Here’s the News: Jon Stewart Backlash Over Biden Comments Explained
Jon Stewart is facing backlash from some Democrats over his comments about President Joe Biden. Is he about to learn a hard truth about the current state of media and culture? --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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No, here's the fucking news!
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A changing media world that can't accommodate Perhaps one of its key and landmark figures, Jon Stewart.
When Jon Stewart was last on The Daily Show, he showed how current affairs could be handled comedically and more intelligently than the actual news.
It was a common trope at the time.
People were watching The Daily Show to get their news.
Now Jon Stewart is back, and I would say brilliant and Perhaps even better than ever.
But what's marked, observable and challenging is the world has changed since Jon Stewart used to last be on TV.
Now you're either for the establishment or you're against the establishment.
And the establishment figures from the left have been facing more and more criticism.
Remember, I was associated with the left for a long time because I believe in Liberalism and freedom and be who you are and leave me alone and that kind of stuff which I know a lot of you in the comments will say those are conservative ideas but anti-establishmentism when you have corporatist leaders previously was always assumed to be coming from the cultural left shall we say.
Well now that very same cultural set can't tolerate or accommodate criticisms of Joe Biden for being Old.
Which seems like a pretty high threshold given that Joe Biden is pretty old.
Let's have a look at Jon Stewart's return and some of the criticisms of it before analyzing what's changed in our culture that means that Jon Stewart is now more controversial than ever.
These two candidates they are both similarly challenged and it is not crazy to think that the oldest people in the history of the country to ever run for president might have some of these challenges.
Now Democrats will say that any criticism like this, especially of Biden, is unfair.
That's weird because he's saying this before the criticism has happened and indeed that is precisely the criticism that has happened.
I don't know how you feel in particular about the senility and decay of Joe Biden.
I've always taken it to be an observable and evident symbol of, well, the decay of the system itself, and evidence that he can't be in a pivotal executive position because he wouldn't be capable of that.
And it seems ludicrous and ridiculous to see a paracheek after a paracheek come out and claim that Joe Biden's sharp as a whip, he's lightning fast, it seems preposterous and inconceivable that that's true.
What's interesting to me is to see Jon Stewart with his same cadence and same meter and now suddenly the left, his old allies, can't deal with it.
One thing I think is important about Jon Stewart to remember is that after 9-11 he was right in there with first responders, supporting them.
It's a cause that's very close to him.
And what I would say is that Jon Stewart represents a political category that's starting to disappear.
People of the left that are connected to blue-collar working people.
That in particular is the change that the establishment elite have undertaken.
An evident loathing of ordinary working people is why a lot of people don't feel at home in what was once regarded as the left.
Because you just don't know Biden like they know Biden.
President Biden, who I've been around numerous times just in this last year, is sharp, he's focused, he's bright.
He is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused.
Oh, that one was really funny.
And focused, there.
And focused.
I got all my points in that I was told to get in before I did this TV show.
And focused.
We've all become more media savvy in the intervening years since Jon Stewart's departure from the Daily Show.
We all know now there's a relationship between the legacy media and the government.
We all know now because of the release of the Twitter files that deep state operatives are controlling portions of what's accessible and permittable on social media.
We've all become Better educated.
We all see a montage like that now and understand that it's not a coincidence that they're all using the same terms and the same words.
In a sense, Jon Stewart to a degree participated in the creation of this landscape.
Critiques of legacy media, critiques of the political class.
Of course, Jon Stewart isn't the creator of satire, but this kind of fast-paced, anti-establishment, quick, thinking aggressive style of comedy was very much pioneered or made more popular certainly by Jon Stewart.
The problem is now the culture has changed and it is forbidden oddly on the authoritarian left to attack a leader like Joe Biden as if it's Stalin or something where if you criticize him it's like oh my god you're gonna die.
