Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014–…): Season 4, Episode 8 - Gerrymandering - full transcript
John discusses Trump's military response in Syria, Bill O' Reilly's harassment claims and the issue of Gerrymandering.
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
Season IV
episode 8
Welcome to Last Week Tonight.
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you for joining us.
A quick recap of the week.
It has been frantically busy.
Senate triggered the nuclear option
to put Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court
and, therefore,
a lobster onto our all-dog court.
Nunes recused himself from house
investigation of Trump's Russia ties
after he came
under an ethics investigation.
A classic Devin move.
On Thursday,
there was the biggest news of all.
President Trump has just
ordered a military strike on Syria.
U.S. warships launched between 50
and 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles
targeting a Syrian government
air base.
A Syrian airfield this week
was bombed by President Trump,
two words that when placed
in a sentence like that
are as downright unsettling as
ham smoothie or placenta kimono.
Before we get into
what we did and why,
it is worth to acknowledge reactions
to the airstrikes themselves,
particularly within the media,
which bordered on the orgasmic.
We see these beautiful pictures
at night
from the decks of these two U.S. Navy
vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.
I am tempted to quote
the great Leonard Cohen:
"I'm guided by the beauty
of our weapons."
They are beautiful pictures
of fearsome armaments.
What are you talking about ?
It is a little ironic to see
Brian Williams on MSNBC
talking about
"the beauty of our weapons",
that is not a phrase anyone
would use if they had, for instance,
ever been in a helicopter
that was hit by ground fire.
He wasn't done talking about
whatever the fuck he was talking about.
Because life imitates art, there's
a scene in "The American President"
where Michael Douglas,
playing the fictional president,
is being told that an airstrike
against a radar installation
is proportional
and it's presidential.
He chooses to think about the guy
who's coming on the night shift
as part of a cleaning crew
and how he's gonna lose his life
in this presidential airstrike.
The same
thing happened tonight.
No, it didn't. Because first, this is
not a song, it's not a movie,
we fired real missiles
at an actual country.
There is nothing obvious about
Trump's concern for another human.
The only time he's thought about
a cleaning crew has been to say:
"There's a fingerprint on this vase.
Don't pay them this week."
Some of Trump's biggest critics
had praise for the strikes,
John McCain and Lindsey Graham
saying Trump deserves the support
and Chuck Schumer saying
it was the right thing to do.
Some of Trump's prominent supporters
were significantly less happy,
including Alex Jones, who tried
to weave a conspiracy around it.
So paradoxically,
Trump is really disintegrating
in my eyes on many levels.
Paradoxically
he's doing so much good,
I realize they're maneuvering him,
so they won't call him a Russian agent,
so he can look tough
to the Russians and to the Chinese.
So he can shut down his critics.
But once you feed the pirate,
they're going to want more.
"Once you feed the pirate
they're going to want more ?"
Not only is all of that crazy,
that is not even a phrase.
I'm against these strikes,
you know what they say:
if you wanna skin a ferret,
bring your dancin' shoes.
And I mean it ! Once you start
washing an alligator,
paradoxically,
you don't stop 'til it's dry.
There are serious questions
regarding these airstrikes,
in retaliation against al-Assad's
apparent use of chemical weapons
to target his own people,
which is horrific.
When Assad did
the same thing four years ago,
Trump's response
was significantly different.
The attack also a startling about-face
for President Trump,
who has repeatedly argued against
military intervention in Syria.
Why do we care ?
Let ISIS and Syria fight.
And let Russia, they're in Syria,
let them fight ISIS.
Tweeting after the last major chemical
attack in Syria four years ago
that the US should stay
out of the conflict.
Is there anything Trump is doing now
where he didn't at one point
tweet about doing the opposite ?
I honestly would not be surprised
if in 2011, he tweeted:
"only an idiot would live in a big
white house and sign bills into law."
Hashtag sad.
Administration officials said
that it was the gruesome images
that changed Trump's mind.
Which, on one level,
is understandable.
The images were horrifying.
Just as they were four years ago.
It's natural to want to take
some kind of action in response,
it has to come
in the context of a larger strategy,
or it's close to worthless.
Though the strikes
made certain people feel better,
what did they actually achieve ?
Does this change the facts
on the ground at all ?
I don't think it does.
This wasn't a strategic strike,
and hurting Assad going forward.
It's this one airfield,
it is a punishing air strike.
It took out aircraft, fuel supplies,
the surrounding infrastructure,
but he has other airfields.
It's true. He apparently
still has the one we bombed.
Syrian warplanes were carrying out
attacks from it
just hours
after our missile strike.
And that is hardly
a crippling blow.
Delta passengers experience
longer flight delays on a daily basis.
Maybe a symbolic airstrike was
strategically the best move for Trump.
But I don't think
he's thinking strategically.
Because he hasn't answer
some fairly basic questions, like:
if this was a warning shot,
what are we warning against ?
Do we only want to stop
Assad using chemical weapons
or are we going to push
for regime change ?
If he does it again, are we prepared
to go to war to stop him
or for how this may deteriorate
our relationship with Russia ?
How will that affect our fight
against ISIS ? This is complicated.
Not saying there are right answers.
There needs to be a tangible strategy
acknowledging how difficult
taking on Assad actually is.
We have a President
who feeds off praise
and he just got a "lot" of it
for bombing someone.
And that should make everyone
very worried.
Or, to put this in terms that
Brian Williams can understand:
there is a scene in "American Pie"
where Jim, played by Jason Biggs,
has sex with a pie because he wants
to feel like a big strong grownup man.
The concern is, that if we let him
continue down this path,
Donald Trump could become
that horny teenager
and the whole world
could become that pie.
So for now,
let's move on to FOX News,
Cialis and catheter commercials
occasionally interrupted
by an episode of "The Five".
FOX news has been rocked
by sexual harassment scandals,
and this week brought
one of the most damaging yet.
New revelations about sexual
harassment claims at FOX News
aimed at the network's biggest star.
New York Times finding FOX News
and Bill O'Reilly paid five women
a total of almost $13 million in
settlements, going back 15 years.
O'Reilly, who scientists hypothesize
is a dense nebula of boner and racism
has been paying out settlements
for alleged harassment for "years".
The victims claiming things
like verbal abuse, lewd comments,
unwanted advances and phone calls
in which it sounded
as if Mr. O'Reilly
was masturbating.
And I hate to ask this, but,
what does that sound like ?
Like a dog's jowls flapping when
it sticks its head out of the window ?
