It’s Been a Busy Week

Some weeks, John Oliver front-loads all the really terrible stuff before getting to his main story. Which is invariably also pretty terrible. At least the Last Week Tonight host has decades of experience squeezing laughs from each week’s soul-crushing, tooth-grinding current events.

Oliver needed to squeeze pretty hard this week. He noted in passing how Senate Democrats under Chuck Schumer completely caved when given the rare opportunity to monkey-wrench the ongoing Constitution-shredding party being perpetrated by the Trump administration when they helped pass a contentious GOP budget bill. And that yet another right-wing TV huckster is apparently going to be put in charge of something incredibly important. (This time it’s perennial snake oil shill and medical misinformation peddler Mehmet Oz who’s poised to oversee imperiled Medicare and Medicaid.)

Then there’s the detention by Trump officials of Mahmoud Khalil, the former pro-Palestinian student protester and legal U.S. resident who was scooped up by ICE at his New York home in front of his pregnant wife, whisked away to a remote Louisiana prison, and is now facing deportation, despite not being charged with a crime. As Oliver put it, Khalil’s arrest is “a f*cking disgrace” that “should chill every American to the bone.” Especially since Donald Trump has stated that this politically-motivated detention is merely “the first of many” targeting people whose free speech he disapproves of.

As Oliver, himself a former green card holder with a very public track record of calling out each and every Donald Trump atrocity put it, “When we started this show I had a green card, and five years ago I became a citizen, but I know what it’s like to live in constant fear of being kicked out of somewhere you see as your home.”

Oliver took special umbrage at Trump’s claim that Khalil’s protest against the actions of the Israeli government against Palestinians was in itself anti-Semitic. Mocking the idea that Trump was cracking down against anti-Semitism, Oliver pointed to the appointment of Kingsley Wilson as deputy Pentagon press secretary, whose history of anti-Semitic statements came to light this week. And Trump’s own Vice President J.D. Vance and designated hatchet-man Elon Musk openly praising Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party.

Oliver only had to throw up a photo of Elon Musk making his own Nazi salute and say a disgusted “and this sh*t,” for his next example, before bringing up the firing of one Liz Oyer, now former U.S. Pardon Attorney. Oyer claims she was canned for refusing to allow admitted domestic abuser and on-the-record anti-Semitic conspiracy nutcase/Trump supporter Mel Gibson to own a firearm again. Pointing to the Wikipedia page for Gibson’s late father Hutton to prove the Flight Risk director’s anti-Semitic bona fides, Oliver noted, “Imagine having so many terrible views that producing Mel Gibson is not the worst thing about you.”

And Now This…

Remember that scene in James L. Brooks’ ever-timely media satire Broadcast News where ace producer Holly Hunter seamlessly feeds details of a high-pressure story to clueless neophyte anchor William Hurt through an earpiece live on-air? Well, the Last Week Tonight research crew proved that fiction is smoother than fact with tonight’s montage of on-air talent turning into stuttering messes and blaming “the guy in my ear.”

Sometimes “the guy” is a director, sometimes “two sets of producers,” and sometimes, rather alarmingly, “five different people.” Now nobody’s saying it’s easy to keep your train of thought while “guys” are chattering directly into your ear canal, but you know that there’s not actually a little guy inside your head, right?

Our Main Story Tonight

Switching gears from the overwhelming flood of Trump administration chaos and unconstitutionality to a more localized and contained sort of insidious force, Oliver introduced his main story this week: sports gambling. Specifically, the proliferation of online, app-based sports wagering, a multi-billion dollar industry that—wait for it—pursues untold profits with little to no consumer safeguards.

Which inevitably results in everything from addiction and bankruptcies to an epidemic of abuse and harassment directed at players whose actions on the field/court/rink/table tennis table cost their supposed fans money.

And yes, as Oliver showed in one eye-opening segment, the seemingly benign rec room pursuit that is ping-pong has become an unlikely gambling hotspot, with one completely unwatched overseas match causing the online downfall of one addicted late-night wagerer to the tune of $35,000.

With the college basketball brackets of March Madness clicking into place all across the country as he spoke, Oliver did his signature spelunking trip into the depths of the ubiquitous sports betting industry.

For one, he showed how, before the Supreme Court tossed the legal betting issue back to the states, professional leagues wanted absolutely nothing to do with sports gambling. Now there are official sponsorships of sports leagues and teams, logos on arenas and jerseys, and even odds folded directly into broadcasts.

Oliver explained how betting apps like FanDuel and DraftKings (and the official betting app of ESPN) make most of their money by pushing their biggest losers to bet more, enticing heavy bettors with promotional trinkets (look, a shiny crown!), “free” money for bets (don’t read that fine print), and even “hosts” who identify potential big losers and shepherd them toward more and more wagers.

