Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014–…): Season 6, Episode 25 - China's One Child Policy - full transcript
John explains the troubling history, brutal enforcement and questionable results of China's highly controversial, decades long, one-child policy, a punitive measure conceived originally as ...
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
SEASON VI
EPISODE 25
Welcome to Last Week Tonight!
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Let's dive in with a week that was once
again consumed by Stupid Watergate II,
something that features everything
that was bad about the original,
while still somehow
managing to be worse.
It's basically the Diet Mountain Dew
of political scandals.
This week saw Trump
try to shift the narrative
away from the allegations
surrounding him
to conspiracies
surrounding the Biden family,
although in doing so,
he hit some ridiculous roadblocks.
The president is amping up
his accusations on social media.
Tweeting out a video
slamming the Bidens
featuring music
from the rock group "Nickelback"
only to be shut down by Twitter
after the band complained
that was a copyright violation.
It's true.
Twitter removed one of the president's
memes 'cause Nickelback complained.
And that's a sentence
that somehow suggests the news
is being written by an algorithm
designed to generate random shittiness.
"Twitter took down Trump's meme;
And now for the weather,
where it will be raining expired
ranch dressing, rats, and bedbugs,
all in honor
of Guy Fieri's birthday.
Thanks for watching,
I'm Roman Polanksi."
And if that wasn't sufficiently stupid,
the very next day,
during Trump's customary
"screaming next to a helicopter" time,
he decided to answer a question about
what he wanted Ukraine to do like this.
They should investigate the Bidens,
likewise, China should start
an investigation into the Bidens,
because what happened in China
is just about as bad
as what happened with Ukraine.
I would say that President Zelensky,
if it were me,
I would recommend that they start
an investigation into the Bidens.
Holy shit!
Instead of denying that he privately
solicited dirt from a foreign power,
he publicly did it,
and then asked another foreign power
to get involved, too.
Which is just making it worse.
You almost expect his next words to be:
"Biden's not as bad as Jeffrey Epstein,
but no problem, I had him killed.
So sad, great guy.
The killer too-paid the guards,
used a bed sheet, he's outta there.
Wonderful extrajudicial murder."
It is bad enough
that Trump seems fixated on a rightwing
conspiracy theory about the Bidens.
But what makes it far worse
is the extent
to which he's abused the power
of the presidency to pursue that belief.
Text messages emerged,
showing a career diplomat Bill Taylor,
objecting to Trump
withholding aid from Ukraine
unless they investigated
the Bidens.
He apparently texted his concerns
to Gordon Sondland,
Trump's ambassador to the EU, and
the response he got was not reassuring.
Taylor wrote, quote:
"Are we saying that security assistance
and a White House meeting
are conditioned on investigations?"
Sondland responded: "Call me".
"Call me".
That is not a good response.
It would've been less damning
if Sondland had added:
"Because I'm horny."
"And I want you to talk me off.
Even though I'm your boss.
That's the misconduct I'm engaged in
right now. Not anything else."
Eggplant emoji.
And that wasn't the only time
Sondland brushed off Taylor's concerns.
In a text last month he wrote:
"It's crazy to withhold
security assistance
for help
with a political campaign."
But Gordon Sondland
disagreed saying:
"I believe you are incorrect
about President Trump's intentions...
No quid pro quo's... of any kind."
He suggested taking
the conversation offline.
He said: "I suggest we stop
the back and forth by text."
When you are that concerned
about not leaving a paper trail
in your conversation,
it's just inherently suspicious.
If you texted someone:
"Have you ever masturbated in the lawn
care aisle at Home Depot?"
and they responded with:
"I suggest we stop
the back and forth by text"
you pretty much
have your answer right there.
A lot of information is tumbling out
into the open thanks to this inquiry,
and none of it is good
for the White House.
It was just confirmed today
that a second whistleblower
with first-hand knowledge
of Trump's Ukraine dealings
spoke to the inspector general.
Other White House staffers
are now voicing broader concerns
about the president's
approach to diplomacy.
"The Washington Post"
chronicles President Trump's
conversations with other world leaders.
Often, they leave his aides
genuinely horrified.
Yeah, it's true.
According to the story,
Trump pestered Shinzo Abe to help
recommend him for a Nobel Prize,
was obsequious and fawning
to Vladimir Putin,
and in a call with Xi Jinping,
repeated numerous times how much
he liked a kind of chocolate cake.
While that last one sounds dumb,
at least "I like chocolate cake"
is a unifying message.
The president might be a racist foghorn
wrapped in old fried chicken skin,
but as far as chocolate cake
is concerned, he is us, and we is him.
Unless you don't like chocolate cake,
in which case feel free
to brick yourself up into a wall.
And look...
You fucking monsters!
While it should be clear
why Trump's Ukraine dealings are bad,
it is worth taking a second
to reflect just how bad.
Using your office to take down your
political rivals is what dictators do.
Trump asking China and Ukraine
to do that should really bother us.
The only question is,
will Republicans care?
And many seem to be trying very hard
to avoid commenting,
maybe because, when Marco Rubio
did comment, it didn't exactly go well.
Do you think it's okay
for President Trump to ask China
to launch an investigation
of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?
I don't know if that's a real request
or him just needling the press,
knowing that you guys were
gonna get outraged by it.
I don't think it's a real request,
I think he did it to gig you guys.
He did it to provoke you to ask me
and others and get outraged by it.
Like I said, he plays it like a violin
and every-falls right into it.
"He plays the media like a violin"
only makes sense if he means:
"Trump plays the media
exactly like he plays the violin,
very loud, very badly, and sometimes
screaming at it for no reason."
But the clear subtext
of Rubio's argument there
is that Trump
is just trolling-he didn't mean it.
But I would not be sure
that that is true.
And even if it is, it doesn't matter.
People act on his jokes.
Russia took his "Help find Hillary's
emails" routine pretty seriously.
And shooting his mouth off
now is significantly worse,
because... you know,
he's the president.
Nixon famously justified his actions
during Watergate by saying:
"When the President does it,
that means that it is not illegal."
But Trump's case here
is actually the exact opposite of that.
Because if he was
just any old Fox News-addled idiot
ranting about how Biden should be
investigated, that would be one thing.
But he's not. He's the president,
he has real power,
and when he abuses it to keep himself
in power, that's a big problem.
It is a case where, when the president
does it, it has to be illegal.
And for good reason.
