John Oliver, like his fellow late-night hosts earlier than him, is ringing the alarm on president Donald Trump‘s authoritarianism.
The Final Week Tonight host wasted no time getting right down to brass tacks, addressing the Los Angeles protests that have been spurred by the White Home deputy chief of workers Stephen Miller-led escalation of ICE raids, with brokers focusing on a Dwelling Depot parking zone occupied by day laborers to satisfy elevated deportation quotas final week.
Referring to a clip of Trump’s Fort Bragg speech, the place POTUS claimed the Metropolis of Angels can be “on hearth” akin to the devastating Palisades and Eaton blazes earlier this 12 months if he hadn’t mobilized hundreds of Nationwide Guard troops and a whole lot of Marines, Oliver remarked: “I do know I’m not saying something new proper now, however he’s such a dick. There’s simply no motive to deliver up the traumatic fires which might be nonetheless very a lot on folks’s minds in L.A., for a similar motive you shouldn’t open a toast at a retirement get together with, ‘Wow, solely milestone left after that is demise.’ Yeah, everybody is aware of that, and we’re all attempting not to consider it.”
Noting that 1965 was the final time the Nationwide Guard was deployed with out approval of the corresponding state’s governor, the political comedian stated that “regardless of lots of sensationalist information protection,” the protests have been confined to a small space in downtown L.A. Whereas some Waymos have been set on hearth and the occasional rock was thrown, Oliver remarked the habits was “under no circumstances consultant of the protests as an entire.”
He continued, “Setting a driverless automotive on hearth shouldn’t be the identical factor as assaulting somebody, except we’re one way or the other dwelling within the Pixar Automobiles universe, the place burning one is homicide, and also you’d be condemned to hell by the Automobile Pope — an actual character from Automobiles 2, by the best way — implying there’s automotive Catholicism, automotive Jesus and, presumably, a decades-long automotive coverup of automotive sexual abuse.” (Certainly, Pope Pinion IV is the chief of the Cartholic Church.)
With an estimated $134 million price to taxpayers, Oliver quipped, “Often, when that a lot is spent on one thing fully pointless, we a minimum of get to see one of many Avengers in it,” flashing photographs of the slew of MCU movies made lately.
Including that the “supposed peacekeepers” have been certainly those largely spreading violence — with journalists shot by authorities and the handcuffing/tackling of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) — Oliver stated he was unsure what else may go down between the lag time of taping on Saturday for the Sunday present’s airing.
Nevertheless, he might say one factor with surety: “When everybody was warning a few slippery slope to authoritarianism beneath Trump, that is it — as a result of masked authorities brokers grabbing folks off the road and deporting them with out due course of is authoritarianism; sending within the army to crack down on protests in opposition to these actions is authoritarianism.”
Regardless of this, Oliver stated he felt hopeful, with the No Kings rallies drawing 5 million attendees nationally, even in Minnesota, which noticed a terrifying outbreak of politically motivated violence with the assassination of a lawmaker and taking pictures of one other, each of them Democrats.
“We’re dwelling via a time in American historical past that will likely be remembered for acts of unimaginable cruelty, however I hope it’ll even be remembered for acts of braveness and defiance,” he stated.
Throwing it again to an earlier headline from the evening — a few runaway zebra in Tennessee that was not too long ago captured — Oliver concluded: “Consider this administration like a free zebra within the suburbs; it shouldn’t be there. It makes you shout, ‘Oh, no!’ lots. However possibly if all of us work arduous sufficient, we are able to comprise it till the wonderful day we get to observe it fly off into the f—ing sundown.”
