John Oliver lays out the GOP’s in-progress racist voter suppression blitz
Getting out the vote only works when voters aren't turned away once they get there
TV News Voter suppression
You know how one political party (out of two) is systematically setting the stage to undemocratically destroy voting rights, specifically the rights of those people (the not-white ones) who overwhelmingly sent Donald Trump packing in 2020? John Oliver sure does, as his Sunday main story saw the Last Week Tonight host delving into the Republican war on voting rights. Honestly, as Oliver proved in acidly funny lockstep, it really isn’t necessary to do any delving, as GOP hypocrisy, fringe conspiracy logic, and outright racial oppression at the voting booth is just lying all out in the open.
You know, like in Georgia, which is represented by one Burt Jones, seen in a clip asserting that voting is a privilege that certain people should have to really work for. (Possibly by overcoming the state closing polling places in non-white areas and then forbidding good samaritans from handing out water to the Black people stuck in eight-hour voting lines in the Georgia heat.) Or in Arizona, where, just this week, even the Republican-led, farcically shady “audit” of Joe Biden’s presidential victory there not only proved what every rational human being knew already, but also made Biden’s margin over GOP cult leader and twice-impeached seditionist Donald Trump just a hair wider. (Oh, don’t worry, Republicans are still recommending further voting restrictions to fix the non-existent voter fraud problem they themselves showed doesn’t exist.)
In all, Oliver showed how some 18 states have passed 30 laws since the 2020 Democratic, voter-approved takeover of the presidency, House, and Senate, and that—strangely—every single one of those laws intended to make it harder for certain people to vote was spearheaded by the Republican Party. Oh, and that the GOP’s furthest-right lobbying wing, the Heritage Foundation, is just as busy undermining American democracy, as Oliver showed a Heritage executive (one Jessica Anderson) bragging about those kooky, woman- and gay-hating white supremacists managing to slip through some Iowa voting suppression laws (which Heritage wrote) without anybody noticing. You know, like with all truly fair and vetted democratic policies.
Oliver, as is his way, made time throughout his concise history of Republican voter suppression and outright racist bullshit to go on some theoretically illustrative tangents involving unusual sexual practices. (No kink-shaming, those currently fantasizing about either the Wheel Of Fortune wheel or lobsters.) Painting a starkly chilling portrait of how the current Republican Party is ginning up solutions for a problem it itself manufactured, Oliver summed up this in-progress, democracy-threatening authoritarianism thusly: “Use bullshit claims to stir up baseless fear to pass unnecessary restrictions to target particular groups.”
Showing Texas Lt. Governor and major asshole Dan Patrick using the legally un-actionable fuzzy logic that GOP voter suppression tactics are necessary because “voters have lost faith” in an election system Patrick himself has been working overtime to slander and undermine ever since the Republicans’ Glorious Leader appeared ready to loose bigly on Election Night, Oliver let Patrick’s nonsense hang itself. Although Oliver did note that Patrick’s showboating stunt offering a Texas-style $1 million bounty for every provable instance of voter fraud has seen the bloviating Texas lieutenant liar dodge fellow Lt. Gov John Fetterman’s call for the cash, having offered up the case of a Pennsylvania Trump voters trying to vote for their dead moms. Who are no doubt very disappointed in them.
As for solutions, Oliver, as ever, had sort of a good news-bad news thing going. There are two proposed laws (the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom To Vote Act) that would, between them, halt this Republican campaign of partisan ratfuckery by ensuring everything from early and drive-up voting, to automatic voter registration, to making Election Day a national holiday. And would restore the key tenets of the Supreme Court-gutted, racist-thwarting 1965 Voting Rights Act, something shown as deeply necessary in how GOP legislators keep trying to procedurally ban any talk of racism from the debate over their 100 percent racist voter suppression. In this week’s example of representative villainy, Oliver showed Representative Travis Grantham (R-AZ) telling Black lawmaker Reginald Bolding to, almost verbatim, “sit down and shut up” when Bolding brought up how the Arizona GOP’s proposed laws are blatantly intended to disenfranchise voters of color. (Oh, Grantham used the words “colored people” in his rant, just for some of that old-timey racist flavor.)
On the other hand, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has promised that his GOP minions will filibuster any bill intended to make it harder for them to suppress votes among those communities (not-white ones) where they know they’re shit out of luck, historically and increasingly. And while Oliver threw shade at Democratic(-ish) Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) for saying he’d join his Republican pals in robbing certain people of their voting rights, the host also told the other Joe (Biden) that his folksy entreaty for people to just “out-organize” this out-in-the-open racist rigging is woefully out of touch with just how determined the GOP is to steal elections. Showing Biden praising Americans for turning out in record numbers (during a pandemic, no less) to make sure Donald Trump wound up on unemployed and making paid appearances for sketchy cults, Oliver noted in exasperation that that doesn’t cut it when Republicans are trying to shut out those very voters. Seriously, Joe.
24 Comments
Ahhh, it works so much better with an audience.
Came here to say this. His cracking jokes and then just moving on with no laughter was weird as hell.