Because unfortunately,
not every foreign government will be as
brave and willing to stand up to Trump
as fucking Nickelback.
And now this!
British News Programs
Seem Unable To Book The Right Guest.
May I speak to Gareth Thomas,
the shadow minister for Civil Society.
He's in our central London studio.
Sir, good news, this?
I'm not Gareth Thomas, I'm Richard
Dodd from the British Retail Consortium.
We're joined now by Steven Joseph.
He's chief executive
of the Campaign for Better Transport.
- A very good morning to you.
- Unfortunately I'm Steve McKenzie.
- I'm the finance expert this morning.
- It's equally as good to have you on.
Joining us is Sara Adelbi,
a human rights barrister.
Hi, I'm Addi Kakabara,
from Amnesty International.
We have the wrong guest up.
Joining us from our New York studio
is Ben Walker
who's the baseball editor
for the Associated Press.
I know that you've been covering Roger
Clemens' career for the last 23 years.
Remind us how big a name he is
in the sport of baseball.
Ben, can you hear me in New York?
It's Francis in London.
It's even a worse situation than that.
Because I am not Ben Walker.
And I know nothing about baseball.
He's now attempting to scale
the world's highest mountain again.
He joins us now in the studio
ahead of his next mission.
- Good morning.
- I think you have the wrong guest.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns China, the country that is,
not the thing you fill a cabinet with
when you've run out of human needs.
And I know there is a lot
going on with China right now,
from the ongoing pro-democracy
protests in Hong Kong to the trade war
that's been good and easy to win
for the last year and a half now.
But China took a moment
to celebrate the 70th anniversary
of the Communist Party coming to power
and they did it in some style.
Chinese President Xi Jinping
and other senior officials
watched a grand evening gala
Tuesday on Tiananmen Square.
A song called
"I Love You China" played.
And the number 70
was formed in the night sky.
They didn't just make a 70
out of fireworks,
people also made a 70
out of chickens and out of pandas.
That is a 7 made out of pandas,
with a zero made out of apples.
And if there aren't enough pandas
to make a whole 70 out of pandas,
maybe pandas don't deserve
to be made into a 70.
You might not like it when I imply
pandas are shitty and worthless,
but you know
who agrees with me on that?
Other pandas.
Pandas look at pandas and say:
"That thing sucks so much,
I would not fuck it
if the survival of my species depended
on it, which it absolutely does."
But look, that's not the point.
The point is, since China's government
is celebrating its last 70 years,
we thought we'd help
by highlighting
one the most massively consequential
policies they undertook in that time:
the one child-policy.
It began in 1980, and it was basically
exactly what it sounded like:
a policy from the government limiting
how many children families could have.
And I know
it might seem like old news,
but this policy actually ended
far more recently than you might think.
?n China, the Communist Party
is ending the one child policy
as a method of population control.
That was 2015,
meaning China made the historic
decision to end its one child policy
the same year Pizza Rat
made the historic decision
to carry pizza down stairs
while being a rat.
Which one of those decisions
will prove to be more historic?
We won't know until future generations
are reading about both events
in the history textbook: "History Is
Memes: 435 Pages About Pizza Rat."
So, why talk about
something that's now over?
The history of the one child policy
reveals a lot
about how the Communist Party
has used and held on to its power.
And for another,
the effects of it are far from over.
The one child policy is behind a lot
of challenges facing China right now.
To take just one major example:
for reasons we'll discuss later,
there are currently around 34 million
more males than females in China.
That is a lot.
In some villages, the ratio of men
to women can be nearly two to one.
A situation that's made journalists
who've visited noticeably sad.
Welcome to the most miserable
place in China for lovers.
Here where single men sit around
all day, it seems, with nothing to do.
You come across them everywhere,
listless and hopeless.
That is so harsh!
"The most miserable place in China
for lovers."
I presume narrowly beating out
wherever they keep the pandas.
The one on the right
is clearly thinking:
"I am not doing it." And the one on
the left is completely fine with that.
So, tonight, let's talk
about China's one child policy:
why it happened, how it was carried out
and what the consequences have been.
And let's start with why it happened.
In the 60s and 70s, overpopulation
was a huge global concern,
with alarmists
making apocalyptic predictions.
Even Disney got in on it, producing
this video for the Population Council.
Suppose that in time,
more and more children are born.
The children will be sickly, unhappy,
with little hope for the future.
This picture can be true
for countless families
if the number of children
born is left to chance.
But fortunately,
this need not happen anymore.
Modern science has given us a key
that makes possible
a new kind of personal freedom:
family planning.
Family planning?
Never heard of it.
Okay, okay, so first:
I know that clip
seems a little racially problematic,
but let's remember Disney also made
"Song of the South",
so we're grading them
on a very steep curve here.
But secondly,
and I cannot stress this enough,
I don't care how useful the information
Donald has on family planning might be,
you never take advice
on having sex from a duck.
They have corkscrew-shaped penises
that they regrow every mating season.
Donald Duck
actually looks like this.
And I'm simply not taking
family planning lessons
from some corkscrew-dicked pervert.
In any case, curly-dick duck aside,
the overpopulation hysteria was global.
And China was no exception.
And the Communist Party also saw
controlling their population growth
as key to raising the China's economic
prospects and standard of living,
making it easier for them
to hold onto power.
So, who did they pick
to solve this issue?
Take a minute and think about
who would be the absolute worst choice
to craft a prescriptive
nationwide policy on reproduction
and, do keep in mind,
Jared Kushner is not Chinese.
I'll give you the answer,
it was actually the military.
The policy was crafted
by military scientists.
Which, as one expert will tell you,
was not ideal.
It was conceived by men.
So, and the, these men
were primarily missile scientists,
who envision women
as in some ways like machines.
What these men thought
were that, women's fertility,
you can push it up
or push it down like a switch.
They didn't understand
that that's not how things work.
She's absolutely right.
Family planning isn't rocket science.
That's exactly why rocket scientists
should not do it.
It's the same reason
we don't let OB-GYNs
launch babies into space
and land them on the moon.
Experts should stay in their lane.
This policy
was a nationwide directive,
in the form of an open letter
to members of the Communist Party,
but it was actually
implemented at the lower level,
meaning enforcement varied wildly
depending on where you lived.
There could be exceptions.
Many rural areas even allowed families
a second child if their first was a girl.
But, the general message
was to have just one child.
It was often expressed through
striking propaganda, like this!
If you have a second child,
you violate the law.
