Infowars Shuts Down, Julian Assange Goes Free & China Visits Far Side of the Moon | Peter S. Goodman
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You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show with your host, Michael Kosta. Thank you.

Welcome to The Daily Show. I'm Michael Kosta. We've got so much to talk about tonight. Julian Assange is a free man. Alex Jones is a broke man. And the Surgeon General is warning America that gun violence is bad. Who knew? Let's get into the headlines.

Let's kick things off with some big international news about a whistleblower. No, not the Boeing ones. They've all suddenly died under completely normal circumstances. I'm talking about one who got some good news. This morning, Julian Assange, who founded WikiLeaks and rocked governments around the world with it, is set to plead guilty in U.S. federal court to a single felony charge.

in exchange for his freedom, ending the years-long legal saga around his explosive publication of U.S. state secrets. Assange, celebrated by some as a hero, reviled by others as a reckless vandal, published state secrets of country after country, none more damaging than the vast trove of U.S. classified documents WikiLeaks posted online starting in 2010 at the height of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's right. WikiLeaks founder and man who looks like he feeds James Bond to sharks, Julian Assange, is out of prison. And like many of you, when I first heard the news, I thought, which one is he again? Because I thought he was Edward Snowden. And then someone said, no, Edward Snowden is Edward Snowden. That's why they call him that. And that made sense to me. Now,

Julian Assange is the one who spent a decade on the run for revealing war crimes committed by America in Iraq, even though the people who did those crimes weren't punished. It's all thanks to an obscure military doctrine known as snitches get stitches. And...

Let's be honest, a lot of the stuff he leaked, we already knew. America was doing bad shit in Iraq. The DNC was in cahoots with Hillary's campaign. It's like how you kind of already knew that your wife was banging her tennis instructor, but it's nice to have it confirmed. By the way, in that example, I'm the tennis instructor. Now...

Some people think Assange is a villain for revealing state secrets, while others argue that the states shouldn't have had those secrets in the first place. But what irks me about Assange is that he didn't reveal any of the secrets I wanted to know. You know, he's going to dump literally millions of documents and not a single one was about aliens or who killed JFK or why they never made a Forrest Gump sequel. I mean...

I don't want 10 Fast and Furious sequels. I want to see Forrest Gump accidentally invent the Macarena, right? Yeah. Let's move on from a character that some love and some hate to a character who's much easier to judge, Alex Jones. Now, it's been a year and a half since the boner Pillsbury Doughboy was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the Sandy Hook families, and now the Repo Man is pulling up at the door.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is losing his media empire. Court-appointed trustee has laid out plans for shutting down Jones's InfoWars. The money will go towards the $1.5 billion Jones has been ordered to pay families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. He pushed the claim that the 2012 massacre wasn't real. The plan calls for winding down operations and then liquidating inventory.

Oh, no. InfoWars is dead. But how will I know which vaccines turn me gay? The good news here is that this shows that if you maliciously lie to the American people, you will be held accountable, like, 0.3% of the time. And the rest of the time, you'll be elected president. But politics aside, I think we can all agree it's a great day in America whenever a podcast ends. So...

It's been a rough final week for Jones, but he spent it doing what he loves. Jones spouted lies even as he drove to the hearing in Houston. It is all a brazen power grab. Leading up to the hearing, he had been vacillating between tears...

More lies. It was the FBI and the Justice Department behind all these fake lawsuits against me to get me off the air. And naked opportunism, peddling supposed dietary supplements until the last moment. If you order any products at InfoWarsStore.com, you will get them before InfoWars is shut down.

It's crazy that his listeners think the vaccine is gonna kill them, but then they spend hundreds of dollars on off-label weight loss supplements, you know? I don't want anything weird in my body. That's why I take Bethel Polyethrazol 15G and Tiger Gut. By the way, if you're sad you can no longer buy pills from the InfoWars store, please consider purchasing Michael Kosta's pills for a stronger brain or whatever. Just give me your money, you stupid piece of shit.

Thank you. Everyone loves a camera turn.

Let's move on to some public health news. A lot of people don't know this, but getting shot is not good for your health. Luckily, America's top doctor is here to let you know. New this morning, a first-of-its-kind advisory from the Surgeon General's office declaring firearm violence an urgent public health crisis. The new advisory spells out just how pervasive firearm violence is and calls for the, quote, collective commitment of the nation to stop it. Yeah, that should do it.

