Jon Stewart, Intrepid Purveyor of Half-Truths

Alright, you got me, I'll talk about Harrison Butker and Caitlin Clark.

Jon Stewart and some guy who got cancelled by liberals.

For the last several years, Jon Stewart has served as something of a pressure valve for liberal dogma. Every once in a while, he is trotted out to make a pronouncement that slightly deviates from the official Democratic Party narrative on a controversial issue, and people are expected to act like he just blew our minds with his epic truth-telling. To anyone who isn’t fully blinded by ideology or loyalty to party, these statements haven’t been all that revelatory, but his function within this political theater is interesting nonetheless.

In June 2021, Stewart went on former colleague Stephen Colbert's nauseating CBS late-night show and ranted about how reasonable it is to figure that the Covid pandemic was the result of a leak from the coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China. To many, that was a fairly obvious assessment of what might have happened, but because of the authoritarian nature that establishment outlets policed perceived “misinformation” about Covid during the preceding lockdown year, it struck just as many as a significant break in messaging from liberal elites, with which Stewart is aligned, even if he would like to pretend that he isn’t.

More recently, Stewart has resumed, at least on a part-time basis, hosting duties at “The Daily Show”, the role that catapulted him from a relatively marginal actor and comedian into a modern-day, wisecracking Walter Cronkite for liberals of a certain age. For a while, he had a show on Apple’s streaming service, but that was nixed in late 2023, a decision Stewart attributed to the tech company not wanting “me to say things that might get me in trouble.”

At the beginning of this month, Stewart, performing at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival, went in on Joe Biden being a decrepit old coot. Sure, Biden is an old, wet fart of a president, but tell us something we don’t already know. Nevertheless, Stewart caught some flak from fellow Democrats for stating the obvious. He’s also gotten in hot water for suggesting that libs need to engage with popular figures like Joe Rogan rather than desperately trying to deplatform them.

"I know liberals say, 'Don't say Joe Biden is old' — don't say what people see with their own eyes," Stewart said of the 81-year-old president. "I know you know how fucking old he is, and I know you don't want to say it because Trump is so scary, but he's so fucking old. When you watch him on television, you're nervous, aren't ya?

There are any number of reasons to see Biden as a horrible president beyond his age, but that’s a convenient out for Democratic elites who want to be seen as having a dissident or independent streak. With Biden’s poll numbers sinking, to offer up his age as the reason he’s likely failing to win re-election smacks of looking for a more friendly narrative than what is actually going on. Meanwhile, the legacy liberal media has been busy the last year or so gaslighting voters over the economy and worsening financial conditions. One could easily go in on Biden getting the country involved in funding two more wars, pushing endless amounts of divisive identity politics, establishment censorship, forbidding rail workers from striking months before a catastrophic derailment of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. And that’s before getting into Biden’s sad and insincere attempts to play to both sides in the ongoing Israeli war with Hamas. Biden, as always, is doggedly in support of Israel but hopes he can make enough weak and misleading gestures to satisfy his larping-as-radical-leftist, young, would-be supporters. That said, going after Biden on these issues also implicates Democratic Party operatives who are liable to be around well after Biden kicks the bucket.

As for Jon Stewart, I was once a fan of his shtick. When I was in college, in the early Aughts during the first term of George W. Bush, “The Daily Show” had illuminating segments that punctured some of the suffocating narratives of the era, while also functioning as legitimately solid comedy. This was the era of journalism when objectivity meant bland both-sidesism that often refused to arrive at easily observed conclusions about events, at the risk of being disingenuously attacked for having an agenda. By now, we know that flawed model has been replaced in recent years by an even more flawed paradigm that essentially amounts to fully partisan media that eschews the basic principles of the reporting discipline. I was in journalism school at the time, and I can recall a professor or two that had reservations about how much some of their students raved about “The Daily Show” as a font of truth and righteousness.

Stewart, of course, has never identified as a journalist. In fact, one of the more weaselly aspects of him as host of “The Daily Show” was his refusal to take responsibility for any of the show’s shortcomings or unfair practices, despite its clear influence on American politics and culture. When critics pointed these things out, Stewart’s response was typically something to the effect of “hey, I’m just a comedian - what do you want from me?” A similar dynamic cropped up during the (first?) Trump era of 2016-2020 with podcasts like Chapo Trap House being seen as leaders of the “dirtbag left” movement, yet the hosts consistently swore off any responsibility when they would do counterproductive or cowardly things.

For all of Jon Stewart’s grandstanding about Apple being afraid of him dropping truth bombs on the world, he sure came off as a partisan hack when I checked back in with him this week.