Or someone frantically
stirring a bowl of cake batter ?
Or was it more a subtle
"tap tap tap"
like a mouse
giving a round of applause ?
Either way, it is horrible.
It's not just those five women.
Dr. Wendy Walsh,
occasional guest on O'Reilly's show,
claimed he took her to dinner,
to offer her career advice.
She declined to come to his room,
his tone noticeably changed.
I ordered a soda water,
he complained about the cost,
said: I wonder what they're charging
for a cup of water here.
He told me my bag was ugly:
"the ugliest bag I've ever seen".
She is saying, when he got rejected,
he started negging her by complaining
about the price of seltzer
and criticizing her fashion choices.
In Bill O'Reilly's mind, every woman
wants to fuck her own mother.
It is hard for us to imagine
what it must be like
to be on the receiving end
of dirty talk from Bill O'Reilly.
But it's not,
as it turns out, impossible.
In 1998 he wrote a book called
"Those Who Trespass",
featuring numerous sex scenes.
And he narrated
his own audiobook.
And yes, we're doing this !
Here is a sample.
I would like you to unhook your bra
and let it slide down your arms.
You can keep your shirt on.
Cup your hands under your breasts
and hold them for ten seconds.
He slipped the hose down
to her ankles,
continuing to knead
her skin with his tongue.
Ashley climaxed twice before
the two got up from the couch.
Hot.
That is a man describing
a woman's orgasm
who has clearly
never seen a woman's orgasm.
You can't knead
skin with your tongue, Bill.
You've confused making love with
making a rustic sourdough bread.
We haven't even got to the most
stomachchurning part yet.
He had accomplished his goal,
giving Ashley Van Buren a night
she would long remember.
His physical pleasure
was secondary.
His primary euphoria came
from knowing that Ashley was
enjoying every bit of his expertise.
There has never been
a fictional character
more happy to not actually exist
than Ashley Van Buren.
And yet so far, FOX News
is firmly standing by their man
and is citing some
weak reasoning.
FOX's parent company points out no
current or former FOX news employee
ever took advantage
of the 21st Century FOX hotline
to raise a concern
about Bill O'Reilly.
So their defense is,
he can't be guilty,
because no one called HR
to complain.
Why would they ? I'd assumed
that FOX News' HR department
is a telephone in an empty room
being manned by a horny goat.
O'Reilly denies the claims,
accusing women of wanting money.
Wendy Walsh isn't even
asking for money.
She thinks everyone could learn
a valuable lesson.
All men need to learn that a workplace
is not a mating marketplace.
Bill O'Reilly, like the rest of us,
needs to just use Tinder.
No, he absolutely does not
need to do that.
That would be terrible for literally
everyone, except Bumble,
they would have a rocksolid
new ad campaign
that's going to hit hard
and hit well.
Whether O'Reilly is learning
his lesson here or not,
his advertisers are not
hanging around to find out.
We have seen around
60 advertisers go ahead and say
we're not going to run our ads
all round the O'Reilly factor.
Not good news for Bill O'Reilly.
I would say that he should call
his advertisers to apologize,
but he might start jerking off
while they're on the phone.
Almost nobody
is standing by Bill O'Reilly.
Nobody, that is, apart from
the President of the United States.
He's a person I know well.
He's a good personý
Personally, I think
he shouldn't have settled.
- How come ?
- Should have taken it all the way.
I don't think Bill
would do anything wrong.
Nobody gets to be surprised
because it is entirely plausible
that the hill our President
is willing to die on
is the one formed by Bill O'Reilly's
workplace erection
poking up
against his old-man slacks.
To recap this story for you:
Bill O'Reilly needs advertisers.
Donald Trump needs
to understand sexual harassment.
Here is where we come in.
As you may remember,
our catheter cowboy spent this year
appearing in ads on FOX News,
explaining the nuclear triad
and the American Health Care Act.
I think you know
where this is going.
We have produced an ad
to educate Donald Trump,
to air during the "O'Reilly Factor"
in New York and DC.
We submitted it to stations
on Friday, but weirdly,
we haven't heard back
from them since.
Surprising, because we're one
of the only advertisers
offering to buy time
on his show at the moment.
I hope they don't reject this ad.
But just in case they do,
here's a sneak peek of what we
would like the President to see.
Attention, patients.
Howdy. I'm a professional cowboy.
There's two things I know.
I don't like pain when I cath,
and repeated, sexual advances
or obscene remarks in the workplace
constitutes sexual harassment.
If there's a power disparity
between the two parties,
that's as inappropriate as
lubricating a catheter with hot sauce.
Why would you do that ?
I do not like pain when I cath.
If you've got a friend
who is accused of something like that,
I think twice
about defending him,
that contributes to a culture where
women don't wanna come forward.
I know you might not care about that.
But on some level, you gotta
know, you're blowing this.
You're sacrificing the chance
to make society a better place
on the altar of your towering
ignorance and fragile ego.
You are blowing this.
Goodbye everyone watching this
and definitely not one specific person.
See ya next time.
Moving on. Our main story
tonight concerns democracy.
Undeniably the best Greek export
that doesn't have fruit at the bottom.
There is concern about the
personalities harming our democracy.
Let's talk about one of the major
structural problems.
Something that Democrats
love to complain about.
We've seen Republicans rig the system
by their often illegal gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering to a fare-thee-well
in states controlled by Republicans.
Political gerrymandering is one of
the greatest threats to our democracy.
That is a bit much.
The greatest threat to our democracy
is clearly whatever tweet the President
planned for Cinco de Mayo this year.
We don't know yet, which
Spanish words will be misspelled.
But we can assume
it will be horrifying.
Gerrymandering is a problem.
Practice of drawing voting districts
in a way that creates unfair advantages
for whoever happens
to be drawing the lines.
Which sound mundane,
but the results can be significant.
Gerrymandering is responsible
for giving Republicans an edge
in the House of Representatives.
Look what happened in some states
where they drew the district lines.
In Pennsylvania 44 percent
chose Democratic candidates
for the House of Representatives
in 2014.
But, 13 of the 18 districts
are represented by Republicans.
In Ohio, 40 percent of the voters chose
democratic candidates for the House,
but 12 out of 16 seats
are represented by Republicans.
Those numbers are out of proportion
to what people should expect.
You wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice
cream that was 75 percent strawberry.
How is that okay ?
What perverts voted for this ?
Whoever draws the districts
has a lot of power.
It's possible to use that
power in very precise ways.
In the age of computers, you can
gerrymander with scientific precision.