I thought the Surgeon General's warnings were supposed to be for things you can avoid. You know, you can choose not to smoke cigarettes, but no one seeing this news is like, you know, I was going to try to get shot this weekend, but now I'll change my plans.

Sorry if I'm a bit skeptical. I know this guy's just trying to help. It's just that in the last year, the Surgeon General has already declared social media and loneliness as public health problems. And I'm like, "Hey, man, we know, all right?" The Surgeon General never tells us anything we don't already know. Like, if he came out and just said, "Hey, just so you know, peanut butter stays inside you forever." That's something that's helpful, and I can take action now, right?

And that's another thing. Why are we trusting a guy who calls himself the Surgeon General? That sounds like a profession my four-year-old daughter makes up. Yeah, I want to be either a Surgeon General or a ballerina dentist. It's like, you're just mashing two real jobs together, dummy. If we're going to have a U.S. Surgeon General, yeah, my daughter's a dummy sometime. If...

If we're gonna have a U.S. Surgeon General, he needs to at least do one of them, right? Either he's in charge of the president's surgeries or we give him an army. Then at least when you sign into social media, he can drone your house. Social media addiction solved, right? Finally, let's talk about the moon. We see it in the sky every night. But did you know the moon is also in other countries?

Well, it is. And now some of them are taking notice. China is now the first country to ever bring back samples from the far side of the moon. This lunar probe just completed its historic mission, retrieving samples of dust and rock from the side of the moon facing away from the Earth. Chinese scientists anticipate the return samples will include volcanic rock.

That's over two million years old, a major difference to samples collected by astronauts during the Apollo missions. - Holy shit, you know? China's the first one to visit the far side of the moon, which if you don't know is the part of the moon the Earth never sees. 'Cause the moon, okay, it's spinning, while the Earth, okay, it's turning. Like in my head is China and it... You guys get it?

Anyway, China did it. So now there are three different flags planted on the moon. The Chinese flag, the United States flag, and that flag from San Alito's wife. So the woman loves flags. For more on China's landing on the moon, we go live to Cape Canaveral with Josh Johnson. Yeah, Josh.

This is a huge scientific achievement. China is the first country to reach the far side of the moon. What does this mean? I'll tell you what it means, Michael. It means America's got to get back to the moon right now. All right? Someone call Neil Armstrong or Lance Armstrong or Lance Bass. One of them. Why do we have to get back to the moon? Because the moon is...

only thing America has left. We don't have the best cars anymore. We don't have the best democracy anymore. Even the best basketball players are from, like, Slovakistan. You know? All we have left is the moon, and now China's taking that from us, too? No. No, as a matter of national pride, we're going back. Okay, so we're gonna build a whole new moon program. That's gonna be expensive as hell. Oh, yeah, it's gonna bankrupt us. All right? We gotta cancel Medicare and education immediately, okay? Okay?

Sorry, kids, you can't read good no more, but you can take pride knowing America is the best at moon. Okay, so we're going to blow up our budget just to show China that we can also collect moon dirt? Oh, man, come on. We're not going up there to do that nerd shit. We're going up there to knock their flag down. What? Josh, Josh, Josh.

If we knock their flag down, you're going to start a war. No, no, no. Costa, chill. What's going to start the war is when our astronauts knock it down with their dicks. All right? Like, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. This is a terrible idea. For starters, taking your dick out on the moon is going to make it explode. I know.

But it's the only way to show China we're still the big dogs. Okay, but Josh, we've already been to the moon. We're focused on Mars now. Not anymore. The moon is our girl, okay? We've been together since the 60s. Mars was just a side piece, all right? And now China is trying to take our girl behind our back and in our face. We can't let that happen. And that's why I'm here at the launching pad. What? What?

I'm going to go win the moon back. Josh, no, don't go to the moon. You're not qualified to go up. Josh, come back. Josh. Josh. Listen, moon. We both made some mistakes. We fooled around with Mars and you let someone else get your rocks off. But we're together now, baby. And America's never going to leave you again. Now let me get up in them craters. Josh, Josh, wait. Don't take your dick out. Josh. Josh.

