After a break, he has returned with a new episode and it was a hard-hitting one.

To no one’s surprise, he led off with Saudi Arabia’s ban on the episode of his show where he harshly criticized Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and his authoritarian rule generally. Minhaj pointed out that the ‘morality’ law under which his show was pulled is, as is often the case, highly vague and used to single out shows that the government dislikes for its political content, nothing to do with morality.

Form there, he pivoted to a description of the strict censorship that exists in China where the government has managed to throttle access to foreign news sources and social media platforms on the internet and replaced them with local sources that they can control more easily. I had not been aware of the extent of China’s control over the information that Chinese people can access and the cat-and-mouse game that is perpetually underway between activists and censors.

It was a very revealing show.