Stewart gave a master-class in cheap moralizing when Andrew Sullivan appeared on his show to discuss race relations.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week we detail the decline of the always-bad Jon Stewart, force ourselves to stare at the horror in Ukraine, and hit more media misses.
Jon Stewart’s Sad Descent from Bad to Worse
Jon Stewart, formerly of the Daily Show, has come out of retirement to make a mockery of his comedic legacy on The Problem with Jon Stewart, which airs on Apple TV+.
Having shown himself willing to break with the orthodoxy of the great and good by endorsing the then-blasphemous Covid lab-leak theory in June, Stewart demonstrated during a recent episode of his new program that his independent streak doesn’t extend to the third-rail issue of race relations.
Still committed to the blind partisanship and bad faith that made him famous in the first place, Stewart took his game to the next level in a recent episode featuring independent journalist Andrew Sullivan.
The conversation, which also featured two parrots of Stewart’s position, was centered around white supremacy and its historical effects. After beginning with a simplistic, moralizing monologue, Stewart lost his temper when Sullivan pushed back on the idea that the United States is, at present, “white supremacist,” erroneously claiming that Sullivan had submitted that the country was not racist at all.
He went on to argue that Sullivan was not “living in the same f***ing country as we are,” and to call him a “motherf***er,” mischaracterizing nearly every word out of Sullivan’s mouth in the process.
Having been caught flat-footed during his appearance on Stewart’s show, Sullivan thoroughly dismantled Stewart’s monologue and subsequent attempt at panel moderation in a Substack post.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”
I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.
Rather than responding to Sullivan point-by-point as Sullivan had done to him, Stewart blasted the journalist on Twitter, asking “can we stop with the lazy ‘woke’ sh** anytime someone disagrees with a conservative. F*** man.”
I wouldn’t count on any remorse, much less a change in behavior from Stewart, who will no doubt continue on with his deeply humiliating yet profitable tantrums.
Bearing the Unbearable
As Russian forces retreat from Kyiv, their ultimate intentions unclear, the atrocities they’ve committed are gradually being brought into the light thanks to the work of fearless journalists, local and foreign.
The shelling of civilian areas we’ve witnessed since the war began has been accompanied by a more personal kind of atrocity. In Bucha, bodies left in the street bear the signs of torture and execution. Mass graves had to be dug by overwhelmed coroners, and residents have told journalists that the Russians murdered their neighbors indiscriminately.
Journalists on the ground in Ukraine have done yeomen’s work exposing the horrors inflicted by the Russians.
At the New York Times, Carlotta Grall and Andrew Kramer recount the experience of a 76-year-old woman from Bucha forced to bury her daughter’s body in her front yard bit-by-bit after Russian tanks rolled into town and immediately opened fire on her. “There was so much shelling, I did not know what to do,” said the woman. Another resident, this one bearing a limp, reported that he’d been detained, tied to a metal pole, interrogated, and beaten for two days by the invaders.
The Associated Press reported that in another town outside of Kyiv, Motyzhyn, the mayor and her family were murdered in cold blood and thrown into another mass grave.
Human Rights Watch interviewed a woman from a suburb of Kharkiv who said that she had been beaten and repeatedly raped.
Another woman living outside of Kyiv told the Times that the same thing had happened to her after Russian soldiers murdered her husband.
It’s gut-wrenching, but vital work: The only thing worse than reading about the suffering of the Ukrainian people would be to ignore it.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Washington Post delivered a hard-hitting investigation this week that pulled no punches: “Analysis: Where to buy bread near Mar-a-Lago.”
Reporter Philip Bump shared his magnum opus on Twitter explaining: “Trump said in an interview this week that stores are out of bread. Alarmed, I called some places near Mar-a-Lago and can report that he is incorrect.”
Floridian gluten fiends can rest easy thanks to this brave reporting!
If he's reading and still scouring the area for some sourdough, I included driving directions from Mar-a-Lago to nearby stores with bread in stock. https://t.co/yuJVJDpwDB
— Philip Bump (@pbump) March 30, 2022
Media Misses
-Michael de Adder, a cartoonist for the Washington Post, depicted Florida governor Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of transgender children because of his support for a bill preventing teachers from instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms. Worse yet, de Adder appears to have used a photograph of a dead Syrian child as his “inspiration.” It’s grotesque enough to accuse political opponents of murdering children through eminently reasonable – and extremely popular – legislation, but it’s another thing entirely to draw upon a real-life tragedy for the occasion.
–Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz has continued her very public, years-long meltdown, and is now blaming MSNBC for the reaction to an interview she did with the cable network on online harassment.
Taylor Lorenz is blaming MSNBC because she looked like a fool and got massively dunked on. pic.twitter.com/izpwYhusoo
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) April 4, 2022
Many reacted to Lorenz’s tears by mocking her, since her journalism seems designed to bring harassment and worse upon its subjects, who are oftentimes formerly anonymous teenagers. Harassment is always wrong, but if Lorenz is worried about it, she might want to rethink how she’s spent her career.
–Politico reported on Monday morning that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is on the cusp of becoming the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. This will come as news to sitting Justice Clarence Thomas, and anyone who’s ever patronized the Baltimore airport.
-PBS NewsHour correspondent Lisa Desjardins partook in an embarrassing moment of flattery for President Biden last week when she prefaced a question by saying that he has “more foreign-policy experience than any president who has ever held this office.”
PBS reporter to Joe Biden: “You have more foreign policy experience than any president who has ever held this office.”#Journalism pic.twitter.com/iLofPWAfVa
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 28, 2022