a guy carrying dead ducks too, if you need to shame some relatives.) That includes the woman citing the fact that she hasn’t seen any ducks recently, with Oliver noting helpfully that ducks occasionally fly away. He also added to the internet fame of Miss Sassy, the innocent feline at the unwitting heart of GOP hate speech, who was found safe and sound in her own house after her MAGA mommy took to Facebook to accuse Haitians of devouring her, something that J.D. Vance knew was nonsense before he sicced a bigot troll army on a city he represents. (Pro tip for journalists: police reports, being public records, go a long way toward undermining politicians’ transparently ugly hit-jobs, should you actually care to do your jobs as well as a cheeky British guy with a comedy show and a bookcase full of awards.)
The thing is, as Oliver noted up top, this sort of over-the-top of egregious bigotry would have been the sort of thing to tank a presidential campaign in the days before Donald Trump gave voice to the millions of white Americans itching to play the victim because democracy seemed poised to actually give underrepresented Americans a voice. Mocking the now publicly apologetic Ohioan whose social media post helped kickstart the GOP hate machine (“What is she like when she can’t find the remote? ‘911, the Venezuelans are at it again!'”), Oliver went on to show how Trump and Vance’s crusade to amplify soulless racism through bullsh*t has genuine consequences.
Haitians in Springfield have endured threats, bomb scares have shut down local government and schools, and even the family of a young boy killed in an accident involving a Haitian immigrant has had to go to that same city council to publicly beg a major party’s presidential candidate to stop exploiting their child’s death for racist political purposes. Again, that’s the sort of thing that might have derailed a campaign in a screeching pile-up of public condemnation, principled outrage, and human decency, but, well, this is the modern Republican party, so the election remains horrifyingly close.
And Now This…
We can always use a breather between Last Week Tonight‘s amusingly infuriating opener and its hilariously soul-crushing main story, right? So how about local news anchors reacting to the birth of an adorable (if slimy) baby hippo named Moo Deng? As John Oliver and his staff continue to prove, however, local newscasters plus unscripted downtime equals cringe comedy at best, and uncomfortably revealing provincialism at worst, as little Moo Deng’s b-roll inspired one talking head to lump the Taiwan-born pygmy hippo’s homeland with all the other Asian countries he likes, and another musing how “hippos… will mess you up.” To be fair to the currently toothless and adorable Moo Deng, she will grow up to be an enormous aquatic mammal of the type responsible for some 500 human deaths per year in territorial disputes traditionally settled in favor of the party weighing between three and five thousand pounds with giant teeth. But, hey, maybe newscasters shouldn’t mess with her, did you ever think of that?
Our Main Story Tonight
Donald Trump doesn’t get a mention in Last Week Tonight‘s main story about the maddening, life-ruining failure of America’s Social Security Administration to fairly and adequately serve the millions of people living with disabilities in this country. Of course, John Oliver could do that, since the Republican chosen one famously did a grotesque pantomime of a New York Times reporter with arthrogryposis who dared criticize him, slighted wounded service members receiving the Medal of Honor, and, according to Trump’s own nephew, has stated that people living with disabilities “should just die.”
But Oliver, as ever, views Donald Trump as a festering symptom of the disease of conservative cruelty, not the cause, a view borne out by one of his typically machete-safaris through the suffocating red tape that is the lifeblood of the American medical system. Offering an overview of the SSI and SSDI safety nets which people with disabilities rely upon to, you know, live, Oliver was unsparing in showing how the push for budget cuts and the underlying assumption that people in need should just get over it (or at least hide away so lawmakers don’t have to think about hem) have left untold Americans crushed under debt, uncertainty, and punishingly arbitrary and conflicting requirements.
There’s the fact that the ridiculously meager benefits afforded those fortunate enough to qualify for SSI or SSDI haven’t been adjusted for the cost of living in decades. And how even those benefits can be snatched away if someone earns a single dollar more than those outdated limits. Ot how couples with disabilities are punished with reduced benefits for getting married. (Check out the recent documentary Patrice: The Movie for a bracingly heartwarming/infuriating take on the subject.) Or how people receiving benefits can have no more than $2,000 in savings at any one time, a cap which one woman convincingly explains is a real dilemma when your accessible van breaks down and your government-mandated meager savings can’t get you even a Flintstones-style car you have to stop with your feet.
There’s the archaic list of acceptable jobs used to determine whether an applicant with disabilities applying for benefits could actually find work, which includes such 1977-era (the last time the list was updated) hot industries as “nut sorter,” “dowel inspector,” and “magnetic tape winder.” Or how similarly outdated medical indicators ignore new (as in from this century) advances in treating sickle-cell anemia that actually punish applicants for receiving appropriate drug treatments. And don’t get John Oliver started on the slipshod, seemingly deliberately punishing application and appeals process. (Oh, you know John Oliver is going to get into the deliberately punishing application and appeals process.)