Then you'll be detained.
If you try to escape,
you will end up in jail.
Think twice about it.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Holy fuck!
That is undeniably effective.
No better way to dissuade parents
from having more children
than by showing them
that particular child.
"Congratulations, Mrs. Jong, you've
given birth to a real aggro narc!"
There were also propaganda signs,
saying things like:
"Respond actively to the call that
each couple should have one child."
And "Have fewer children
but raise the quality."
Which is just
not how children work.
Children, and I say this
as a loving parent,
are not high-quality individuals.
Their artwork is derivative
and their stories, meandering.
No one who's ever been asked:
"Who's your ideal dinner guest"
has said, "Someone who insists
their food be dinosaur-shaped."
Broadly, the one child policy was also
enforced by an enormous bureaucracy.
At the national level, there were
half a million employees
in charge of administering it,
with many millions more
at the local level and their
scrutiny could be intense.
Workers must have their factory's
permission to get married.
Each team of 16 women,
has its birth planning worker.
She is constantly alert for
anyone who might be pregnant
or even thinking
of having a child.
We asked: "Doesn't the fact that
she's watching her workmates,"
"asking them
about their periods and so on,"
"doesn't that make
for resentment?"
No, the workers
are grateful for my concern.
Really?
Are you sure about that?
The workers are grateful
for your concern?
If there is anything I know about
women, and there definitely isn't,
it's that they love to be asked
about their periods at work.
Seriously. Just go up to a colleague
and say:
"How do you like
that DivaCup, girlfriend?"
"You wear it with a period
thong to prevent leakage?"
"How about that extra-absorbent
period toilet paper?"
My female writers told me that one
of those things I said isn't real,
but they refuse
to tell me which one.
If I'm honest, my money
is on "DivaCup"
'cause it sounds like what Mariah Carey
demands all her beverages come in.
I could be wrong, but obviously,
the enforcement went much further.
Local officials
would issue massive fines
for having more children
than you were allowed,
fines that routinely were multiple
times a household's annual income.
Many villages came to depend
upon those fines for revenue.
Even if parents could afford them,
some chose never to let
their kids ever forget it.
One child policy fines
are now so common
that they're being
incorporated into children's names.
Why did we name our child
"20000 Chen?"
That's how much we were fined
to have him, 20000 yuan.
Yeah. They named
their kid "20000 Chen"
so everyone would know what
they had to go through to have him.
It's the equivalent of
"Jason Last-Minute-Epidural-And-A-Lot
- Of-Shitting-On-The-Table Rabinowitz."
It's a lot
to make that kid carry around.
Massive fines were far
from the worst-case scenario,
particularly for girls.
In China, there's
a strong preference for boys,
which are seen as
an economic investment for old age,
as sons are expected
to support their parents.
Families would go to great lengths
to make sure that
their one child was a boy:
from abandoning girls,
to having sex-selective abortions,
to cases of female infanticide.
In some areas, the government's
methods of preventing more births,
regardless of gender,
were brutal.
Children could be taken
and sold to orphanages
and there were millions of forced
sterilizations and forced abortions.
This woman is still haunted
by the fact she was forced
to abort her child at nine months,
because her husband had a child
from a previous marriage.
It's like an arrow through my heart.
They made a mistake,
I should have had my baby,
they did not let me to keep my child.
The policy was
just so senseless.
That's obviously horrifying.
I know that there are some
who like to hold up China as a blanket
argument against abortion.
It is very easy to be both pro-choice
and anti-forced abortion,
in the same way you can be pro-drinking
fountain and anti-waterboarding.
The important thing is who's
in control of the fucking process.
As you have seen so far,
many heartbreaking decisions
were forced on Chinese families
by the one child policy.
You'll be relieved to hear
that we're gonna jump now
from the past to the present.
There are enormous ongoing
ramifications to China's policy
and much
like Donald Duck's penis,
there are a lot of twists and turns
and an important point at the end.
For a government that made it a point
to micromanage their citizens' lives,
China did little to prepare for
the long-term consequences.
And let's start
relatively small here.
The one child policy meant
that an entire generation
is filled with many only children.
Some theorize that means lots of kids
whose parents have overindulged them,
as a newscast explained in the '90s
in a not very tactful way.
A surprising by-product of China's
affluence is a young generation
with growing numbers
of fat children,
"little emperors" or "little meatballs"
as they're called in Chinese.
Calling that kid a little meatball
is both mean and adorable.
You shouldn't call a child a meatball
if he doesn't want to.
But on the other hand:
look at that little meatball!
Look at his little meatball hat. I want
to bite that little meatball's tummy.
I want to say "nom nom"
and throw him up
in the air and say:
"Who's a little meatball?
You are!"
That's the proper
reaction to that little meatball.
Hashtag #MeatballHero,
hashtag #ThatsASpicyMeatABall.
The policy didn't just produce
lots of scrumptious little meatballs.
Remember those fines
that resulted in 20000 Chen?
There were many parents who
did not have that kind of money.
But even if, for whatever reason,
they were able to keep their child,
there was a massive catch,
as this woman,
born 26 years ago as a second
child, can attest.
Officials told her parents
they would have to pay a fine,
the equivalent to about
four years of their salaries.
They could never afford it,
so she was never registered
as a Chinese citizen.
Her birth certificate
has a blank instead of her name.
Without an ID card,
I can't have a normal life.
I could never go to school,
never see a doctor.
I can't work and I can't get married.
It makes me very sad.
Exactly. She can't go to the doctor,
find a job, or get married.
She's a ghost without all the fun
parts of being a ghost,
like rattling chains,
or summoning cold winds,
or making terrible ceramics
while having sex with Demi Moore.
That woman is far from alone.
At least six and a half million Chinese
have no official status
because they were born
outside the family planning rules.
But one of the largest and perhaps
most far reaching effects of a policy
that resulted in the elimination
of millions of girls,
is that a couple of decades later
you have a generation
with a massive gender disparity
and far more men than women,
34 million more,
you may remember.
Millions of Chinese men will end up
without female mates.
Which has created a number
of odd business opportunities
to give men an edge
in attracting women.
This is an agency catering for
China's growing population of singles.
Choosing the right clothes,
the right chat lines on the first date
are all part of the plan.
For singles like Lo Gu Zhang,
newfound magic skills
may do the trick.
"You can really impress a girl,"
he says,
"and they'll become
attracted without even knowing it."