I think his dick exploded. I tried to warn him. Josh Johnson, everybody. What? His dick exploded. When we come back, Louis Black will be on the show joining me. Don't go away. Josh! Welcome back to the show. When a news story falls through the cracks, Louis Black catches it for a segment we call Back in Black. Back in Black.

Ah, summer, when my balls glue themselves to my thigh and don't let go until Labor Day. And if you're a kid, it means going to camp. Summer camp used to be about playing sports, making friends, and if you're lucky, finding a dead body.

But for parents who think it's time for their five-year-old to start focusing on a career, there are a few camps just for them, like this one. Chick-fil-A is getting some backlash over its new summer camp coming to Louisiana at the end of July. Kids will learn skills such as taking guest orders and bagging food. The franchises that are doing it only charge about $35, ages 5 to 12, and kids learn the chicken sandwich business. Ow!

Did you hear that? Chick-fil-A has a summer camp.

Kids are finally getting to learn the chicken sandwich business. You know, nothing says summer fun like third-degree grease burns. And the best part about Chick-fil-A camp is it only costs $35. What a bargain! I mean, for $35, you can't even find a babysitter on the terror watch list.

Even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was $40 an hour and he didn't even change diapers. But if that's still too steep a price tag, you can always bring them for free to the company who's basically raising them anyway. Apple.

For over 20 years now, Apple stores have hosted Apple Camp. This is where kids and their parents can get creative on the latest Apple devices. This year's session focuses on using the iPad to create an interactive storybook. They're creating animations. They're adding AR shapes, 3D shapes, taking AR photos where they place the 3D shapes in the world around them.

Oh, thank God. Just what our children need. More screen time. I hope they'll use these iPads on planes at full volume while I contemplate getting a second vasectomy. Better safe than sorry.

I will say these Apple camps seem way nicer than the ones in China. I mean, for starters, the kids get to leave. Oh, stop it. Seriously, wake up. How do you moan over that?

But maybe I'm judging too quickly. Who knows? These camps could be fostering the storytellers of tomorrow. It's basically a donut that plays baseball, but the ball always goes through. So this friend helps him put like a net in the car so the ball doesn't go through.

This girl could write the next great animated film. But if you dare touch the opening weekend of Inside Out 3, I'll sue the shit out of you. Follow your dreams, but stay away from daddy's gravy train.

But if the friolator and ADHD don't do it for your child, there are some camps that teach actual skills. The Wichita Fire Department gave young people the opportunity to experience what it's like to be a firefighter. It's hosting a kids' summer camp, and the fun kicked off yesterday.

This year's summer camp introduces them to the roles and responsibilities of the fire department with up close and hands-on experience. Campers ages 8 to 13 will get a view of firefighting tasks like pulling hose, spraying water, forcible entry, and rescue. First of all, I don't think you need a camp to teach teen boys how to pull hose. I mean, they tend to figure it out on their own. By the way...

Firefighter camp is just like police camp, but with more cardio and less framing people for murder. I admire these kids, but they better not show up when I burn down my Panama City condo for the insurance money. Stay away from daddy's other gravy train, you little life-saving shits.

But if firefighting camp sounds like too much fun, don't worry, you've still got options. At this summer camp, middle schoolers take care of baby Tori, a $75,000 high-fidelity simulator. And there's also... So pick your poison. Do you want to dress a wound?

or build a body. Baycare's Diane Rausch Camp Nurse Junior at Dunedin's Sally L. Bailey Nursing Education Center is not your typical teenage summer fun. Here they're learning about patient care and broken bones and CPR and more. For Camila and Ellie and dozens of others, this might be their future. What the f*** is that?

Is that supposed to be a baby? It looks like someone knocked up Megan. Somebody send that thing to the Supreme Court and we'll have abortion back in no time.

But of course, there's also one very affordable summer program that parents are forgetting about. Ignoring your kids and letting them f*** off for three months. You know, watch TV, kick rocks, maybe even pull some hoes. That's how I spent my summers as a kid. And look how I turned out. Back to you, Michael. Thanks for that. Louis, Louis Black, everyone. We'll be back.

Peter Goodman will be joining me on the show, so don't go away. Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is a global economics correspondent for The New York Times and author of the new book, How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain. Please welcome Peter Goodman. Yes. So...

How the world ran out of everything. During COVID, we ran out of toilet paper. Sure did. Baby formula, computer chips. We had cars that were ready to run, but no computer chips. What the f*** happened? And did we fix it?