In Stewart’s regular Monday stint back behind the desk at “The Daily Show”, he addressed a controversy involving Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker making comments about his tradcath beliefs during a recent college commencement speech. I had been hoping to avoid writing about the subject because I think it has only been as drawn out as it has because it happened during the deadest portion of the NFL off-season when the media is looking to milk anything remotely salacious for content. What’s more, I find it so very tiresome that liberals insist that everyone involved in the nation’s most popular big money bloodsport has to share their cultish progressive values, even kickers, who are hardly the most respected players on the field. I guess they forgot that former Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers publicly endorsed Rick Santorum for president a few election cycles ago, and listed Santorum’s opposition to abortion as one of the main reasons why. Oh wait, but that happened in 2012, a couple years before Trump Derangement Syndrome set in.

Stewart took the Butker story as an excuse to launch into a tirade on cancel culture, specifically that the only “real” cancel culture is opposing Donald Trump as a member of the right. Oh boy, here we fucking go again…

The analysis is so shitty and dishonest about something that has severely affected me for the better part of a decade that I am forced to the bait.

The thrust of Stewart’s argument is that right-wing media has been going on a frenzy, claiming that Butker is being cancelled by woke liberals when Butker hasn’t actually been cancelled at all, and this fits a pattern of cynical self-victimization by right-wingers.

There’s some truth there. Butker is going to end up keeping his job, but it’s not for a lack of trying by liberals to oust and damage him. An online petition with over 220,000 signatures is calling on the Chiefs to release him. A Kansas City Star columnist wrote that Butker should be fired and replaced by a woman kicker. An employee with the city government of Kansas City posted Butker’s home address on social media, a move with clear intention to get people to harass him and his family. Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes haven’t exactly sided with Butker but they aren’t reflexively condemning him either, earning them a predictable scolding from media liberals who have made guilt by association a common theme in their witch hunts.

Do these sound like the actions of level-headed people? No, it’s very much in keeping with the vindictive, bloodthirsty mob-like tactics we’ve seen from social justice puritans over the last decade. Again, Butker isn’t cancelled, but that doesn’t mean many libs don’t want to and aren’t actively trying to do it. And if he were cancelled, what exactly are you destroying him for? Saying some shit you don’t like in a venue outside his job, that quite a few people do agree with?

That Butker is one of the better kickers in the NFL is relevant here. I have little doubt that if Butker were some scrub, the team would have immediately cut him and his football career would likely be over. But shitlibs love to play this game where each time they are unsuccessful cancelling someone, they pivot to pretending that their cancelling isn’t real and it’s actually a right-wing myth. “See!? We couldn’t destroy this one guy. That means we never do it! Now kindly please ignore the hundreds of other examples where our cancel campaigns were brutally effective.” It’s a slimy as hell tactic, and one would hope after a decade they would develop some shame, but I guess that’s too much to ask of these utter fascist pieces of shit.

Stewart’s point that rightoids often make a hue and cry over liberal cancel culture that ultimately can’t harm them is true and it’s a phenomenon that is deeply frustrating to me personally, but again, this requires more context. Some talking head on Fox News can indeed freely spout off on subjects that would get them tarred and feathered if they did so in a liberal space then turn around and sell books about their fake persecution, but that doesn’t mean conservatives who do function within liberal spaces are immune. Remember that Gina Carano was fired from “The Mandalorian” in 2021 and had her own spin-off series scrapped for a social media post in which she dimly compared being conservative to being Jewish in Nazi Germany. It’s a dumb point on her part, but you’re ultimately still cancelling someone for the crime of benign wrongthink.

Stewart continues in this segment decrying what he calls the grievance culture of the right. Sure, I agree, Republicans definitely have a culture of grievance. Do you think that the Democrats don’t? Because it sounds like you believe that the Democrats don’t.

To counter that delusion, let’s take a look at the WNBA, a space decidedly overrun with progressive values, where Caitlin Clark is beginning her professional career after rocketing to stardom in college hoops. If you’ve been paying attention to Clark’s arrival in the league, it’s basically been met with a metric fuckton of pathetic whining by black women that the only reason that Caitlin Clark is popular is because she is white. Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson got in on the act. Turbo hack journo Jemele Hill took it a bit further and attributed Caitlin Clark’s popularity to the fact that she is white and heterosexual. I can’t say I pay an immense amount of attention to Clark - I’ve watched maybe five of her games in college and the pros combined - but I don’t really see her flaunting her sexuality. Is this all because Angel Reese got pissy with her for no good reason?

I’m sorry, did you all think we forgot how hyped Candace Parker was and still is? OMG SHE DUNKED THAT ONE TIME! The WNBA stalwarts could and probably should see Clark’s popularity as a potential rising tide that lifts all boats, but they can’t see past their own identity hang-ups and petty grudges. And now they got Charles Barkley shit-talking them, too.

