Last Week Tonight: Top Five Stories (Season 3)

It’ll be a few months before Last Week Tonight comes back, so in the meantime, I thought I’d take a stab at narrowing down my favorite main stories from this past season.  Since The Daily Show is also off this week, it’ll be a good use of today’s News Satire Roundup.

Season 3, Episode 1 – “Voting”

The season started strong with this story on voter ID laws.  John deftly highlighted the motivations behind laws like this, which tend to be both partisan and racist, showing the specific obstructions put in place to keep mostly working-class Black and Latin@ citizens from voting.  He also challenged the justifications behind these laws, dismantling the myth that voter fraud is such a rampant problem that it calls for these “just-so-happen-to-be-discriminatory” measures.

Season 3, Episode 16 – “United Kingdom”

This story (and its follow-up after the vote) did a superb job laying out the misinformation, isolationism, and nativism behind the Brexit movement.  By the end of John’s rundown, I was appalled at the ugly comments from Brexit supporters and the lies sold to the public by its major players.  If it had to go down the way it did, I wish it could have at least served as a cautionary tale to the U.S. as we were gearing up for a similarly-crucial vote.

Season 3, Episode 18 – “Republican National Convention”

More so than any one particular speech or ramification of a Trump nomination, I think John hit the nail on the head in his biggest takeaway from the convention:  the fallacious notion that feelings and facts are equally valid.  He was right that it was a thread running through the entire convention, and nowhere was it more evident than in Newt Gingrich’s interview, in which he insisted that crime has gone up (even though, objectively, it hasn’t) because people believe it has.

Season 3, Episode 28 – “School Segregation”

Excellent, heartbreaking piece on the disparities between school experiences of many white children compared to children of color (especially Black and Latin@ kids.)  It can be so easy to think of segregation as both an issue of the past and an issue of the South, and John hammered home the point that neither is true.  Upsetting how, even in triumphs for civil rights like the Brown v. the Board of Education decision, the way was paved to still allow racism a foothold.

Season 3, Episode 30 – “President-Elect Trump”

Here it came, rolling inexorably towards us to round off the increasingly-depressing 2016.  John covered lots of angles with this one, but there were two points that particularly stuck out to me.  First, taking time not just to worry or despair over the future but preparing for it, arming us with a list of worthy organizations that will likely need our support in the coming years.  Second, John’s firm insistence on never normalizing what happened here, to always keep at the front of our minds the knowledge that there’s something wrong with this picture.