Pro note from Oliver: the ubiquitous and profitable (for the apps) prop bets (in-game micro-wagers on everything form who scores the first points to what color Gatorade gets dumped on the winning coach’s head) and parleys (whose success depends on multiple such outcomes all hitting) are what insiders call “sucker bets.”

But the predatory practices don’t end there. Oliver showed how one woman’s attempt to pull herself out of over $150,000 in gambling debts was hampered by DraftKings offering her Steelers tickets and $250 in credit to “Get you back in action.”

As ever, Oliver concluded with a few solutions—which would involve the people profiting off of this shady business model taking some responsibility. Good luck there, although Oliver noted that the startling amount of data tracking that goes into keeping addictive gamblers betting could similarly be used to track when people have a problem. He also noted how states could enforce laws already on their books banning the most exploitative methods companies use, preventing those under 21 from getting hooked, and restricting so-called VIP programs by ensuring that people enrolled in these high-stakes betting tracks can actually afford to be there.

Pointing to the way that smoking advertising was curtailed once it was determined that the practice was both addictive and heavily marketed to impressionable youth, Oliver said that sports leagues could put similar restrictions on those lucrative ads now festooning arenas and littering every TV broadcast with celebrity-driven come-ons. Again, with literally hundreds of billions of dollars on the line, none of this is likely to happen, but the John Oliver “I told you so” file will at least have yet another entry to point to when things get much, much worse.

To end the show, Oliver enlisted his own stable of funny famous people to fake-shill for a site called GriftKings. Ben Schwartz was the pitchman, laying out all the ways his company will keep customers happily putting their mortgage payments on the line. Adam Pally was the die-hard Eagles fan whose enjoyment of his team’s Super Bowl win was undermined by them not covering the spread. And marrieds Bobby Moynihan and Casey Wilson were on very different sides of the coin-flip as to whether the shiny, tiny crown sent by GriftKings as a thank you gift counterbalances the fact that he bet (and lost) two mortgage payments to get it. If only his kiss cam/Asian ref/the stadium running out of pretzels parley had come in. Maybe next week.

Cardus Endus

As mentioned in the intro, New York Senator Chuck Schumer got the title card treatment tonight for presiding over yet another Democratic failure to counteract any of the Trump administration’s massive cuts to governmental jobs and programs while treating the Constitution like so much toilet paper. Even the card’s mock Latin mocked Schumer as the anti-Caesar.

Sure, some might argue that the minority Dems don’t have many options. Others would counter that refusing to give a blank check to a ruling party who shut the Democrats out of the budget negotiations completely and whose stated plan is to allow an unelected, Nazi-saluting foreign billionaire to continue to gut everything from cancer research, to the National Weather Service, to veterans services, to Social Security, to Meals on Wheels, to Head Start, to overseas AIDS prevention might be worth expending what little political capitol you’ve got. Who’s to say? Voters, most likely.

Last Lines Tonight

“Our main story tonight concerns sports, the greatest activity you can do with balls after my favorite activity, reading. That’s right, reading with my eyeballs, the balls of the eye. Reading. I love to read pornography.”

“It’s not gambling, it’s a social free to play sweepstakes of micro-transactions that pay out real cash if you win, available to teens when their brains are most impressionable. What could possibly go wrong?”

on fliff, a company dedicated to skirting laws against underage sports gambling

“Also, for what it’s worth, ‘Fliff’ might be one of the most upsetting words I’ve ever heard. It sounds like either one of most innocent things imaginable, like a helpful cartoon chipmunk, or that little bit of flower on top of freshly baked bread. Or something so disgusting it has its own Pornhub page with videos like ‘Stepmom Gressica Shyne gets fliffed by personal trainer and his college advisor, Rod Steel.’”

“Yeah, that is rough. The only thing any guy should be doing on their phone in the bathroom at their girlfriend’s house is frantically googling “What is Summer House Bravo. Help, how do I talk to her best friends and seem cool, Reddit.’”

after a news story about a young man’s surreptitious toilet gambling habit

“It should be pretty obvious someone doing seven deposits a day is addicted. Anyone doing anything on an app seven times a day deserves a check-in. If you post more than seven Instagram stories a day and you’re not in Barbados or at the Cowboy Carter tour, Instagram should hold an intervention.”

“That has got to be a demoralizing thing to have to do. It’d be like if I told you after all these years that I’d been sitting behind a desk sponsored by the Sackler family. It’d make you question some things.” 

on a 60 Minutes reporter revealing that his other job involves sitting behind a desk emblazoned with a sports betting logo