Does Jon Stewart ever really face a conservative interviewer? Someone who would challenge his lazy multi-millionaire leftist assumptions? Because on Sunday’s Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, the host gushed about “a rare conversation with the great Jon Stewart” that offered no pushback as Stewart uncorked on complaints about critical race theory as a “purposeful distortion field” from Republicans who are terrible at governing.
Jon Stewart has been terrible at comedy for decades now, replacing the laughs with his political lecturing. This is the Zakaria softball about CRT:
ZAKARIA: So nowadays when you watch Republicans campaign against Democrats, they don't campaign much on what they used to which was, you know, the Democrats were big spenders or whatever. You know, it's all about critical race theory and it's all this cancel culture stuff.
STEWART: Sure. Yes. The biggest problem.
ZAKARIA: Why does it work and what should Democrats do? Are they falling for a bait in doing this, in talking about these issues?
STEWART: I mean, I don't know if they're falling for a bait, but, I mean, I think, again, I don't even think half of the Republicans who do it even mean it.
What kind of lazy questioning assumes that the Left isn’t doing anything in their crusade for “diversity equity and inclusion”? That’s not happening?? As in the Left hasn’t been pushing the Systemic Racism button incessantly since George Floyd died in police custody?
If there were a conservative on set, they would mock the idea that the Left is just a passive victim in this DEI or CRT debate. Stewart just gets to say Republicans don’t even believe their own bluster – a classic take for lazy liberals. Then he adds the other classic lazy-liberal schtick, that Republicans have no governing ideas:
STEWART: What would you do if you were out of governing ideas? If you didn't know how to govern a country of this magnitude, and a country of this diversity, and you basically are running on government is broken, and then when you get in office, you have to be terrible to prove the original premise, like it must be great to be able to do that.
This government doesn't work and by me not funding it and breaking it, see? See, what I told you? Keep me in power. If you don't have ideas on governing, what do you do? Well, you do the purposeful distortion field that they create.
Stewart even went so far to suggest the DEI craze in corporate America is just a bunch of empty seminar talk, and America isn’t really dismantling systemic racism like a Marxist academic would:
ZAKARIA: When Sarah Huckabee Sanders did the response to the State of the Union, I know that she kept talking about CRT. She didn't even bother to spell it out. I would assume most average Americans don't know what it's for.
STEWART: But, Fareed, that's -- the guy who came up with that [let's guess that's Christopher Rufo], that's purposeful. His plan is make everything CRT. And by the way all this diversity initiatives and CRT and all those other things are only there because we refuse to actually fix the real problem.
The diversity and equity initiatives are a salve. They are to pacify and mollify because we won't actually do the real thing. We won't actually dismantle the vestiges of all the systemic racism and all this systemic classism and all the systemic gender issues. We won't actually dismantle that. But what we will do is you can have an office in the building. And every few months we're going to have to sit and listen to you talk for like an hour. And so we're good, right?
Jon Stewart's white version of Ibram X. Kendi was brought to you by WeatherTech.