I know this might seem
hard to believe,
but that's actually a pretty
amazing magic trick there.
At the beginning, the hoop
and the chain are separate.
By the end, any woman he's talking
to has disappeared.
No matter how many cool tricks
they learn,
millions of men who want
a wife will never have one.
Which has led to a bunch
of unintended consequences,
including the success
of this company.
There are far too many men in China
compared to the number of women.
It's a great business opportunity.
There are more single men who cannot
find a wife and are desperate.
We've decided to make
life-sized dolls for them.
These men are happy to pay the price,
because the alternative
is to be alone
for the rest of their lives.
Buying a life-sized sex doll does not
stop you from being alone.
It makes you somehow more alone
than you were
when you were totally alone.
If one is the loneliest number,
one and a sex doll is the even
loneliester number.
While buying a sex doll
to replace the wife you'll never have
may seem like rock-bottom,
it's somewhere around rock-middle.
The gender imbalance created
by the one child policy
has created
a huge market for human trafficking,
with women and girls trafficked from
within China or surrounding countries
to be sold as wives
for Chinese men.
One study estimated that,
in just a four-year period,
21000 women and girls,
just from northern Myanmar,
were forced into marriage
in one Chinese province alone.
It isn't fair to expect the rocket
scientists who designed this policy
to anticipate the boom times it would
create for sex dolls and trafficking.
The irony is that one of the key
justifications for the policy
was that it would boost
China's future economic prospects.
Those prospects are under threat,
thanks to that very policy.
China's population is rapidly aging
and the youngest generation
is facing crushing responsibilities.
Researchers estimate that by 2025,
one in five Chinese in urban areas
will be over 60
and that by 2050,
that age group will increase
to 30 percent of the population.
The policy has led to what
is called the 4-2-1 problem,
where one child will be responsible
for two parents and four grandparents.
Right, that's a lot
for someone to take on.
If you've seen "Willy Wonka
& The Chocolate Factory",
you know the pressure
of having four grandparents,
all relying on you.
Best-case scenario, you win a
chocolate contest and you end up
impressing a slave-owner by surviving
his child murder factory.
But that's only gonna happen
to what? 12-14 of them, tops.
The rest are facing
a big challenge here.
There are worrying signs for China.
From 2012 to 2017,
the country's working-age population
decreased by 25 million people,
the equivalent
of the entire population of Australia
disappearing from the workforce.
And not for the reasons Australians
usually leave the workforce,
like being carried off
by a giant snake.
Australia is a terrible island
full of monsters.
Those aren't even stars on their
flag. They're spiders.
Get out of here!
You're disgusting.
And the troubling economic forecast
is a big reason why China's government
decided to end
their one child policy.
If you think:
"Great, happy ending."
"The government learned its lesson
and stopped meddling with family size",
not exactly.
Remember that clip earlier announcing
that the policy was over?
Let me play it out just a little bit.
The Communist Party is ending
that country's one child policy
as a method of population control.
All couples will now be allowed
to have two children.
Exactly! The one child policy is over,
but a two child policy has begun.
Chinese couples
can do whatever they want,
as long as what they want
is having two children
like the government
wants them to want.
Many couples don't want that. China's
birth rate has fallen to its lowest,
despite the policy shift, due in part
to rising living standards
and the cost of having children.
The Chinese government is pushing
the appeal of two children hard,
in ways that may, by now,
seem a little familiar to you.
There's propaganda, once again,
they've released stamps
showing a happy
monkey with two babies,
there are signs that say things like:
"One is too few, two is just right;"
"The young will have siblings,
the old will be cared for."
There are
government-produced PSA's...
To all our friends of childbearing age,
are you aware that the two child policy
went into effect
on January 1st, 2016?
The reform
of family planning services
will be a great thing
for not only each family,
but also the great family
that makes up China.
Look, I'll grant that that was a very
compelling argument
made by a very sexy cartoon.
We all agree on that, right?
That's a hot 'toon right there.
When you consider...
Now you get it, now you see it.
We've got the same tie on.
That's a copyright infringement.
When you consider all the one
child propaganda before that,
that's pretty jarring to watch.
I haven't seen a turnaround
that abrupt
since Subway changed their slogan
from "eat fresh"
to "forget that pedophile".
It was direct.
You have to give that to them.
Enforcement of the two child policy
is being left to local officials,
so methods for carrying it out
can still vary.
There are concerns
that the low birthrate
is behind a push in some provinces
to tighten access to abortion
and make it more difficult
to get divorced.
And in other areas, where two
is being treated as a hard limit,
people exceeding those limits are
frightened of the worst consequences.
Listen to this man, whose wife
got pregnant with their third child.
He was so terrified, he'd only
talk with his identity disguised.
A third baby is not allowed,
so we went into hiding.
Family planning officers conduct
pregnancy tests every three months.
They would have done
a forced abortion.
And that right there does suggest
the Chinese government
still hasn't learned
the fundamental lesson here:
people are not machines,
whose reproductive systems
can be turned on or off at will.
Pretending otherwise leads
to all the consequences you've seen,
from the entirely foreseeable,
like trauma and heartbreak,
to the less anticipated ones
like delicious little meatballs,
desperate magic tricks
and a factory that can't pump
out sex dolls fast enough.
That image is pretty on-the-nose:
a factory churning out
headless silicone women,
because rocket scientists nearly
40 years ago didn't care enough
about what their policies
might do to real ones.
As China's Communist Party
celebrates its 70 years in power,
it seems worth remembering a massive
way that they used that power.
And if they are running low
on pandas, which they clearly are,
I'd argue that sex dolls might be
a more appropriate tribute.
They've certainly got enough
of them.
So, happy 70th
to the Chinese government.
And now, this.
More Local News Beat Poetry
From NBC4 Washington's Pat Collins.
Two scammers got a shopper inside
Whole Foods talking about rice.
Soon, they disappeared.
And so did her wallet.
See this display case here?
It used to be way over there.
Now, it's back here in what's left
of the break room.
A video chat. She takes off
her clothes,
he takes off his clothes.
And then, sextortion!
The sign over here says "open",
but this morning it was far more
open than they ever intended it to be.
Two days later, same kind
of pick up truck, same M.O.!
In goes the truck!
Down goes the ATM.
ATM here.
Not anymore.
Police say they also seized a car.
A car with flashing lights.
A car with a siren.
A car with police equipment.
It was a Honda.
That's our show, thanks for watching.
See you next week. Goodnight!