You can run in and out of alleys
and up and down streets,
so include and exclude
whichever voters you want,
so it's become
a very precise science.
He's right: gerrymandering has
become a very precise science.
It's one of the few
remaining types of science
in which the Republican Party
currently believes.
There are different reasons
politicians engage in gerrymandering
it's done to disadvantage voters
based on race, or on political party,
or to shore up seats for incumbents,
sometimes even within a party.
Take Hakeem Jeffries.
In 2000, he ran a strong challenge
in a Democratic primary
for the New York State Assembly.
He planned to run again
in 2002,
but the Democrats had done
something interesting to the map.
The map that was drawn
was absolutely fascinating.
They drew a map that literally
carved out the block
on which Hakeem Jeffries lived
from Assembly District 57.
I remember
shaking my head in disbelief.
A lot of people hoped to vote for me
but were surprised to find
that they no longer lived
in the assembly district
they had been living in
for years, if not decades.
Brooklyn politics can be rough,
but that move was gangsta.
Yeah, it was "gangsta"
and remember:
the threshold for "gangsta"
in Brooklyn is the Notorious B.I.G.,
whose debut album begins
with songs that are, respectively,
about armed robbery, gun violence,
armed robbery and gun violence,
being prepared to die by gun violence
while committing armed robbery.
Even the term "gerrymandering"
goes back centuries.
It gets its name from a 19th century
politician named Elbridge Gerry.
As Governor of Massachusetts,
he helped shape a congressional
district so blatantly one-sided
that one critic said it looked
like a salamander.
"No", another replied:
"a gerry-mander".
Now, that counted
as a joke in 1810,
when your entertainment
options were sunsets,
Washington Irving novels
and getting kicked by a horse.
You are not wrong to notice that
the "gerry" in "gerrymander"
refers to a guy whose name
was pronounced "Gerry".
Everything about gerrymandering
is stupid and wrong.
There is nothing inherently wrong
with re-drawing a voting district.
It's necessary. They need to have
the same number of people in them.
Populations shift over time,
as people move, or die
or emigrate because
their stand-up careers endured
what might be characterized
as a "pogrom of indifference".
Every ten years,
we have a census,
lines are re-drawn for both
the U.S. House and state legislatures.
The problem is, in most states,
the lines are drawn by politicians.
In fact, in 37 states, the drawing
of state legislative districts
is primarily controlled
by the legislators themselves
and they have a pretty clear
vested interest there.
And if you think that seems
crazy, you're not alone.
Every fall I speak to five or six
members of the British parliament,
one of the things I explain: "here's
how you get elected to the House."
I see these shocked looks
and one time one said:
"That's not the voters choosing
their representatives,"
"that's the representatives
choosing their voters !"
First: that's racist.
And second: even I find it difficult
hearing advice on map-drawing
in a British accent that once said:
"I don't see why one scrap of dust
is any different from another."
I ended the border here,
that's where my pen ran out of ink.
They'll learn to like it. What's
the worst that can happen ?
If your party holds the redistricting
pen, it wields substantial power
and there are multiple techniques
at its disposal.
There are a couple of ways
that you can reapportion people
and there's a thing called packing
and a thing called cracking.
Yes, "packing" and "cracking".
Not to be confused with the teen
drug trend of "cracking and packing",
which is when the teens
fill a cucumber with crack
and put in in their anus
to absorb it faster.
I saw it on the local news,
which means it's real
and every teenager
is doing it right now !
In this context, "packing" means
cramming as many opposition voters
into just a few districts.
"Cracking" means spreading them
out thinly over a bunch of districts
so they can't gain a majority
in any one of them.
Either way,
it dilutes their impact.
Try and think of it
as table assignments at a wedding:
you can either break up
your eight awful relatives
and spread them out
over different tables,
or you can pack them all together
in one table of the damned.
Washington Post showed how this can
work: look at this hypothetical state.
It's 60 percent blue voters,
40 percent red
and it needs to be
carved up into five districts.
Proportionally, you would want
three blue and two red districts,
but if you draw
the lines like this,
you can get three red majorities,
and two blues,
and if you draw it like this, you get
five blue majorities and no red.
And if you draw lines like this
it looks like a dick,
which is irrelevant,
but it is objectively very funny.
And if you are thinking:
"Shouldn't all of this be illegal ?"
Complicated. If you're gerrymandering
to disadvantage minorities,
that is illegal
under the Voting Rights Act.
If you are gerrymandering to
disadvantage voters of opposing party
that has generally been allowed.
So racial gerrymandering ?
No.
Partisan gerrymandering ?
That's kind of okay.
And it's led politicians to be
brazen in their behavior.
Like in North Carolina last year.
Their congressional map
was thrown out in federal court for
racial gerrymandering, which is wrong.
They had to redraw.
And while doing it,
State Rep. David Lewis went out
of his way to explain
the new map would not illegally
fuck over minorities.
It would legally fuck
over Democrats.
We want to make clear that we,
to the extent, are going to use
political data in drawing this map,
it is to gain partisan advantage
on the map.
I want that criteria to be clearly
stated and understood.
I need you to understand: this is not
a race thing because it can't be.
We just want a map that churns
out Republicans like it's Ann Romney.
That is all we're saying here.
Please let me understand.
And that map worked.
In 2016, despite Republicans winning
over half the votes in House races,
they wound up controlling 77 percent
of the state's seats.
A more blatant disregard
for what people want
than the asshole who gives out
Bazooka Joe on Halloween.
Gum from the Roosevelt administration
wrapped in a comic from
the other Roosevelt administration.
The guy handing out
Snickers stuffed with razor blades
actually gives you a Snickers.
Republicans elevated this technique
to art form with a plan called REDMAP,
or the Redistricting Majority Project.
They poured more than $30 million
into state-level races,
gaining huge numbers of seats
and that paid massive dividends.
When Republicans won the majority
of state houses in 2010,
it ensured they'd be redrawing
the maps in those states.
Lo and behold,
it paid off in 2012.
Nationwide, Democrats running for
Congress got 1.1 million more votes,
but Republicans sent 33 more
members to the House.
The maps they drew put Democrats
at a significant disadvantage.
It's like if,
instead of Tim Duncan,
the San Antonio Spurs
had had to use Tim Burton.
It's not technically impossible to win,
but it's going to be much harder.
And look: to some extent,
Republicans got lucky,
because 2010 was a wave election
for their party.
I'm not saying Democrats
are angels here.
They've gerrymandered the shit out
of districts in states like Maryland
and they've been brazen, too.