And it’s not only race resentment that has surfaced with Clark’s arrival in the WNBA. Right after she was drafted, the salary disparity between the WNBA and the NBA became a big to-do for liberals, because it turns out Clark, despite all the attention she commands, will only make about $80,000 in salary this season. Lord knows liberals love a good wage gap freakout, legitimate or not. Even Joe Biden felt the need to weigh in on this horseshit because there’s no end to his pandering to (and sniffing of) women. That wage disparity sounds just dreadful, until you realize that the WNBA has never turned a profit and has been fully subsidized by the NBA for its entire existence. Can’t dole out hefty salaries when your league makes no fucking money, you dolts. Oh, and right after all this identitarian blubbering, Clark signed a $28 million deal with Nike. I think she’s gonna be alright. Probably won’t have to deliver with DoorDash on the side. Not to be deterred, The New York Times is still running guest columns decrying how little Clark is being paid in salary (there’s a new one today!), because modern progressivism only ever truly focuses on bestowing yet more privilege on already rich women.

Getting back to Jon Stewart, in the middle of this segment, after heated and detailed discussion of the Republicans and their cynicism, he offers a bit of vague and tepid throat-clearing, presumably in the name of fairness.

“Look, it is absolutely true that in our modern, social media driven society, our interactions are incentivized and monetized for outrage, and it is fucking exhausting for everyone. But contrary to your conservative book industry, the outrage isn’t just coming from the left; it’s coming from the left, the right, for the right, for the left, and the Swifties, and YA readers, and anybody who dares to lift their head up to say fucking anything. We are not censored or silenced. We are surrounded by and inundated by more speech than has ever existed in the history of communication. And it is all weaponized by professional outrage hunters of all stripes, scouring the globe for graduation speech snippets, offhand comments during promotional tours, out of context comedy bits, lame marketing ideas, or any words and phrases they can latch onto to generate monetized clicks. Outrage is the engine of the modern media economy. And sometimes someone loses a job or something else happens like that that should never fucking happen.”

Wow, that’s a lot of mealy-mouthed nothing, Mr. Soothsayer. Who exactly are these “someones” who have lost jobs and “something else” and what has caused them to lose these things? Jon Stewart has nothing but specific condemnations for Republican dishonesty, but when it comes to liberal cancel culture, it’s just part of a nebulous state of modern society where everyone is guilty and you can’t point fingers. This is as much a calculated brush-off as the lie that cancel culture isn’t real or a right-wing fantasy. No, cancel culture is in fact real and it might have started as a right-wing invention during the Red Scare in the ‘50s, but it is a tool of the right that liberals gladly adopted as their own during their own lurch to the right. Identity politics is the distraction from that movement, the mirage that they still have left-wing concerns, and so it must be enforced with authoritarian methods, even when it rarely accomplishes more than symbolic representation in corporate spaces.

There are so many people I once respected and admired, who because of their spineless lies on this issue, that I now loathe. Maybe if this had gone on for a month or two, I could look past it. But not after seven years of this shit. I will never forgive these self-serving cretins. It’s bad enough to be savagely unpersoned by these types, but then to turn around and watch them lie about the underlying dynamics of it over and over again is an added layer of punishment. People only want to focus on the loss of employment, the social stigma of cancellation, but in many ways it is psychological torture as well.

Oh wait, we’re not done yet. Jon has a little more for us:

“But contrary to conservatives’ victimization complex, there is no organized cancel culture conspiracy where even the slightest misstep can 100 percent get someone on the right cancelled. Actually, there is. There is one.”

Here’s the coup of the segment: Jon Stewart saying the real cancel culture is right-wingers opposing Trump. Again, there is truth to it, but not the whole truth, and what delicious irony to see Jon Stewart, hero to liberals during the Bush Administration, depicting the ghoulish daughter of Dick Cheney as some put-upon victim for being ousted from the Republican Party.

Stewart sums this all up by concluding that the Republicans are now a cult of Trump.

True enough, but the Democrats are a cult of identity politics and reverence for zombie institutions, and everything they decry about the GOP is pure projection. Ending democracy? Well, the Dems have rigged their last three presidential primaries and fight to keep third parties off the ballot. And even though Jon Stewart swears “we are not being censored or silenced” there’s an entire censorship complex being amassed and implemented behind closed doors.

Moreover, perhaps the most interesting lie-of-omission in this segment is Israel. If you wanted to go at destructive right-wing cancel culture, labeling criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism is all the rage right now, but ah - that’s a cancel campaign also being supported by establishment Democrats. Best to let that one simmer for a while until you can only blame it on the GOP. Indulge in the fantasy that only one side of the corporate duopoly is bad.