Of course now it would be more a digital death or a cultural death or not being permitted to participate in the spoils of the establishment elite and I think what's most interesting about Jon Stewart's return is we can see now that the culture has radically altered since John Stewart was part of the mainstream.
The culture no longer permits criticism of the powerful.
There are prescribed tropes that are permitted, and that's it.
You might have seen some talk show hosts talking about Tucker's interview with Putin, and it was kind of lukewarm satire, and that's what's become normal now.
The aggressive attack of the powerful, that exists on online platforms now.
The mainstream has extracted that from its discourse.
It can no longer tolerate it because the legacy media exists to amplify and support the establishment, not to attack it.
This is a man who is sharp, who is on top of his game, who knows what's going on.
He's smart.
He's on his game.
I was in almost every meeting with the president.
Yeah, a lot of people have got doubts about you and all, mate.
And the president was in front of and on top of it all, coordinating And directing.
What is the standard you expect of the President of the United States?
It's not like an elderly person who's participating in the community as a member of the Rotary Club.
This is a person that's across geopolitical issues, numerous world wars, arms deals, pandemics.
That standard isn't high enough.
Leaders who are in charge of America's national security, not to mention our allies around the globe.
Did anyone film that?
I even wonder if the audience laughed at his somewhat nervous
We've been so coached during the pandemic period to recognise this is what we're allowed to laugh at, we're not allowed to laugh at this and part of cancel culture and part of the what you used to call political correctness but has now become far more extreme.
means that we don't live in the same sort of convivial and easy comedic atmosphere that we once did.
Are we allowed to laugh at Joe Biden? It's not laughing at him because he's elderly, of course.
There is an equivalency between age and experience and therefore perhaps wisdom.
This is not laughing at an old person, this is questioning the cognitive capacity of a person
in a position of great power and querying whether or not this is at odds with what
our expectations of the leader of the free world ought be.
Because if you're telling us behind the scenes he is sharp and full of energy and on top of it
and really in control and leading, you should film that.
Of course, when it comes to Republicans, they've got a different strategy for their 77-year-old candidate.
Jon Stewart goes on to attack Donald Trump, and Jon Stewart always used to attack both sides, used to attack the establishment broadly.
Now, the Democrats have been very critical of Jon Stewart's attacks, as they perceive them, on Biden, but the right haven't mentioned anything about Donald Trump, and it's odd First of all, Donald Trump is not an old man.
this tendency towards censorship, this inability to accommodate open conversation or humor,
or even pointing out the obvious in the case of Joe Biden's cognitive decline,
is an indicator of a new cultural climate where there is a sense of pervasive oppression,
where there's certain things you're just not allowed to say, and that is perhaps the biggest
shift that's taken place since Jon Stewart was last on the air.
Well first of all, Donald Trump is not an old man.
He's an old man! He is objectively an old man, on a human scale.
We have two candidates who are chronologically outside the norm of anyone who has run for the presidency in this country, in the history of this country.
They are the oldest people ever to run for president, breaking by only four years the record that they set!
The last time they ran!
Jon Stewart appears to be skewering an important flaw of our political age.
Our political class are not retiring.
Perhaps because of the donations and financial support and ability to rake in cash, invest in companies that will benefit from laws that they're passing.
People like Nancy Pelosi or that other old lady that needed to be given advice.
Vote for the war!
War is good now?
Yeah, times have changed.
War is good now.
Yeah, just say aye.
Okay, just...
Aye.
All these people are elderly and don't you see in that a kind of visual demonstration of what's wrong with the system?
It has become corrupted.
It has become occupied by incumbents that are no longer appropriate.
It needs to alter.
It needs to radically change.
during the 2020 election.
Wasn't it kind of ridiculous that we were talking about progress and change and people of color
and Joe Biden was the monolith that was presented to us as here, this elderly white gentleman
for a new brave world.
It shows you that there are no real values or principles within that system,
that it's actually governed by peculiar hierarchies, odd systemic relationships and financial partnerships
between financial systems and big tech and the military industrial complex.