Take Illinois. In 2001, Democrats won
the right to redistrict there after,
for reasons too complicated
and too stupid to explain,
a name was pulled out of a replica
of Abraham Lincoln's stovepipe hat.
Watch as one Democratic lawmaker
made the least convincing promise.
We'll sit down
and draw a very fair map.
Come on.
That's an inherently
suspicious look on his face.
That's the expression of someone
who urinated in a public pool.
Water's warm today !
Enjoy your swim.
How do you know if your district
has been drawn with nefarious intent ?
That's tricky. Because too often,
people will lazily point
to districts that have a weird shape.
North Carolina's 12th district
looks like spilled coffee.
Pennsylvania's 16th
is flexing its muscles.
One commentator compared Maryland's
3rd to a broken-winged pterodactyl.
And then there's this,
they call it the earmuffs.
Yes, an earmuff district, not to be
confused with the Earmuff District,
an area of Manhattan
where sketchy men sell accessories
made from the fur
of endangered species.
You should go visit.
While it is tempting to see something
suspicious in an oddshaped district,
there is a pretty good argument
against prioritizing tidy lines.
Dropping a bunch of squares
seems fair.
Like if you could just draw a grid
like Tron that you could put people
into districts and there wouldn't be
any manipulation in the process.
But Americans don't live,
with the exception of Montana,
Americans don't live in squares,
our communities are irregular.
American communities
are not square.
They're like jazz music:
they're free-form, free-flowing
and they contain a troubling
amount of opioids.
And there is no one right way
to draw a district.
Reasonable people will disagree.
Some might prioritize a district
being politically competitive,
others might favor compactness.
Others want to keep so-called
"communities of interest" together.
It may be physically impossible to do
all three of those things in one place.
Take that Earmuff District.
The thin line connecting
the two halves is just a single road.
People love to make fun of that.
In Chicago, squeezed
between two freeways,
this narrow strip is needed to connect
two halves of a gerrymandered district
to keep it contiguous,
as is required.
This is the way Congress gets around
the contiguous rule because
there's obviously nobody living here.
Unless they're homeless people,
I guess.
Anybody here ?
Any congressional voters out there ?
Now you may laugh,
but a few seconds later,
an entire ghost baseball team
from the 1900s walked out of the grass
and beat him to death
with their ghost bats.
And he kind of deserved it.
But here is the thing: it is drawn
like earmuffs for good reasons.
The northern and southern
parts are two Latino communities.
The district in the middle
is predominantly African-American.
Both are Democratic, so it's not
about partisan advantage.
It's about ensuring both communities
have representatives.
And it's criticized a lot,
but redistricting experts love it,
two of them actually put it
on their wedding cake.
That is a real wedding cake !
The bachelorette
party cake was something like:
"one more night
of packing and cracking !"
Not all weird shaped districts
are bad
and not all normal shaped districts
are good.
Gerrymandering is not the sole reason
for the mismatch
between our popular vote percentages
and our representation.
Some of that is due to where
Democrats choose to live.
Democrats live in the wrong places,
they cram themselves in cities
and that makes it really hard
to have a winning coalition.
If you are college-educated,
you move to a city and those places
have enough Democrats already.
Democrats need to make places
like Des Moines or Columbus, cool,
but that's outside of the typical
realm of political strategy.
What do you mean
make Des Moines cool ?
They've already got
the Des Moines Heritage Carousel,
the most bad-ass, balls-to-the-wall
carousel in the whole Midwest !
According to their website,
it is closed for the season, of spring,
not a good time for carousels,
but when May 28th rolls around,
it's gonna be an all-out
carousel fuckstravaganza !
Until 8pm.
Democrats are basically
packing themselves into districts.
And that is not likely
to change soon.
But there is a broader,
non-partisan point here,
that in a democracy, the question
of who gets to draw the map
should not have as much
significance as it currently does.
There is a Supreme Court case,
involving a redistricting in Wisconsin
that was so partisan, a lower
court struck their maps down
and the Supreme Court may,
for the first time,
issue a clear ruling putting limits
on partisan gerrymandering.
Our hopes are now in the delicious
claws of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Even without a ruling,
many experts argue
we should be taking redistricting
out of the hands of politicians
and give the task
to independent commissions.
A handful of states already
do some version of that.
It's not perfect. It is tough
to remove partisan biases,
a fact that one state lawmaker
brought up to shoot the idea down.
If I felt there were any way I could
stand before my constituents and say:
I believe that it's possible
to come up with a group of people
who have no political bias
who will simply sit down in a room
and magically create districts,
I'd be behind it.
I'd be behind it a hundred percent.
But those people don't exist.
If you recognize that guy,
you saw him ten minutes ago,
reassuring everyone that his intent
in drawing districts
was to gain partisan advantage
for Republicans.
He's arguing: nobody's unbiased,
so let's use me,
the most brazenly
biased man in the universe.
Which is pretty much arguing:
"no babysitter is perfect,
so let's just use Slenderman."
While commissions
might not be perfect,
they would be better.
It is hard to come up with a worse
system than the one most states have.
And there is something
important at stake here.
Lawmakers should not be allowed
to dilute our votes
by drawing their own lines
and picking their own voters.
I will tell you why.
The foundations of democracy
are built on the idea
that everybody's vote
should count equally.
Everybody's.
That is what America is all about.
Every one of us should get an equal
chance to make a bad decision,
which fucks things up
for everybody else.
Whoever we are,
however poor our decisions.
Whether you are a juggalo...
Stop it.
- Or a 47-year-old Quidditch player...
- It's a sport !
Or someone who bought
that stupid $6 000 jacket
I wore on the show last week,
it's horrible.
Our voices should be fully heard.
Even if we're scientologists,
or guys who ride unicycles as their
primary mode of transportation.
In this one context,
we should all be relevant,
regardless of our questionable
life choices.
Whether you're an EDM bro,
a guy jamming a knife into a toaster,
or a Washington Redskins fan
or even a Jill Stein supporter.
- She would've won !
- How ?
What process
could she have used to win ?
Her voice should count
as much anyone else's,
as much as a guy in a fedora
or a baker of erotic pastries,
or a Santacon attendee,
or everyone's racist grandma.
Don't say anything.
Because at the end of the day,
that is the point of this country.
That's what's made America great.
Because think about it:
election results should not be
the fault of lawmakers' crazy lines.
They should be the result of our own
crazy decisions. Am I right ?
- Am I right ?
- Yeah !