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
END OF EPISODE 25,
SEASON VI
WITH JOHN OLIVER
SEASON VI
EPISODE 25
Welcome to Last Week Tonight!
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Let's dive in with a week that was once
again consumed by Stupid Watergate II,
something that features everything
that was bad about the original,
while still somehow
managing to be worse.
It's basically the Diet Mountain Dew
of political scandals.
This week saw Trump
try to shift the narrative
away from the allegations
surrounding him
to conspiracies
surrounding the Biden family,
although in doing so,
he hit some ridiculous roadblocks.
The president is amping up
his accusations on social media.
Tweeting out a video
slamming the Bidens
featuring music
from the rock group "Nickelback"
only to be shut down by Twitter
after the band complained
that was a copyright violation.
It's true.
Twitter removed one of the president's
memes 'cause Nickelback complained.
And that's a sentence
that somehow suggests the news
is being written by an algorithm
designed to generate random shittiness.
"Twitter took down Trump's meme;
And now for the weather,
where it will be raining expired
ranch dressing, rats, and bedbugs,
all in honor
of Guy Fieri's birthday.
Thanks for watching,
I'm Roman Polanksi."
And if that wasn't sufficiently stupid,
the very next day,
during Trump's customary
"screaming next to a helicopter" time,
he decided to answer a question about
what he wanted Ukraine to do like this.
They should investigate the Bidens,
likewise, China should start
an investigation into the Bidens,
because what happened in China
is just about as bad
as what happened with Ukraine.
I would say that President Zelensky,
if it were me,
I would recommend that they start
an investigation into the Bidens.
Holy shit!
Instead of denying that he privately
solicited dirt from a foreign power,
he publicly did it,
and then asked another foreign power
to get involved, too.
Which is just making it worse.
You almost expect his next words to be:
"Biden's not as bad as Jeffrey Epstein,
but no problem, I had him killed.
So sad, great guy.
The killer too-paid the guards,
used a bed sheet, he's outta there.
Wonderful extrajudicial murder."
It is bad enough
that Trump seems fixated on a rightwing
conspiracy theory about the Bidens.
But what makes it far worse
is the extent
to which he's abused the power
of the presidency to pursue that belief.
Text messages emerged,
showing a career diplomat Bill Taylor,
objecting to Trump
withholding aid from Ukraine
unless they investigated
the Bidens.
He apparently texted his concerns
to Gordon Sondland,
Trump's ambassador to the EU, and
the response he got was not reassuring.
Taylor wrote, quote:
"Are we saying that security assistance
and a White House meeting
are conditioned on investigations?"
Sondland responded: "Call me".
"Call me".
That is not a good response.
It would've been less damning
if Sondland had added:
"Because I'm horny."
"And I want you to talk me off.
Even though I'm your boss.
That's the misconduct I'm engaged in
right now. Not anything else."
Eggplant emoji.
And that wasn't the only time
Sondland brushed off Taylor's concerns.
In a text last month he wrote:
"It's crazy to withhold
security assistance
for help
with a political campaign."
But Gordon Sondland
disagreed saying:
"I believe you are incorrect
about President Trump's intentions...
No quid pro quo's... of any kind."
He suggested taking
the conversation offline.
He said: "I suggest we stop
the back and forth by text."
When you are that concerned
about not leaving a paper trail
in your conversation,
it's just inherently suspicious.
If you texted someone:
"Have you ever masturbated in the lawn
care aisle at Home Depot?"
and they responded with:
"I suggest we stop
the back and forth by text"
you pretty much
have your answer right there.
A lot of information is tumbling out
into the open thanks to this inquiry,
and none of it is good
for the White House.
It was just confirmed today
that a second whistleblower
with first-hand knowledge
of Trump's Ukraine dealings
spoke to the inspector general.
Other White House staffers
are now voicing broader concerns
about the president's
approach to diplomacy.
"The Washington Post"
chronicles President Trump's
conversations with other world leaders.
Often, they leave his aides
genuinely horrified.
Yeah, it's true.
According to the story,
Trump pestered Shinzo Abe to help
recommend him for a Nobel Prize,
was obsequious and fawning
to Vladimir Putin,
and in a call with Xi Jinping,
repeated numerous times how much
he liked a kind of chocolate cake.
While that last one sounds dumb,
at least "I like chocolate cake"
is a unifying message.
The president might be a racist foghorn
wrapped in old fried chicken skin,
but as far as chocolate cake
is concerned, he is us, and we is him.
Unless you don't like chocolate cake,
in which case feel free
to brick yourself up into a wall.
And look...
You fucking monsters!
While it should be clear
why Trump's Ukraine dealings are bad,
it is worth taking a second
to reflect just how bad.
Using your office to take down your
political rivals is what dictators do.
Trump asking China and Ukraine
to do that should really bother us.
The only question is,
will Republicans care?
And many seem to be trying very hard
to avoid commenting,
maybe because, when Marco Rubio
did comment, it didn't exactly go well.
Do you think it's okay
for President Trump to ask China
to launch an investigation
of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?
I don't know if that's a real request
or him just needling the press,
knowing that you guys were
gonna get outraged by it.
I don't think it's a real request,
I think he did it to gig you guys.
He did it to provoke you to ask me
and others and get outraged by it.
Like I said, he plays it like a violin
and every-falls right into it.
"He plays the media like a violin"
only makes sense if he means:
"Trump plays the media
exactly like he plays the violin,
very loud, very badly, and sometimes
screaming at it for no reason."
But the clear subtext
of Rubio's argument there
is that Trump
is just trolling-he didn't mean it.
But I would not be sure
that that is true.
And even if it is, it doesn't matter.
People act on his jokes.
Russia took his "Help find Hillary's
emails" routine pretty seriously.
And shooting his mouth off
now is significantly worse,
because... you know,
he's the president.
Nixon famously justified his actions
during Watergate by saying:
"When the President does it,
that means that it is not illegal."
But Trump's case here
is actually the exact opposite of that.
Because if he was
just any old Fox News-addled idiot
ranting about how Biden should be
investigated, that would be one thing.
But he's not. He's the president,
he has real power,
and when he abuses it to keep himself
in power, that's a big problem.
It is a case where, when the president
does it, it has to be illegal.
And for good reason.
Because unfortunately,
not every foreign government will be as
brave and willing to stand up to Trump
as fucking Nickelback.
And now this!
British News Programs
Seem Unable To Book The Right Guest.