We have not fixed it. I'm sorry to say the vulnerabilities are still there. What happened was a reveal of something that had been there for decades. We are dependent upon this really improvised, ad hoc, rickety supply chain. It's really a bunch of supply chains. We've been devoted to this kind of reckless, ruthless form of deregulation. And during the pandemic, just as we were in our darkest hour of need, it buckled. And yeah, we ran out a lot of stuff.

When I was reading your book, I kept asking myself the same question, which was, why don't we just make this shit here? Yeah. Why aren't we making all of the shit here? Well, but you...

You answer that, but explain it to me again. We could make more things here, and there's a movement to make more things here, and that's helpful. It's in the margins, but we're not going back to self-sufficiency. Look, if there was no trade, you and me wouldn't be having this conversation. We'd be out trying to feed our families with bark or whatever, right? And, you know, I'm not that good at growing food. I'm sure you're not either. So here we are. We're dependent upon a global supply chain. Speak for yourself, Peter. I...

I did lose a tomato in the wind last night in my rooftop garden, but good luck with that. Yeah, I don't want to try to feed my family through my own labor. So we have trade, and we've got a lot of jobs in this country that are dependent upon a global supply chain. And it's been a consumer bonanza. We've just done a very poor job cushioning the people who've lost jobs.

We don't need to throw out globalization. We need to reconfigure it. We need sensible regulations. We need working people to get more of a piece of the action so we have a more reliable supply chain. You tell the story in the book about one company that is trying to make these glow-in-the-dark toys, even has a contract with Sesame Street, and he wants to actually use American manufacturing, but...

can't find American manufacturers to do it. Right. I mean, he calls around. These are these, I follow this one container from a factory in China to the West Coast of the United States and then across the continent to Starkville, Mississippi, where his warehouse is based. He couldn't find somebody to make the molds for these products unless he paid 12 times as much as the price in China. He tried to get somebody to make a

kind of children's pop-up book style package for his product. And he was told, this is just too complicated. Go make this in China. It was the path of least resistance. You follow this path, this container ship from China all the way to Mississippi. And literally, this is the path it takes. I mean, it is. It's a harrowing journey. And as an American that buys a lot of stuff, I'm going, holy shit, I didn't know that all this happened. I just pressed click.

And then it shows up. Yeah, well, then it worked. Yeah. Do we need to buy less dumb shit? I know that's like not the most intellectual question. Do we need to buy less dumb shit? It's a legitimate question. Look, I rode for three days with a long haul truck driver from Kansas City to Dallas and back to try to understand. That sounds like my worst nightmare.

It's everyone's worst nightmare, which is why we don't have enough truck drivers. And the best part of that moment, we're somewhere in Oklahoma, and this truck driver looks out the window and he says, people just buy too much the word you just used. And, yeah!

We could do well thinking more carefully about what we buy and what we need. But let's face it, like we're going to keep making stuff. We're going to keep consuming stuff. The question is, are we going to have a more resilient supply chain or one that's just optimized for basically big box retailers and investors? Because that's what we've had now for decades. I had before reading your book, I had always kind of seen China as this

aggressor that has taken American jobs and manufacturing. And do you feel that's the case? Is that an accurate portrayal of China? I think what you painted the picture so well in here was that

It's American business executives that are saying we can make more money. It's not the American worker that's saying this. It's the executives. Why did factory jobs move to China? Because publicly traded corporations governed by the imperative to lower their costs

and produce lower-priced products, but fattened their margins as well. They sent production to China. They were encouraged to go there by the investor class, and it worked out really well for them. And look, this is an old story, right? Chinese labor was brought in to build the railroads in the United States. You talk about that, yeah. Yeah, and the...

Walmart going to the People's Republic of China, that's just a continuation of the old story of basically undercutting American labor unions, undercutting American working people. These are decisions, you know, the hollowing out of our factory towns that are not made in Beijing. These are decisions made in boardrooms in New York and Seattle and Congress.

It's not always portrayed that way. Right. You know, it's portrayed as there's China taking our economy. Right. But what we have a big debate coming up Thursday night. Right. Trump and correct me if I'm wrong, but Trump put some tariffs on China and Biden has kept a lot of those tariffs. Has advanced them. Has advanced them. What can we expect when this question comes up Thursday night? What?