That's our show. We'll see you
next week. Good night !
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
END OF EPISODE 8,
SEASON IV
WITH JOHN OLIVER
Season IV
episode 8
Welcome to Last Week Tonight.
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you for joining us.
A quick recap of the week.
It has been frantically busy.
Senate triggered the nuclear option
to put Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court
and, therefore,
a lobster onto our all-dog court.
Nunes recused himself from house
investigation of Trump's Russia ties
after he came
under an ethics investigation.
A classic Devin move.
On Thursday,
there was the biggest news of all.
President Trump has just
ordered a military strike on Syria.
U.S. warships launched between 50
and 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles
targeting a Syrian government
air base.
A Syrian airfield this week
was bombed by President Trump,
two words that when placed
in a sentence like that
are as downright unsettling as
ham smoothie or placenta kimono.
Before we get into
what we did and why,
it is worth to acknowledge reactions
to the airstrikes themselves,
particularly within the media,
which bordered on the orgasmic.
We see these beautiful pictures
at night
from the decks of these two U.S. Navy
vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.
I am tempted to quote
the great Leonard Cohen:
"I'm guided by the beauty
of our weapons."
They are beautiful pictures
of fearsome armaments.
What are you talking about ?
It is a little ironic to see
Brian Williams on MSNBC
talking about
"the beauty of our weapons",
that is not a phrase anyone
would use if they had, for instance,
ever been in a helicopter
that was hit by ground fire.
He wasn't done talking about
whatever the fuck he was talking about.
Because life imitates art, there's
a scene in "The American President"
where Michael Douglas,
playing the fictional president,
is being told that an airstrike
against a radar installation
is proportional
and it's presidential.
He chooses to think about the guy
who's coming on the night shift
as part of a cleaning crew
and how he's gonna lose his life
in this presidential airstrike.
The same
thing happened tonight.
No, it didn't. Because first, this is
not a song, it's not a movie,
we fired real missiles
at an actual country.
There is nothing obvious about
Trump's concern for another human.
The only time he's thought about
a cleaning crew has been to say:
"There's a fingerprint on this vase.
Don't pay them this week."
Some of Trump's biggest critics
had praise for the strikes,
John McCain and Lindsey Graham
saying Trump deserves the support
and Chuck Schumer saying
it was the right thing to do.
Some of Trump's prominent supporters
were significantly less happy,
including Alex Jones, who tried
to weave a conspiracy around it.
So paradoxically,
Trump is really disintegrating
in my eyes on many levels.
Paradoxically
he's doing so much good,
I realize they're maneuvering him,
so they won't call him a Russian agent,
so he can look tough
to the Russians and to the Chinese.
So he can shut down his critics.
But once you feed the pirate,
they're going to want more.
"Once you feed the pirate
they're going to want more ?"
Not only is all of that crazy,
that is not even a phrase.
I'm against these strikes,
you know what they say:
if you wanna skin a ferret,
bring your dancin' shoes.
And I mean it ! Once you start
washing an alligator,
paradoxically,
you don't stop 'til it's dry.
There are serious questions
regarding these airstrikes,
in retaliation against al-Assad's
apparent use of chemical weapons
to target his own people,
which is horrific.
When Assad did
the same thing four years ago,
Trump's response
was significantly different.
The attack also a startling about-face
for President Trump,
who has repeatedly argued against
military intervention in Syria.
Why do we care ?
Let ISIS and Syria fight.
And let Russia, they're in Syria,
let them fight ISIS.
Tweeting after the last major chemical
attack in Syria four years ago
that the US should stay
out of the conflict.
Is there anything Trump is doing now
where he didn't at one point
tweet about doing the opposite ?
I honestly would not be surprised
if in 2011, he tweeted:
"only an idiot would live in a big
white house and sign bills into law."
Hashtag sad.
Administration officials said
that it was the gruesome images
that changed Trump's mind.
Which, on one level,
is understandable.
The images were horrifying.
Just as they were four years ago.
It's natural to want to take
some kind of action in response,
it has to come
in the context of a larger strategy,
or it's close to worthless.
Though the strikes
made certain people feel better,
what did they actually achieve ?
Does this change the facts
on the ground at all ?
I don't think it does.
This wasn't a strategic strike,
and hurting Assad going forward.
It's this one airfield,
it is a punishing air strike.
It took out aircraft, fuel supplies,
the surrounding infrastructure,
but he has other airfields.
It's true. He apparently
still has the one we bombed.
Syrian warplanes were carrying out
attacks from it
just hours
after our missile strike.
And that is hardly
a crippling blow.
Delta passengers experience
longer flight delays on a daily basis.
Maybe a symbolic airstrike was
strategically the best move for Trump.
But I don't think
he's thinking strategically.
Because he hasn't answer
some fairly basic questions, like:
if this was a warning shot,
what are we warning against ?
Do we only want to stop
Assad using chemical weapons
or are we going to push
for regime change ?
If he does it again, are we prepared
to go to war to stop him
or for how this may deteriorate
our relationship with Russia ?
How will that affect our fight
against ISIS ? This is complicated.
Not saying there are right answers.
There needs to be a tangible strategy
acknowledging how difficult
taking on Assad actually is.
We have a President
who feeds off praise
and he just got a "lot" of it
for bombing someone.
And that should make everyone
very worried.
Or, to put this in terms that
Brian Williams can understand:
there is a scene in "American Pie"
where Jim, played by Jason Biggs,
has sex with a pie because he wants
to feel like a big strong grownup man.
The concern is, that if we let him
continue down this path,
Donald Trump could become
that horny teenager
and the whole world
could become that pie.
So for now,
let's move on to FOX News,
Cialis and catheter commercials
occasionally interrupted
by an episode of "The Five".
FOX news has been rocked
by sexual harassment scandals,
and this week brought
one of the most damaging yet.
New revelations about sexual
harassment claims at FOX News
aimed at the network's biggest star.
New York Times finding FOX News
and Bill O'Reilly paid five women
a total of almost $13 million in
settlements, going back 15 years.
O'Reilly, who scientists hypothesize
is a dense nebula of boner and racism
has been paying out settlements
for alleged harassment for "years".
The victims claiming things
like verbal abuse, lewd comments,
unwanted advances and phone calls
in which it sounded
as if Mr. O'Reilly
was masturbating.
And I hate to ask this, but,
what does that sound like ?
Like a dog's jowls flapping when
it sticks its head out of the window ?
Or someone frantically
stirring a bowl of cake batter ?