May I speak to Gareth Thomas,
the shadow minister for Civil Society.
He's in our central London studio.
Sir, good news, this?
I'm not Gareth Thomas, I'm Richard
Dodd from the British Retail Consortium.
We're joined now by Steven Joseph.
He's chief executive
of the Campaign for Better Transport.
- A very good morning to you.
- Unfortunately I'm Steve McKenzie.
- I'm the finance expert this morning.
- It's equally as good to have you on.
Joining us is Sara Adelbi,
a human rights barrister.
Hi, I'm Addi Kakabara,
from Amnesty International.
We have the wrong guest up.
Joining us from our New York studio
is Ben Walker
who's the baseball editor
for the Associated Press.
I know that you've been covering Roger
Clemens' career for the last 23 years.
Remind us how big a name he is
in the sport of baseball.
Ben, can you hear me in New York?
It's Francis in London.
It's even a worse situation than that.
Because I am not Ben Walker.
And I know nothing about baseball.
He's now attempting to scale
the world's highest mountain again.
He joins us now in the studio
ahead of his next mission.
- Good morning.
- I think you have the wrong guest.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns China, the country that is,
not the thing you fill a cabinet with
when you've run out of human needs.
And I know there is a lot
going on with China right now,
from the ongoing pro-democracy
protests in Hong Kong to the trade war
that's been good and easy to win
for the last year and a half now.
But China took a moment
to celebrate the 70th anniversary
of the Communist Party coming to power
and they did it in some style.
Chinese President Xi Jinping
and other senior officials
watched a grand evening gala
Tuesday on Tiananmen Square.
A song called
"I Love You China" played.
And the number 70
was formed in the night sky.
They didn't just make a 70
out of fireworks,
people also made a 70
out of chickens and out of pandas.
That is a 7 made out of pandas,
with a zero made out of apples.
And if there aren't enough pandas
to make a whole 70 out of pandas,
maybe pandas don't deserve
to be made into a 70.
You might not like it when I imply
pandas are shitty and worthless,
but you know
who agrees with me on that?
Other pandas.
Pandas look at pandas and say:
"That thing sucks so much,
I would not fuck it
if the survival of my species depended
on it, which it absolutely does."
But look, that's not the point.
The point is, since China's government
is celebrating its last 70 years,
we thought we'd help
by highlighting
one the most massively consequential
policies they undertook in that time:
the one child-policy.
It began in 1980, and it was basically
exactly what it sounded like:
a policy from the government limiting
how many children families could have.
And I know
it might seem like old news,
but this policy actually ended
far more recently than you might think.
?n China, the Communist Party
is ending the one child policy
as a method of population control.
That was 2015,
meaning China made the historic
decision to end its one child policy
the same year Pizza Rat
made the historic decision
to carry pizza down stairs
while being a rat.
Which one of those decisions
will prove to be more historic?
We won't know until future generations
are reading about both events
in the history textbook: "History Is
Memes: 435 Pages About Pizza Rat."
So, why talk about
something that's now over?
The history of the one child policy
reveals a lot
about how the Communist Party
has used and held on to its power.
And for another,
the effects of it are far from over.
The one child policy is behind a lot
of challenges facing China right now.
To take just one major example:
for reasons we'll discuss later,
there are currently around 34 million
more males than females in China.
That is a lot.
In some villages, the ratio of men
to women can be nearly two to one.
A situation that's made journalists
who've visited noticeably sad.
Welcome to the most miserable
place in China for lovers.
Here where single men sit around
all day, it seems, with nothing to do.
You come across them everywhere,
listless and hopeless.
That is so harsh!
"The most miserable place in China
for lovers."
I presume narrowly beating out
wherever they keep the pandas.
The one on the right
is clearly thinking:
"I am not doing it." And the one on
the left is completely fine with that.
So, tonight, let's talk
about China's one child policy:
why it happened, how it was carried out
and what the consequences have been.
And let's start with why it happened.
In the 60s and 70s, overpopulation
was a huge global concern,
with alarmists
making apocalyptic predictions.
Even Disney got in on it, producing
this video for the Population Council.
Suppose that in time,
more and more children are born.
The children will be sickly, unhappy,
with little hope for the future.
This picture can be true
for countless families
if the number of children
born is left to chance.
But fortunately,
this need not happen anymore.
Modern science has given us a key
that makes possible
a new kind of personal freedom:
family planning.
Family planning?
Never heard of it.
Okay, okay, so first:
I know that clip
seems a little racially problematic,
but let's remember Disney also made
"Song of the South",
so we're grading them
on a very steep curve here.
But secondly,
and I cannot stress this enough,
I don't care how useful the information
Donald has on family planning might be,
you never take advice
on having sex from a duck.
They have corkscrew-shaped penises
that they regrow every mating season.
Donald Duck
actually looks like this.
And I'm simply not taking
family planning lessons
from some corkscrew-dicked pervert.
In any case, curly-dick duck aside,
the overpopulation hysteria was global.
And China was no exception.
And the Communist Party also saw
controlling their population growth
as key to raising the China's economic
prospects and standard of living,
making it easier for them
to hold onto power.
So, who did they pick
to solve this issue?
Take a minute and think about
who would be the absolute worst choice
to craft a prescriptive
nationwide policy on reproduction
and, do keep in mind,
Jared Kushner is not Chinese.
I'll give you the answer,
it was actually the military.
The policy was crafted
by military scientists.
Which, as one expert will tell you,
was not ideal.
It was conceived by men.
So, and the, these men
were primarily missile scientists,
who envision women
as in some ways like machines.
What these men thought
were that, women's fertility,
you can push it up
or push it down like a switch.
They didn't understand
that that's not how things work.
She's absolutely right.
Family planning isn't rocket science.
That's exactly why rocket scientists
should not do it.
It's the same reason
we don't let OB-GYNs
launch babies into space
and land them on the moon.
Experts should stay in their lane.
This policy
was a nationwide directive,
in the form of an open letter
to members of the Communist Party,
but it was actually
implemented at the lower level,
meaning enforcement varied wildly
depending on where you lived.
There could be exceptions.
Many rural areas even allowed families
a second child if their first was a girl.
But, the general message
was to have just one child.
It was often expressed through
striking propaganda, like this!
If you have a second child,
you violate the law.
Then you'll be detained.
If you try to escape,
you will end up in jail.
Think twice about it.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Holy fuck!
That is undeniably effective.