I don’t watch any of the US late night shows but of the clips I do see, it’s one of the things which just didn’t work for me at all.Like Amber Ruffin’s ones where she makes a joke, she chuckles to herself and then moves on. It’s such an odd thing to see and feels like the jokes are falling flat every single time.
Oh waah fucking waah! It’s not hard to vote. Quit enabling the victim class.
The really funny thing now is that some Iowa Republicans just got caught doing some major voting fraud themselves, and thanks to the laws they themselves shoved through, they have no choice but to allow a full investigation.
I haven’t been paying attention much, but when did John Oliver get out the void and back in a studio?
I think two weeks ago. The couple of shows before that were like a countdown until he returned to the stuido.
I genuinely don’t understand how one party is built on causing suffering to the masses and gleefully killing them, and the other party is built on trying to actually give a damn about people and yet somehow this is still a contest.It is so disgusting.
plus consider that 74 million of your fellow citizens are perfectly fine with that.
I’m not American, but it’s the same over here too, just with less guns.
stupid is international for sure. All that matters to those type of people is that the people they hate get hurt.
bECaUsE mA fReEDomS!!!?!
At least you can believe one of your parties is built on trying to give a damn about people.
Hasn’t felt like that in Australia for years.
I just want Labor to go full left. Announce a UBI, 90% tax rate for miners, 50% tariffs on half the shit we import, federal ICAC.Steal all the greens’ policies, and then when they crack a sad, tell them to fuck back to their doctor husbands. Turn Vaucluse into social housing, declare Murdoch an enemy of the state.
I honestly don’t know what Labor stand for anymore.
Turns out the only remotely “blue collar” massive industry that’s left is mining, and that’s firmly fucking LNP now. Maybe Fitzgibbons abandoning the Hunter will be a wake-up call. They’re not gonna convince the Lib voters to switch. So stop trying. There’s a possibility for those Greens voters who are wondering why the Greens never seem to achieve much (look, the Greens themselves say they only want to dominate in the Senate, not to lead the country – possibly why Labor still has a good run in Qld, since they have no Senate). I would say something about how no one in Australia votes in governments, but merely votes them out, but after the last fucking Federal election I’m scared of saying anything.
Part of the problem is the Democratic party, while having a wing that is truly focused on helping people, is more often focused on maintaining decorum and status quo calm. They’d like to help people, as long as it doesn’t rock the boat. Obviously that’s better than the party whose wings are Racists, Apocalyptic Fundamentalists, Obtaining More Gold for Smaug the Dragon, and Sadism, but yeah.
Rig the system, then convince your base that they’re the ones the system is rigged against. It’s pretty simple.
It’s the mindset that I don’t get.Not the how to make it a contest lol.
It’s the classic victim mentality and it is really effective on people who don’t think about their actions or avoid critical thinking. It’s amazingly powerful.
The really great part is how they condescendingly made fun of an art competition for ten minutes. That was “fun”.
Why is Joe Biden just pushing people to “out-organize” the Republicans. Because Republican organizing has been kicking the shit out of progress for forty years. “Progressives” are too busy nitpicking their own party members.Also, what do you expect Biden to do? He can’t pass any significant legislation. First, he isn’t Congress, who passes legislation. Second, the only way we’re going to get anything useful through the Senate is if two more Senate seats are flipped in 2022. This is a feat that can only be accomplished through…? Organization. Look into the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin races for starters.
That’s the problem with a political side that has a conscience.
The Republicans don’t have any fucking principles. No guiding decency. Trump is the antithesis of almost every ideal they’ve claimed to believe in for at least fifty years, but they don’t care because it’s all power. Power is the only thing that matters. They’d slit any one of their constituents’ throats, drink their blood, and sell their children into slavery if it meant winning. I know that sounds insane, but it’s true.
American progressives believe things and have lines they won’t cross, and want to leave things better than they found them. They get sad when hundreds of thousands of people die preventable deaths, forests burn, and history is ignored. Those things matter to them. And because of that, they argue about which order they’re doing things, and which thing we should care about most, and which candidate is the most pure.
American conservatives don’t fucking care about any of that. They’ll do the 180 opposite of what they said yesterday if it will put one more penny in their jar, and progressives can’t handle that. How many days have we spent vibrating with horror at Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court hypocrisy? If you confronted him face to face with no cameras, he’d say, “Yeah. That’s the game. If you can break a rule, do it. I don’t fucking care about the rules. I don’t care what’s right. We haven’t won a popular election in how many elections, and how many Justices do we have?”
They’ll put razor blades on their boxing gloves because they’ve already drugged the refs, and we won’t even throw an elbow.
So who are we going to blame for an entire generation of conservative ass-hats developing the conviction that the solution to your party pushing a minority platform is to change not the platform but the whole friggin’ electorate? Did they have civics teachers in the front of the classroom saying, “America is a representative democracy, and the right to vote is a duty and a privilege of which we all should be proud, right up until the point when the majority in this country holds views that diverge from our own, at which point our responsibility is to take the vote away from as many people as possible!” Or is it all Mark Zuckerberg’s fault?
One thing I didn’t seem to understand was John banging on about drive through and 24 hour voting being banned because ‘53% of POC used that service’. When you’re running a 2 party system 53% of voters is really only 3%.