Or was it more a subtle
"tap tap tap"
like a mouse
giving a round of applause ?
Either way, it is horrible.
It's not just those five women.
Dr. Wendy Walsh,
occasional guest on O'Reilly's show,
claimed he took her to dinner,
to offer her career advice.
She declined to come to his room,
his tone noticeably changed.
I ordered a soda water,
he complained about the cost,
said: I wonder what they're charging
for a cup of water here.
He told me my bag was ugly:
"the ugliest bag I've ever seen".
She is saying, when he got rejected,
he started negging her by complaining
about the price of seltzer
and criticizing her fashion choices.
In Bill O'Reilly's mind, every woman
wants to fuck her own mother.
It is hard for us to imagine
what it must be like
to be on the receiving end
of dirty talk from Bill O'Reilly.
But it's not,
as it turns out, impossible.
In 1998 he wrote a book called
"Those Who Trespass",
featuring numerous sex scenes.
And he narrated
his own audiobook.
And yes, we're doing this !
Here is a sample.
I would like you to unhook your bra
and let it slide down your arms.
You can keep your shirt on.
Cup your hands under your breasts
and hold them for ten seconds.
He slipped the hose down
to her ankles,
continuing to knead
her skin with his tongue.
Ashley climaxed twice before
the two got up from the couch.
Hot.
That is a man describing
a woman's orgasm
who has clearly
never seen a woman's orgasm.
You can't knead
skin with your tongue, Bill.
You've confused making love with
making a rustic sourdough bread.
We haven't even got to the most
stomachchurning part yet.
He had accomplished his goal,
giving Ashley Van Buren a night
she would long remember.
His physical pleasure
was secondary.
His primary euphoria came
from knowing that Ashley was
enjoying every bit of his expertise.
There has never been
a fictional character
more happy to not actually exist
than Ashley Van Buren.
And yet so far, FOX News
is firmly standing by their man
and is citing some
weak reasoning.
FOX's parent company points out no
current or former FOX news employee
ever took advantage
of the 21st Century FOX hotline
to raise a concern
about Bill O'Reilly.
So their defense is,
he can't be guilty,
because no one called HR
to complain.
Why would they ? I'd assumed
that FOX News' HR department
is a telephone in an empty room
being manned by a horny goat.
O'Reilly denies the claims,
accusing women of wanting money.
Wendy Walsh isn't even
asking for money.
She thinks everyone could learn
a valuable lesson.
All men need to learn that a workplace
is not a mating marketplace.
Bill O'Reilly, like the rest of us,
needs to just use Tinder.
No, he absolutely does not
need to do that.
That would be terrible for literally
everyone, except Bumble,
they would have a rocksolid
new ad campaign
that's going to hit hard
and hit well.
Whether O'Reilly is learning
his lesson here or not,
his advertisers are not
hanging around to find out.
We have seen around
60 advertisers go ahead and say
we're not going to run our ads
all round the O'Reilly factor.
Not good news for Bill O'Reilly.
I would say that he should call
his advertisers to apologize,
but he might start jerking off
while they're on the phone.
Almost nobody
is standing by Bill O'Reilly.
Nobody, that is, apart from
the President of the United States.
He's a person I know well.
He's a good personý
Personally, I think
he shouldn't have settled.
- How come ?
- Should have taken it all the way.
I don't think Bill
would do anything wrong.
Nobody gets to be surprised
because it is entirely plausible
that the hill our President
is willing to die on
is the one formed by Bill O'Reilly's
workplace erection
poking up
against his old-man slacks.
To recap this story for you:
Bill O'Reilly needs advertisers.
Donald Trump needs
to understand sexual harassment.
Here is where we come in.
As you may remember,
our catheter cowboy spent this year
appearing in ads on FOX News,
explaining the nuclear triad
and the American Health Care Act.
I think you know
where this is going.
We have produced an ad
to educate Donald Trump,
to air during the "O'Reilly Factor"
in New York and DC.
We submitted it to stations
on Friday, but weirdly,
we haven't heard back
from them since.
Surprising, because we're one
of the only advertisers
offering to buy time
on his show at the moment.
I hope they don't reject this ad.
But just in case they do,
here's a sneak peek of what we
would like the President to see.
Attention, patients.
Howdy. I'm a professional cowboy.
There's two things I know.
I don't like pain when I cath,
and repeated, sexual advances
or obscene remarks in the workplace
constitutes sexual harassment.
If there's a power disparity
between the two parties,
that's as inappropriate as
lubricating a catheter with hot sauce.
Why would you do that ?
I do not like pain when I cath.
If you've got a friend
who is accused of something like that,
I think twice
about defending him,
that contributes to a culture where
women don't wanna come forward.
I know you might not care about that.
But on some level, you gotta
know, you're blowing this.
You're sacrificing the chance
to make society a better place
on the altar of your towering
ignorance and fragile ego.
You are blowing this.
Goodbye everyone watching this
and definitely not one specific person.
See ya next time.
Moving on. Our main story
tonight concerns democracy.
Undeniably the best Greek export
that doesn't have fruit at the bottom.
There is concern about the
personalities harming our democracy.
Let's talk about one of the major
structural problems.
Something that Democrats
love to complain about.
We've seen Republicans rig the system
by their often illegal gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering to a fare-thee-well
in states controlled by Republicans.
Political gerrymandering is one of
the greatest threats to our democracy.
That is a bit much.
The greatest threat to our democracy
is clearly whatever tweet the President
planned for Cinco de Mayo this year.
We don't know yet, which
Spanish words will be misspelled.
But we can assume
it will be horrifying.
Gerrymandering is a problem.
Practice of drawing voting districts
in a way that creates unfair advantages
for whoever happens
to be drawing the lines.
Which sound mundane,
but the results can be significant.
Gerrymandering is responsible
for giving Republicans an edge
in the House of Representatives.
Look what happened in some states
where they drew the district lines.
In Pennsylvania 44 percent
chose Democratic candidates
for the House of Representatives
in 2014.
But, 13 of the 18 districts
are represented by Republicans.
In Ohio, 40 percent of the voters chose
democratic candidates for the House,
but 12 out of 16 seats
are represented by Republicans.
Those numbers are out of proportion
to what people should expect.
You wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice
cream that was 75 percent strawberry.
How is that okay ?
What perverts voted for this ?
Whoever draws the districts
has a lot of power.
It's possible to use that
power in very precise ways.
In the age of computers, you can
gerrymander with scientific precision.
You can run in and out of alleys
and up and down streets,
so include and exclude
whichever voters you want,
so it's become
a very precise science.