No better way to dissuade parents
from having more children
than by showing them
that particular child.
"Congratulations, Mrs. Jong, you've
given birth to a real aggro narc!"
There were also propaganda signs,
saying things like:
"Respond actively to the call that
each couple should have one child."
And "Have fewer children
but raise the quality."
Which is just
not how children work.
Children, and I say this
as a loving parent,
are not high-quality individuals.
Their artwork is derivative
and their stories, meandering.
No one who's ever been asked:
"Who's your ideal dinner guest"
has said, "Someone who insists
their food be dinosaur-shaped."
Broadly, the one child policy was also
enforced by an enormous bureaucracy.
At the national level, there were
half a million employees
in charge of administering it,
with many millions more
at the local level and their
scrutiny could be intense.
Workers must have their factory's
permission to get married.
Each team of 16 women,
has its birth planning worker.
She is constantly alert for
anyone who might be pregnant
or even thinking
of having a child.
We asked: "Doesn't the fact that
she's watching her workmates,"
"asking them
about their periods and so on,"
"doesn't that make
for resentment?"
No, the workers
are grateful for my concern.
Really?
Are you sure about that?
The workers are grateful
for your concern?
If there is anything I know about
women, and there definitely isn't,
it's that they love to be asked
about their periods at work.
Seriously. Just go up to a colleague
and say:
"How do you like
that DivaCup, girlfriend?"
"You wear it with a period
thong to prevent leakage?"
"How about that extra-absorbent
period toilet paper?"
My female writers told me that one
of those things I said isn't real,
but they refuse
to tell me which one.
If I'm honest, my money
is on "DivaCup"
'cause it sounds like what Mariah Carey
demands all her beverages come in.
I could be wrong, but obviously,
the enforcement went much further.
Local officials
would issue massive fines
for having more children
than you were allowed,
fines that routinely were multiple
times a household's annual income.
Many villages came to depend
upon those fines for revenue.
Even if parents could afford them,
some chose never to let
their kids ever forget it.
One child policy fines
are now so common
that they're being
incorporated into children's names.
Why did we name our child
"20000 Chen?"
That's how much we were fined
to have him, 20000 yuan.
Yeah. They named
their kid "20000 Chen"
so everyone would know what
they had to go through to have him.
It's the equivalent of
"Jason Last-Minute-Epidural-And-A-Lot
- Of-Shitting-On-The-Table Rabinowitz."
It's a lot
to make that kid carry around.
Massive fines were far
from the worst-case scenario,
particularly for girls.
In China, there's
a strong preference for boys,
which are seen as
an economic investment for old age,
as sons are expected
to support their parents.
Families would go to great lengths
to make sure that
their one child was a boy:
from abandoning girls,
to having sex-selective abortions,
to cases of female infanticide.
In some areas, the government's
methods of preventing more births,
regardless of gender,
were brutal.
Children could be taken
and sold to orphanages
and there were millions of forced
sterilizations and forced abortions.
This woman is still haunted
by the fact she was forced
to abort her child at nine months,
because her husband had a child
from a previous marriage.
It's like an arrow through my heart.
They made a mistake,
I should have had my baby,
they did not let me to keep my child.
The policy was
just so senseless.
That's obviously horrifying.
I know that there are some
who like to hold up China as a blanket
argument against abortion.
It is very easy to be both pro-choice
and anti-forced abortion,
in the same way you can be pro-drinking
fountain and anti-waterboarding.
The important thing is who's
in control of the fucking process.
As you have seen so far,
many heartbreaking decisions
were forced on Chinese families
by the one child policy.
You'll be relieved to hear
that we're gonna jump now
from the past to the present.
There are enormous ongoing
ramifications to China's policy
and much
like Donald Duck's penis,
there are a lot of twists and turns
and an important point at the end.
For a government that made it a point
to micromanage their citizens' lives,
China did little to prepare for
the long-term consequences.
And let's start
relatively small here.
The one child policy meant
that an entire generation
is filled with many only children.
Some theorize that means lots of kids
whose parents have overindulged them,
as a newscast explained in the '90s
in a not very tactful way.
A surprising by-product of China's
affluence is a young generation
with growing numbers
of fat children,
"little emperors" or "little meatballs"
as they're called in Chinese.
Calling that kid a little meatball
is both mean and adorable.
You shouldn't call a child a meatball
if he doesn't want to.
But on the other hand:
look at that little meatball!
Look at his little meatball hat. I want
to bite that little meatball's tummy.
I want to say "nom nom"
and throw him up
in the air and say:
"Who's a little meatball?
You are!"
That's the proper
reaction to that little meatball.
Hashtag #MeatballHero,
hashtag #ThatsASpicyMeatABall.
The policy didn't just produce
lots of scrumptious little meatballs.
Remember those fines
that resulted in 20000 Chen?
There were many parents who
did not have that kind of money.
But even if, for whatever reason,
they were able to keep their child,
there was a massive catch,
as this woman,
born 26 years ago as a second
child, can attest.
Officials told her parents
they would have to pay a fine,
the equivalent to about
four years of their salaries.
They could never afford it,
so she was never registered
as a Chinese citizen.
Her birth certificate
has a blank instead of her name.
Without an ID card,
I can't have a normal life.
I could never go to school,
never see a doctor.
I can't work and I can't get married.
It makes me very sad.
Exactly. She can't go to the doctor,
find a job, or get married.
She's a ghost without all the fun
parts of being a ghost,
like rattling chains,
or summoning cold winds,
or making terrible ceramics
while having sex with Demi Moore.
That woman is far from alone.
At least six and a half million Chinese
have no official status
because they were born
outside the family planning rules.
But one of the largest and perhaps
most far reaching effects of a policy
that resulted in the elimination
of millions of girls,
is that a couple of decades later
you have a generation
with a massive gender disparity
and far more men than women,
34 million more,
you may remember.
Millions of Chinese men will end up
without female mates.
Which has created a number
of odd business opportunities
to give men an edge
in attracting women.
This is an agency catering for
China's growing population of singles.
Choosing the right clothes,
the right chat lines on the first date
are all part of the plan.
For singles like Lo Gu Zhang,
newfound magic skills
may do the trick.
"You can really impress a girl,"
he says,
"and they'll become
attracted without even knowing it."
I know this might seem
hard to believe,
but that's actually a pretty
amazing magic trick there.
At the beginning, the hoop
and the chain are separate.