WHERE DO THEY STAND ON THIS? I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH NUANCE THERE WILL BE IN THAT DEBATE, BUT LET'S FACE IT, THERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS -- I THINK WE ALL KNOW HOW MUCH NUANCE THERE WILL BE IN THAT DEBATE. THERE ARE NOT MANY THINGS THAT GARNER AGREEMENT IN AMERICAN POLITICS, BUT ONE OF THEM

unfortunately, is the sort of cartoonish depiction of China as this job-killing juggernaut without any of the details that we've already discussed here. I mean, I think in terms of the differences between these two candidates, Donald Trump is a threat to the global supply chain. He's proud to be a threat to the global supply chain.

He likes the photo op of slapping tariffs on steel and mugging for the cameras with steel workers going back to work. Never mind that there are six to eight times as many people who go to work at factories in America that buy steel as there are people who make steel. So those companies are less competitive. Now, Biden is also bashing China.

this is a bipartisan initiative, but it's a much more nuanced kind of industrial policy. It's less about containing China's rise. I mean, Trump is really about let's have a cold war with China. Biden is more about let's embrace industrial policy. Let's try to make electric vehicles in the U.S.

These are some significant differences. -I was in Vermont this weekend performing. I eat a lot of ice cream in my life. I wanted to go see the Ben & Jerry's ice cream

factory where it all started. These were two men in 1978 who started making ice cream out of a gas station. Right. And then as I kind of dug into it, I was also reading your book. It's kind of a perfect tie-in. I realized, oh, they sold the company to Unilever in year 2000. And all of a sudden, these two men who really care about keeping things local, who really cared about

uh... social issues it felt like the big evil corporation was constantly pushing back against them and was constantly looking at profit margins is there something that i can feel optimistic about his capitalism always just defeat us and these two little ben and jerry man scoops i don't think it's capitalism i mean you know the people who benefit from the status quo would have us believe that regulating and taxing and

enforcing antitrust laws. We might as well, you know, be advocating Venezuela style, you know. I mean, it's just nonsensical, right? Capitalism needs markets. Markets need regulation. They can't function without. But in terms of what we can do, you know, consumers are not going to save us from the vulnerabilities in the global economy. We're busy dealing with our kids. So I can keep buying plastic shit for my four-year-old daughter on Amazon. I'm not turning you in. I mean, it's going to take

antitrust enforcement, labor mobilization so that working people get a piece of the action so they're less likely to quit their jobs in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, you know, Henry Ford, problematic character, knew a thing or two about making things in the supply chain. You know, he said explicitly as he raised wages for workers in 2014 and was called a communist by some, he said, I just want to make things reliably. Any business that's premised on low wage labor is inherently unstable. Right. And...

That's where we're at right now. It feels like. I mean, normalcy is built on this idea that huge numbers of people have to do dangerous jobs away from their families with little control or understanding about their schedules. And they just have to suck that up for the benefit of our sort of just in time, ruthlessly efficient that turns out not to be so efficient global economy.

you personally that I can steal from you, what can I do? What do you do? What any habits of yours that have changed since researching and writing this? Yeah, I mean, I try to give my business to people who are actually in control of their businesses. I mean, if you're mostly transacting with big companies that are answerable to Wall Street, then you're ultimately transacting with entities that are thinking about shareholder interests above all. They can't afford to be kind to their workers necessarily because their competitors aren't.

They can't afford to think about keeping production local. They can't think about the highest quality ingredients, and they can't think beyond the next quarter. So certainly local, small production. But again, consumers are not going to save us from the vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. It's going to take regulation. It's going to take labor mobilization. But it helps to know that my...

$14 strawberries at the farmer's market is probably going to better use than the $9 strawberries at the Amazon. You need to shop somewhere else. Exactly. These are the celebrity prices that I get. Look, how the world ran out of everything is available now. Peter Goodman, everybody. Thank you. We'll be right back after this. Thank you. Thank you.

That's our show for tonight. Now here it is, your moment of zen. Bakari, what makes you nervous? Oh, when my wife yells at me when I'm coming home from work and I'm unsure what she's mad about on this particular day is really when I get nervous. How about for the debate? Because if that happens on Thursday, you'll have many things to worry about. It's all good. It's all good. We'll take that offline.

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