When John Oliver Says What Can We Do? He's Not Asking A Question

 

Earlier this month almost by accident I ended up watching Last Week Tonight. Ever since the results of the November election I've made a habit to avoid late night shows as a matter of principle for reasons that my readers are more than aware of but the majority of the people in the business, such as Oliver, refuse to acknowledge. I don't know why I watched the show: there was something arguably superior and more interesting but I suspect it was because it had to do with Netanyahu.

To be clear the twenty minutes I saw demonstrated that Oliver seems to have discarded even the pretense that he is doing a comedy show and was for all intents and purposes a polemic with barely the trappings of humor added in. It's clear that he has gone even further to the left then he was when I was watching him (and my readers know that was pretty far already) and seemed more interesting in speaking in terms of a political rant against what is wrong with the world, which as we know in the gospel according to Oliver, is everything but the people who watch his show.

He had nothing to say that I didn't already know in large part because I'd either read about it before or Oliver himself had covered it. But what I found striking and revealing came in the final minutes when he stated something that he and so many people who have talked about the conflict in Gaza basically chose to leave out when it came to why no one was doing anything.

Oliver acknowledged essentially that it was in Netanyahu's best interest to keep the conflict in Gaza going as long as possible for his political survival and more importantly his freedom. The leader of Israel has been dealing with corruption charges that have plagued him for decades and it has been clear the only thing that has kept him from facing the music was his hold on power. Everything he has done in his most recent term from the appointment of his cabinet to raiding the judiciary even before October 7^th was done for one reason only: he didn't want to face charges and likely die in prison.

Oliver essentially confirmed as much in this piece as well as in the summation. To be clear he showed neither empathy for Netanyahu's situation nor the Israeli people (except those who were opposed to his government) or even the Jews who've spent so much time over the last two years undergoing so much bigotry and hostility around the world pretty much because of his actions in a country that the majority have no doubt have never been to. He casually mentioned that Netanyahu's term was up in 2026 and perhaps maybe sooner and that hopefully the people would do the right thing, though given Oliver's contempt of the democratic process in general he was basically indifferent to the idea.

None of this was news any more then it really was entertainment. What caught my attention however was the fact that Oliver did the piece at all and more than that did something he has gone out of his way to avoid doing in the decade I watched him. And that is acknowledge, even momentarily, that someone could have a motivation for their actions other than the simple fact that they know what the right thing to do is and choose not to because they have no regard for the well-being of humanity.

As I wrote in an earlier article about late night Last Week Tonight has existed for ten years basically operating on what might be the grand unitary theory of progressivism. I'll quote myself:

How many episodes has he argued about corporations such as Amazon, Boeing or McKinney as if these were human beings destroying the world rather than corporate entities? And it's not just corporations he personifies: it's government institutions, organized religion, education, political parties, other countries, even Law & Order…

And all of these rants which are usually disguised with jokes make the judgment that these are people in a way keeping with Oliver's now blatantly leftist politics: they are broken because they don't act with the proper morality structure which is the only thing that should factor it, rather than such things as economics or political gain which Oliver thinks should not factor into why they – or really anybody – should choose to do something. Like the overwhelming majority of leftist thinkers Oliver believes the only reason anybody should do anything – and he makes it clear that he considers corporations no different than people that regard – is for the common good, even if it doesn't benefit that institution personally, if there's no short-term or long term benefit, or even if it ends up destroying your ability to do good entirely.  That's more or less what has passed for a governing philosophy among leftist thinkers for nearly two centuries. That it is almost certainly can't work in practice has not stopped them for advocating for it.

I've long wondered if Oliver was a true believer in this regard or if he was capable of acknowledging there might be outside factors that lead individuals to do things absent this reasoning. His statement about why Netanyahu chose to do what he did at the end of the program would seem to confirm the latter. And considering he's essentially spent the last two years basically ranting at American leaders for not being able to end the conflict purely based on this theory of progressivism alone – and that show clearly indicates that he knew that the Israeli leader had a very good reason not to listen to them  - it basically gives the game away on Oliver the same way that he has been revealing the double-talk and statements of everyone else on his show for more than a decade. It's not a gotcha moment in the traditional sense – Oliver is not a journalist, a politician or even much of an entertainer – but for a man who thinks that his job is to speak truth to power more than entertain, it's as close to a giveaway as I've seen in all this time.

I don't believe for a moment his viewers caught up on the discrepancy or even if so many critics will do the same. The far left is very much like the far right in this regard; it has been willing to circle the wagons to protects its own and they will clearly defend him to the death. Nor does it really shock me that Oliver has revealed himself to be a fraud in addition to someone who cherry-picks his fact to create a certain narrative absent of reality. What interests me is something that at the end of the day, neither Oliver or the school of thought he represents never concerns itself with: the bigger picture.  And that's what this means in context of what this means in regard to those on the left who insist on viewing the world that Last Week Tonight frames it in.

 In this episode  Oliver acknowledged that there might very well be an outside factor for not following this moral code. More on point he has essentially made the argument that the student protesters and so much of the demonstrations in America and around the world against what was happen in Gaza were in a way  a complete waste of everyone's time.  All of you who disrupted campus and went to jail over the last year? Didn't matter because the guy who could make a difference had no reason to listen to you. Bygones.