And it was all just sort of papered over by language verbosity. This is a brave new world.
I'm the only person that can oppose Donald Trump.
When, in effect, what is happening, as Jon Stewart observes, is elderly people are retaining their power, retaining their positions, while claiming that the world is progressing.
There's something very odd about that.
Predictably, mainstream media, cultural institutions, responded unfavourably to Jon Stewart's nuanced attack on both candidates.
Because, remember, he attacked Trump, he attacked Biden.
I don't see anybody on the right going, you can't say that about Donald Trump.
He's trying his hardest with his hair and his skin tone.
I love that Jon Stewart is back, but what's so offensive to me is there's a difference between age and intelligence.
There's a difference between age and vitality.
There's a difference between age and really being up on things and having that quickness of wit that joy has.
We're talking about Joe Biden, who sometimes doesn't look very well, or like he fully understands the magnitude of what he's dealing with in these numerous incendiary wars.
Different to, like, go and do The View.
I'd let Joe Biden go and do The View.
Yeah, go and do The View.
Don't matter how people are watching it or they won't watch it.
Not, let's decide whether or not to escalate a war with Russia and China and Iran simultaneously.
That's not the same as beyond The View.
Let me just tell you that Martha Stewart's 82.
She's still cooking in front of people.
Yeah, but she's just cooking.
She's not decided whether or not we go to war with Russia.
Also, she did have to go to jail.
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are getting it in.
They're actors.
They're just pretending to be gangsters.
Joe Biden is running the free world.
They've got babies in their 80s, okay?
Jay Fonda, 86.
Representative Maxine Waters, 85.
Yeah, part of the problem.
Nancy Pelosi, 83.
Part of the problem.
I don't know.
They look like they know what they're doing.
No.
No.
Maybe they know what they're doing.
They're exploiting us.
They have the wisdom, they have the history.
The problem with this country... This is distinct.
From revering elders and a culture that respects people's experience and we're able to turn to them and honour them.
Those are really important values.
This isn't a, let's honour Joe Biden by ignoring his evident senility.
That's not what this is about.
This person who seems like might be a corrupt career politician is leading us into various wars that appear to be in the interest of financial institutions and institutions of dominion.
Rather than representative of the will of the American people.
I was taught to respect my elders, and when they want to lead us into a global holy war, I'd bloody well get on with it.
It's called respect.
Called Armageddon.
We don't value people with their wisdom.
We don't value seniors.
We don't value entrepreneurs.
And I'm sick of this ageism.
It says it about both of them, didn't it, Jon Stewart?
That didn't warrant that response at all, did it?
Let's have a look at some cultural analysis about the changing landscape between when Jon Stewart was previously on the Daily Show to present day and why the culture has changed so radically.
And let me know in the comments what you think has changed.
Jon Stewart left the Daily Show in August 2015, which was not all that long ago, but was a vastly different media and cultural environment.
Celebrity apprentice host and celebrity billionaire Donald Trump had taken his golden escalator ride down for his presidential announcement less than two months earlier, and the tidal wave of societal change was a mere ripple.
I remember at that point, the idea that Donald Trump would become president, I thought at least, was ridiculous.
This was before the primaries, this was before he proved himself to be basically hilarious.
This is a tough business to run for president.
Oh I know you're a tough guy, Gia, by the way.
And we need to have a leader.
And before it became pretty plain that about 50% of the American voting public
are so annoyed they are willing to vote for a renegade.
Stewart is a political comedy star from an era that has completely disappeared.
Ever since large portions of the American media became hopelessly addicted to the drug that is Donald Trump, obsessed with their perceived existential fight with the former and potentially future president.
Stuart's daily show reign went from 1999 to 2015, spanning the full scope of the Bush and Obama years.
Divisiveness in our politics and culture was rampant then, but Americans also were being served by a media that valued objectivity, basic fairness and intellectual consistency.