There’s the guy whose eight-year battle to have his debilitating back injury covered was found to have been based on judges reviewing the entirely wrong person’s medical records. The blind woman with cerebral palsy and blindness whose benefits were cut because the government—which issued her Covid stimulus checks—mistakenly counted those checks against her benefits cap. (Oh, the SSA also attempted to force her to repay twice that amount in benefits she rightly received.) Oliver lambasted the bureaucratic cluster-f*ck that sees doctors who have never met applicants rejecting claims, and how one Tennessee doctor hired by the state reviewed an average of a case every 12 minutes, under the SSA’s “faster work gets you more money” guidelines. Truly a model for compassionate, equitable medical care there.
Are there solutions? You bet, although Oliver’s continual, lonely pitch for universal health care acts like bear mace to conservative lawmakers. Barring that, there are a couple of pending, Democrat-introduced bills which would at least update that acceptable jobs list to remove professions that effectively no longer exist and reversing the 2011 GOP-led cuts that turned the Social Security Administration into a rubber-stamping rejection machine. Of course, none of that will happen should the unmentioned Donald Trump retake the White House, as the current GOP plans for people with disabilities essentially doubles down on their “pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you scroungers” version of compassionate conservatism. (See last week’s Last Week Tonight for the GOP’s similar take on those lazy kids who want to eat.)
How infuriating and unfair does John Oliver think these ableist, penurious, capricious policies are? He brought out a f*cking mime to help underscore the point, referencing a truly terrifying vintage Social Security Administration ad purportedly aimed at making people more sympathetic to the plight of the persons with disabilities seeking benefits. With the preening mime mirroring his every gesture (even when Oliver, after unwisely but accurately calling the system “f*cked). As Oliver noted earlier in the show, “For what it’s worth, I f*cking hate mimes.” That’s how badly this system is messed up, people.
Cardus Endus
The final slot in the opening credits’ roll of fame and shame tonight went, perhaps unsurprisingly, to North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. (And way to go as ever, Last Week Tonight writers, for mixing the impossibly high and low with tonight’s Latinate caption.) The current Lieutenant Governor and Republican rising star who just smashed headlong into a telecommunications satellite was discovered this week to have been not only a frequenter of his local porn emporium with a five nights a week punchcard and a regular on cheat-on-your-spouse hookup site Ashley Madison, but also an enthusiastic and vocal habitué of a porn site called Nude Africa, especially and most damningly its apparently-a-thing comments section.
That’s where Robinson, a guy Donald Trump has praised over Martin Luther King Jr., referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” praised Adolph Hitler, expressed a desire to bring back slavery so he could own some, confessed to peeping on women against their will, and (probably most dismaying to GOP voters) lusted over transgender pornography, despite the evangelical loudmouth’s long history of demonizing the trans community, among many others. Robinson has denied it all despite, you know, the internet being forever, but his already tottering swing-state campaign has plummeted, with staffers jumping ship and even the NC state Republican Party denouncing their candidate’s completely unacceptable comm—wait, what’s that? Oh, the North Carolina GOP is standing firm behind their hand-picked “Black Nazi?” Apologies. To quote a recent Emmy winner, “Can you even remember a time when that would be disqualifying?”
Last Lines Tonight
“Republicans have now nominated Trump three times, Democrats have so far lost to him half the time, and this election is somehow inexplicably close because apparently some Americans watched that and thought, ‘I don’t like how Kamala laughed when he called immigrants dog-eaters. That wasn’t very presidential.'”
Oliver, reminiscing on a time when things could disqualify a GOp candidate
“They are failed actors, dancers, and clowns, all rolled into one. A hat trick of disappointment.”
John Oliver, losing the mime demographic
“Social media clearly isn’t a place for reliable information. As we all know, it is for realizing on Father’s Day that all your friends had weirdly hot dads.”
Oliver, reminding us of Facebook’s only accepted use
“And think how much has changed in the last eight years. Barack Obama went from the most powerful man in the country to an unemployed guy who tweets playlists. Eight years ago, Ryan Gosling saved jazz. Eight years ago, Harambe—eight years ago. If you can say, ‘I applied for benefits when Harambe was alive.’ and still not have them, the system is moving too slow.”
On an actual case. Also, RIP, Harambe.
“If you want to get rich quick, getting disability benefits is the worst possible way to do that. Everyone knows the fastest way to get rich is to win the lottery, the easiest is to have rich parents, the grossest is to marry Rupert Murdoch, and the most absurd is to become the “hawk tuah” girl.”
Oliver, refuting Republican stinginess