He's right: gerrymandering has
become a very precise science.
It's one of the few
remaining types of science
in which the Republican Party
currently believes.
There are different reasons
politicians engage in gerrymandering
it's done to disadvantage voters
based on race, or on political party,
or to shore up seats for incumbents,
sometimes even within a party.
Take Hakeem Jeffries.
In 2000, he ran a strong challenge
in a Democratic primary
for the New York State Assembly.
He planned to run again
in 2002,
but the Democrats had done
something interesting to the map.
The map that was drawn
was absolutely fascinating.
They drew a map that literally
carved out the block
on which Hakeem Jeffries lived
from Assembly District 57.
I remember
shaking my head in disbelief.
A lot of people hoped to vote for me
but were surprised to find
that they no longer lived
in the assembly district
they had been living in
for years, if not decades.
Brooklyn politics can be rough,
but that move was gangsta.
Yeah, it was "gangsta"
and remember:
the threshold for "gangsta"
in Brooklyn is the Notorious B.I.G.,
whose debut album begins
with songs that are, respectively,
about armed robbery, gun violence,
armed robbery and gun violence,
being prepared to die by gun violence
while committing armed robbery.
Even the term "gerrymandering"
goes back centuries.
It gets its name from a 19th century
politician named Elbridge Gerry.
As Governor of Massachusetts,
he helped shape a congressional
district so blatantly one-sided
that one critic said it looked
like a salamander.
"No", another replied:
"a gerry-mander".
Now, that counted
as a joke in 1810,
when your entertainment
options were sunsets,
Washington Irving novels
and getting kicked by a horse.
You are not wrong to notice that
the "gerry" in "gerrymander"
refers to a guy whose name
was pronounced "Gerry".
Everything about gerrymandering
is stupid and wrong.
There is nothing inherently wrong
with re-drawing a voting district.
It's necessary. They need to have
the same number of people in them.
Populations shift over time,
as people move, or die
or emigrate because
their stand-up careers endured
what might be characterized
as a "pogrom of indifference".
Every ten years,
we have a census,
lines are re-drawn for both
the U.S. House and state legislatures.
The problem is, in most states,
the lines are drawn by politicians.
In fact, in 37 states, the drawing
of state legislative districts
is primarily controlled
by the legislators themselves
and they have a pretty clear
vested interest there.
And if you think that seems
crazy, you're not alone.
Every fall I speak to five or six
members of the British parliament,
one of the things I explain: "here's
how you get elected to the House."
I see these shocked looks
and one time one said:
"That's not the voters choosing
their representatives,"
"that's the representatives
choosing their voters !"
First: that's racist.
And second: even I find it difficult
hearing advice on map-drawing
in a British accent that once said:
"I don't see why one scrap of dust
is any different from another."
I ended the border here,
that's where my pen ran out of ink.
They'll learn to like it. What's
the worst that can happen ?
If your party holds the redistricting
pen, it wields substantial power
and there are multiple techniques
at its disposal.
There are a couple of ways
that you can reapportion people
and there's a thing called packing
and a thing called cracking.
Yes, "packing" and "cracking".
Not to be confused with the teen
drug trend of "cracking and packing",
which is when the teens
fill a cucumber with crack
and put in in their anus
to absorb it faster.
I saw it on the local news,
which means it's real
and every teenager
is doing it right now !
In this context, "packing" means
cramming as many opposition voters
into just a few districts.
"Cracking" means spreading them
out thinly over a bunch of districts
so they can't gain a majority
in any one of them.
Either way,
it dilutes their impact.
Try and think of it
as table assignments at a wedding:
you can either break up
your eight awful relatives
and spread them out
over different tables,
or you can pack them all together
in one table of the damned.
Washington Post showed how this can
work: look at this hypothetical state.
It's 60 percent blue voters,
40 percent red
and it needs to be
carved up into five districts.
Proportionally, you would want
three blue and two red districts,
but if you draw
the lines like this,
you can get three red majorities,
and two blues,
and if you draw it like this, you get
five blue majorities and no red.
And if you draw lines like this
it looks like a dick,
which is irrelevant,
but it is objectively very funny.
And if you are thinking:
"Shouldn't all of this be illegal ?"
Complicated. If you're gerrymandering
to disadvantage minorities,
that is illegal
under the Voting Rights Act.
If you are gerrymandering to
disadvantage voters of opposing party
that has generally been allowed.
So racial gerrymandering ?
No.
Partisan gerrymandering ?
That's kind of okay.
And it's led politicians to be
brazen in their behavior.
Like in North Carolina last year.
Their congressional map
was thrown out in federal court for
racial gerrymandering, which is wrong.
They had to redraw.
And while doing it,
State Rep. David Lewis went out
of his way to explain
the new map would not illegally
fuck over minorities.
It would legally fuck
over Democrats.
We want to make clear that we,
to the extent, are going to use
political data in drawing this map,
it is to gain partisan advantage
on the map.
I want that criteria to be clearly
stated and understood.
I need you to understand: this is not
a race thing because it can't be.
We just want a map that churns
out Republicans like it's Ann Romney.
That is all we're saying here.
Please let me understand.
And that map worked.
In 2016, despite Republicans winning
over half the votes in House races,
they wound up controlling 77 percent
of the state's seats.
A more blatant disregard
for what people want
than the asshole who gives out
Bazooka Joe on Halloween.
Gum from the Roosevelt administration
wrapped in a comic from
the other Roosevelt administration.
The guy handing out
Snickers stuffed with razor blades
actually gives you a Snickers.
Republicans elevated this technique
to art form with a plan called REDMAP,
or the Redistricting Majority Project.
They poured more than $30 million
into state-level races,
gaining huge numbers of seats
and that paid massive dividends.
When Republicans won the majority
of state houses in 2010,
it ensured they'd be redrawing
the maps in those states.
Lo and behold,
it paid off in 2012.
Nationwide, Democrats running for
Congress got 1.1 million more votes,
but Republicans sent 33 more
members to the House.
The maps they drew put Democrats
at a significant disadvantage.
It's like if,
instead of Tim Duncan,
the San Antonio Spurs
had had to use Tim Burton.
It's not technically impossible to win,
but it's going to be much harder.
And look: to some extent,
Republicans got lucky,
because 2010 was a wave election
for their party.
I'm not saying Democrats
are angels here.
They've gerrymandered the shit out
of districts in states like Maryland
and they've been brazen, too.