By the end, any woman he's talking
to has disappeared.
No matter how many cool tricks
they learn,
millions of men who want
a wife will never have one.
Which has led to a bunch
of unintended consequences,
including the success
of this company.
There are far too many men in China
compared to the number of women.
It's a great business opportunity.
There are more single men who cannot
find a wife and are desperate.
We've decided to make
life-sized dolls for them.
These men are happy to pay the price,
because the alternative
is to be alone
for the rest of their lives.
Buying a life-sized sex doll does not
stop you from being alone.
It makes you somehow more alone
than you were
when you were totally alone.
If one is the loneliest number,
one and a sex doll is the even
loneliester number.
While buying a sex doll
to replace the wife you'll never have
may seem like rock-bottom,
it's somewhere around rock-middle.
The gender imbalance created
by the one child policy
has created
a huge market for human trafficking,
with women and girls trafficked from
within China or surrounding countries
to be sold as wives
for Chinese men.
One study estimated that,
in just a four-year period,
21000 women and girls,
just from northern Myanmar,
were forced into marriage
in one Chinese province alone.
It isn't fair to expect the rocket
scientists who designed this policy
to anticipate the boom times it would
create for sex dolls and trafficking.
The irony is that one of the key
justifications for the policy
was that it would boost
China's future economic prospects.
Those prospects are under threat,
thanks to that very policy.
China's population is rapidly aging
and the youngest generation
is facing crushing responsibilities.
Researchers estimate that by 2025,
one in five Chinese in urban areas
will be over 60
and that by 2050,
that age group will increase
to 30 percent of the population.
The policy has led to what
is called the 4-2-1 problem,
where one child will be responsible
for two parents and four grandparents.
Right, that's a lot
for someone to take on.
If you've seen "Willy Wonka
& The Chocolate Factory",
you know the pressure
of having four grandparents,
all relying on you.
Best-case scenario, you win a
chocolate contest and you end up
impressing a slave-owner by surviving
his child murder factory.
But that's only gonna happen
to what? 12-14 of them, tops.
The rest are facing
a big challenge here.
There are worrying signs for China.
From 2012 to 2017,
the country's working-age population
decreased by 25 million people,
the equivalent
of the entire population of Australia
disappearing from the workforce.
And not for the reasons Australians
usually leave the workforce,
like being carried off
by a giant snake.
Australia is a terrible island
full of monsters.
Those aren't even stars on their
flag. They're spiders.
Get out of here!
You're disgusting.
And the troubling economic forecast
is a big reason why China's government
decided to end
their one child policy.
If you think:
"Great, happy ending."
"The government learned its lesson
and stopped meddling with family size",
not exactly.
Remember that clip earlier announcing
that the policy was over?
Let me play it out just a little bit.
The Communist Party is ending
that country's one child policy
as a method of population control.
All couples will now be allowed
to have two children.
Exactly! The one child policy is over,
but a two child policy has begun.
Chinese couples
can do whatever they want,
as long as what they want
is having two children
like the government
wants them to want.
Many couples don't want that. China's
birth rate has fallen to its lowest,
despite the policy shift, due in part
to rising living standards
and the cost of having children.
The Chinese government is pushing
the appeal of two children hard,
in ways that may, by now,
seem a little familiar to you.
There's propaganda, once again,
they've released stamps
showing a happy
monkey with two babies,
there are signs that say things like:
"One is too few, two is just right;"
"The young will have siblings,
the old will be cared for."
There are
government-produced PSA's...
To all our friends of childbearing age,
are you aware that the two child policy
went into effect
on January 1st, 2016?
The reform
of family planning services
will be a great thing
for not only each family,
but also the great family
that makes up China.
Look, I'll grant that that was a very
compelling argument
made by a very sexy cartoon.
We all agree on that, right?
That's a hot 'toon right there.
When you consider...
Now you get it, now you see it.
We've got the same tie on.
That's a copyright infringement.
When you consider all the one
child propaganda before that,
that's pretty jarring to watch.
I haven't seen a turnaround
that abrupt
since Subway changed their slogan
from "eat fresh"
to "forget that pedophile".
It was direct.
You have to give that to them.
Enforcement of the two child policy
is being left to local officials,
so methods for carrying it out
can still vary.
There are concerns
that the low birthrate
is behind a push in some provinces
to tighten access to abortion
and make it more difficult
to get divorced.
And in other areas, where two
is being treated as a hard limit,
people exceeding those limits are
frightened of the worst consequences.
Listen to this man, whose wife
got pregnant with their third child.
He was so terrified, he'd only
talk with his identity disguised.
A third baby is not allowed,
so we went into hiding.
Family planning officers conduct
pregnancy tests every three months.
They would have done
a forced abortion.
And that right there does suggest
the Chinese government
still hasn't learned
the fundamental lesson here:
people are not machines,
whose reproductive systems
can be turned on or off at will.
Pretending otherwise leads
to all the consequences you've seen,
from the entirely foreseeable,
like trauma and heartbreak,
to the less anticipated ones
like delicious little meatballs,
desperate magic tricks
and a factory that can't pump
out sex dolls fast enough.
That image is pretty on-the-nose:
a factory churning out
headless silicone women,
because rocket scientists nearly
40 years ago didn't care enough
about what their policies
might do to real ones.
As China's Communist Party
celebrates its 70 years in power,
it seems worth remembering a massive
way that they used that power.
And if they are running low
on pandas, which they clearly are,
I'd argue that sex dolls might be
a more appropriate tribute.
They've certainly got enough
of them.
So, happy 70th
to the Chinese government.
And now, this.
More Local News Beat Poetry
From NBC4 Washington's Pat Collins.
Two scammers got a shopper inside
Whole Foods talking about rice.
Soon, they disappeared.
And so did her wallet.
See this display case here?
It used to be way over there.
Now, it's back here in what's left
of the break room.
A video chat. She takes off
her clothes,
he takes off his clothes.
And then, sextortion!
The sign over here says "open",
but this morning it was far more
open than they ever intended it to be.
Two days later, same kind
of pick up truck, same M.O.!
In goes the truck!
Down goes the ATM.
ATM here.
Not anymore.
Police say they also seized a car.
A car with flashing lights.
A car with a siren.
A car with police equipment.
It was a Honda.
That's our show, thanks for watching.
See you next week. Goodnight!
LAST WEEK TONIGHT
WITH JOHN OLIVER
END OF EPISODE 25,
SEASON VI