The reason it really matters is because this show more than anyone demonstrates that one of the most critical elements of Last Week Tonight has been a complete fraud.

One of the reasons I spent so much time in favor of John Oliver as opposed to his fellow late night HBO host Bill Maher is that unlike Maher who seems primarily to use his platform to mock the idea of doing anything Oliver would end his shows by asking the question: "So what can we do?" He would then give a series of suggestions and advice about institutional reform and things that companies and governments should do in the future in order to make things better.  This appeared like Oliver was, after half an hour of despair disguised as comedy, offering a ray of hope or at least a plan to his viewers and it was one of the reason I raved about him for a decade.

It has only recently occurred to me, particularly after the last year in which I was watching him about Oliver's phrasing. When he said: "So what can we do about it?" he implied that there was action his viewers could take in order to do something to change things. However when you heard the overwhelming majority of his advice and guidance, you realized he didn't mean his audience or even most Americans but rather the government acting to regulate the corporations or in other case, having the government do things to correct previous loopholes in its administration.

This is shaky enough and it becomes somewhat cynical when you consider that the other half of Oliver's act pointed out that Republicans were blocking legislation in Congress and that wholesale reform was needed to fix that. Considering that much of his act was arguing that Republicans were evil and would never do the right thing put together he wasn't even really giving false hope. Basically he wasn't so much asking: "What can we do?" instead of staying: "This is what they should do but they're absolutely not going to do." His argument was always based on the idea of this grand theory of progressivism: that these people should do it because it's the morally right thing to do, the only standard that matters. And since in the same breath he seemed to argue that so much of the opposition didn't operate by these standards he was essentially arguing nothing was going to change. I'm not surprised it took me until fairly recently to figure that out; like the overwhelming majority of leftists Oliver is very good at using apparently intelligent arguments to hide a tone of deconstructionism and despair. That he did so in the guise of an entertainer is honestly remarkable.

And its worth noting there were also indications that even when society did the right thing it was never going to be adequate. I remember in a broadcast last year he did a special about how the various pharmacy companies had officially made their final settlement with the government about their role in the opioid crisis. Oliver acknowledged that the $50 billion payout was not nothing: he admitted it was twice the budget of NASA. But he made that clear after arguing it was still well beyond the cost of the damage on the country and in his mind not nearly enough of a real punishment for these companies.

And that lays bare the other part of leftists like Oliver's arguments: even when restitution is made for a crisis, it is always woefully inadequate. "This is all the blood money were getting" Oliver said at one point.  This is the major problem with the kind of thinking that plagues the far left on so many issues: if everything is a moral argument and such matters as dollars and cents are inadequate, then what is the point of doing anything? This argument was made clear in the divides in the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and its basically at the core of the activist movements of today.  These movements are more interested in being angry at the aggressor then in  getting something, however inadequate it might to be the crime, in return. Oliver's essentially making the right's own argument against progressives for them: they're not going to be happy no matter what we give them, so why give them anything?

When you put both of these arguments it is very clear that Oliver knows the reality of the world we live in like  and yet chooses to live in this imaginary moral one which everything has a right or wrong answer and everyone keeps choosing the wrong one. But reality is far more like one of those tests that gave the option: "Choose the best answer" where you are frequently given several choices that will have consequences and benefits. This is true not just for individuals but institutions, whether they are corporations, governments, countries  or what have you.  They must all make choices that will help them in the short and long term based on issues that have far less (if anything) to do with morality then they do how they will benefit them in some way, usually financially or politically.

I once said that I could count on the fingers of both hands the number of times Oliver has made an individual the subject of Last Week Tonight.  Having seen his episode on Netanyahu, I now know why. It is far easier to argue a corporation or a government acts with no consideration of the moral good then a person because the latter are subject to natural human emotions such as self-preservation and doing whatever it takes to survive. And when a society tries to dictate one any individual should behave that is a kind of totalitarianism as much as what the current administration is trying to do in many ways and, as Oliver has made very clear, what the right has been doing for decades in America. Oliver could manage to get away with this because he is an entertainer and not a politician or a right-wing pundit. He'd been skating right up to the line for years but until recent he hadn't crossed over it.

This show, like so many others this past year, make it clear that Oliver has crossed the point of no return. He's argued Chuck Schumer is a bad politician because he takes voters into consideration, that people like Bob Iger are chickens because they take the bottom line into consideration, that the heads of CBS have thrown away their moral standards because they hired Bari Weiss in large part because their ratings for their news broadcasts have been bottoming out for years. All of these people must answer more complicated questions on a daily basis that have to do with their responsibility to far more people than John Oliver and the audience of Last Week Tonight.  Based on the broadcast I saw Oliver clearly knows this; he just doesn't care.  

It's now more clear than ever that: :"What can we do?" wasn't even a rhetorical question. It was an order being yelled at people who didn't watch Oliver's show, who didn't know who he was and if they heard about what he said on his show they thought he didn't understand the context of the issues he was talking about.  I now think its clear Oliver probably does understand the complexities of these issues – and like all leftists he believes that they have to do the moral thing even if there are consequences far more devastating financially or politically.  And it's not like he or his viewers will give them credit for doing the right thing even if they do; he'll just move on to the next grievance, continue to win awards and make millions of dollars saying the world sucks. That's in keeping with the progressive model as well but I guarantee you you'll never see that on Last Week Tonight.