Take Illinois. In 2001, Democrats won
the right to redistrict there after,
for reasons too complicated
and too stupid to explain,
a name was pulled out of a replica
of Abraham Lincoln's stovepipe hat.
Watch as one Democratic lawmaker
made the least convincing promise.
We'll sit down
and draw a very fair map.
Come on.
That's an inherently
suspicious look on his face.
That's the expression of someone
who urinated in a public pool.
Water's warm today !
Enjoy your swim.
How do you know if your district
has been drawn with nefarious intent ?
That's tricky. Because too often,
people will lazily point
to districts that have a weird shape.
North Carolina's 12th district
looks like spilled coffee.
Pennsylvania's 16th
is flexing its muscles.
One commentator compared Maryland's
3rd to a broken-winged pterodactyl.
And then there's this,
they call it the earmuffs.
Yes, an earmuff district, not to be
confused with the Earmuff District,
an area of Manhattan
where sketchy men sell accessories
made from the fur
of endangered species.
You should go visit.
While it is tempting to see something
suspicious in an oddshaped district,
there is a pretty good argument
against prioritizing tidy lines.
Dropping a bunch of squares
seems fair.
Like if you could just draw a grid
like Tron that you could put people
into districts and there wouldn't be
any manipulation in the process.
But Americans don't live,
with the exception of Montana,
Americans don't live in squares,
our communities are irregular.
American communities
are not square.
They're like jazz music:
they're free-form, free-flowing
and they contain a troubling
amount of opioids.
And there is no one right way
to draw a district.
Reasonable people will disagree.
Some might prioritize a district
being politically competitive,
others might favor compactness.
Others want to keep so-called
"communities of interest" together.
It may be physically impossible to do
all three of those things in one place.
Take that Earmuff District.
The thin line connecting
the two halves is just a single road.
People love to make fun of that.
In Chicago, squeezed
between two freeways,
this narrow strip is needed to connect
two halves of a gerrymandered district
to keep it contiguous,
as is required.
This is the way Congress gets around
the contiguous rule because
there's obviously nobody living here.
Unless they're homeless people,
I guess.
Anybody here ?
Any congressional voters out there ?
Now you may laugh,
but a few seconds later,
an entire ghost baseball team
from the 1900s walked out of the grass
and beat him to death
with their ghost bats.
And he kind of deserved it.
But here is the thing: it is drawn
like earmuffs for good reasons.
The northern and southern
parts are two Latino communities.
The district in the middle
is predominantly African-American.
Both are Democratic, so it's not
about partisan advantage.
It's about ensuring both communities
have representatives.
And it's criticized a lot,
but redistricting experts love it,
two of them actually put it
on their wedding cake.
That is a real wedding cake !
The bachelorette
party cake was something like:
"one more night
of packing and cracking !"
Not all weird shaped districts
are bad
and not all normal shaped districts
are good.
Gerrymandering is not the sole reason
for the mismatch
between our popular vote percentages
and our representation.
Some of that is due to where
Democrats choose to live.
Democrats live in the wrong places,
they cram themselves in cities
and that makes it really hard
to have a winning coalition.
If you are college-educated,
you move to a city and those places
have enough Democrats already.
Democrats need to make places
like Des Moines or Columbus, cool,
but that's outside of the typical
realm of political strategy.
What do you mean
make Des Moines cool ?
They've already got
the Des Moines Heritage Carousel,
the most bad-ass, balls-to-the-wall
carousel in the whole Midwest !
According to their website,
it is closed for the season, of spring,
not a good time for carousels,
but when May 28th rolls around,
it's gonna be an all-out
carousel fuckstravaganza !
Until 8pm.
Democrats are basically
packing themselves into districts.
And that is not likely
to change soon.
But there is a broader,
non-partisan point here,
that in a democracy, the question
of who gets to draw the map
should not have as much
significance as it currently does.
There is a Supreme Court case,
involving a redistricting in Wisconsin
that was so partisan, a lower
court struck their maps down
and the Supreme Court may,
for the first time,
issue a clear ruling putting limits
on partisan gerrymandering.
Our hopes are now in the delicious
claws of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Even without a ruling,
many experts argue
we should be taking redistricting
out of the hands of politicians
and give the task
to independent commissions.
A handful of states already
do some version of that.
It's not perfect. It is tough
to remove partisan biases,
a fact that one state lawmaker
brought up to shoot the idea down.
If I felt there were any way I could
stand before my constituents and say:
I believe that it's possible
to come up with a group of people
who have no political bias
who will simply sit down in a room
and magically create districts,
I'd be behind it.
I'd be behind it a hundred percent.
But those people don't exist.
If you recognize that guy,
you saw him ten minutes ago,
reassuring everyone that his intent
in drawing districts
was to gain partisan advantage
for Republicans.
He's arguing: nobody's unbiased,
so let's use me,
the most brazenly
biased man in the universe.
Which is pretty much arguing:
"no babysitter is perfect,
so let's just use Slenderman."
While commissions
might not be perfect,
they would be better.
It is hard to come up with a worse
system than the one most states have.
And there is something
important at stake here.
Lawmakers should not be allowed
to dilute our votes
by drawing their own lines
and picking their own voters.
I will tell you why.
The foundations of democracy
are built on the idea
that everybody's vote
should count equally.
Everybody's.
That is what America is all about.
Every one of us should get an equal
chance to make a bad decision,
which fucks things up
for everybody else.
Whoever we are,
however poor our decisions.
Whether you are a juggalo...
Stop it.
- Or a 47-year-old Quidditch player...
- It's a sport !
Or someone who bought
that stupid $6 000 jacket
I wore on the show last week,
it's horrible.
Our voices should be fully heard.
Even if we're scientologists,
or guys who ride unicycles as their
primary mode of transportation.
In this one context,
we should all be relevant,
regardless of our questionable
life choices.
Whether you're an EDM bro,
a guy jamming a knife into a toaster,
or a Washington Redskins fan
or even a Jill Stein supporter.
- She would've won !
- How ?
What process
could she have used to win ?
Her voice should count
as much anyone else's,
as much as a guy in a fedora
or a baker of erotic pastries,
or a Santacon attendee,
or everyone's racist grandma.
Don't say anything.
Because at the end of the day,
that is the point of this country.
That's what's made America great.
Because think about it:
election results should not be
the fault of lawmakers' crazy lines.
They should be the result of our own
crazy decisions. Am I right ?
- Am I right ?
- Yeah !
That's our show. We'll see you
next week. Good night !
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
END OF EPISODE 8,
SEASON IV