Although in retrospect, the difference between the Obama and Bush era doesn't look as significant as perhaps it seemed at the time.
Ultimately, in retrospect and subsequently, those two men have been able to form a pretty Decent relationship with one another and generally speaking, I would see them as representatives of the same financial interests, wouldn't you?
Obama, George Bush, they belong to the same clubs.
They'll both accept money from Raytheon.
They're both turn up after dinner speeches.
Not even saying this is a criticism of Bush or Obama, but they are institutional politicians.
Donald Trump, a weird renegade, isn't he?
An odd outlier.
The kind of first beneficiary of fervid anti-establishment feeling that was clearly present but has peaked in the interim years.
In the years since Trump rose to power, objectivity has become seen as a sign of ignorance, or worse, there are hysterical screams of false equivalency and both-side-ism and what-about-ism, because if you're not focused solely on Trump alone, you're simply part of the problem.
Former New York Times journalist Amy Chozik said, Objectivity is akin to white supremacy.
We've said many times on this show that Pulitzer Prize winning journalists like Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald and brilliant up-and-coming journalists like Matt Taibbi or Whitney Webb or Schellenberg or Lee Fang, they're now sort of maligned and marginalized.
I swear in the Jon Stewart era one, those people would be at like New York Times, Rolling Stone, getting scoops, attacking the establishment.
Now it's like you lot Shut up, you right-wing fascists!
And if you know those people, as I do, you can tell they're anti-establishment journalists with real integrity that are attacking corruption and hypocrisy.
Now the New York Times won't do that.
Rolling Stone won't do that.
They are no longer radical organisations.
They are about supporting the establishment, accepting cultural areas that ultimately do not affect the main thrust of power, I would argue.
Let me know if you agree with that.
Stuart's daily show made a regular practice of criticising his own side.
He'd go after the hypocrisy of the left, seeming to relish making his audience uncomfortable at times.
Stuart was occasionally masterful at exposing the ridiculous contortions we perform to defend powerful figures we support.
And he did so not by attacking the people, but by attacking the powerful.
In 2024 and since 2017, the Daily Show oeuvre and the corporate media apparatus has been the opposite.
It wasn't enough to simply attack Trump or his administration.
No, the target was the deplorables who put him there in the first place.
This is something we've commented on a lot.
The left used to be, as I understood it, the party of working people.
To ensure that working people, either through trade unions or in a more disparate way, could oppose and confront the corporate world and its ability to manipulate politics, the left arose to represent those interests.
Now the left isn't that anymore.
And it was most evident to me, I suppose, and I'm just a casual observer of these things,
in the era of Clinton and Blair where legislative changes took place and the left became about
we'll just be a slightly nicer version of the right.
That's what we'll do.
Now I'm an anti-establishment person.
I don't think that the right or the left are the solution to our problems.
I believe, as I think you know by now, in decentralization so that we don't have to argue about culture anymore.
We just say, this community is going to be running this way, this community is going to be running that way, and our cultures can be personal matters or community matters or matters for us to determine for ourselves.
This idea that 50% of the population is at war with the other half, where does that end?
I suppose in war.
Which brings us to Monday night and Stuart returning with a manifesto of sorts tackling the Biden-Trump rematch that nobody wants.
He set the table on 2024 by describing in detail the threat of Trump, but also spent significant time calling out the obvious cognitive decline and mental fitness of President Biden, including those Democratic defenders who are spinning a full story after the damning special counsel report.
He referred to Biden as chocolate chip cookie guy and mocked Biden's awkward TikTok debut.
This was capital U unacceptable for some in the press.
Centrist Democrats were appalled at what they saw as a betrayal by one of their own, wrote Rolling Stone.
Stewart's main segment was classic both-side-ism, wrote Slate.
Those organizations, of course, being now ultimately mouthpieces of the establishment.
Jon Stewart is about to learn a hard truth about the current media and cultural environment.
His brand isn't welcome anymore.
He probably already knows that after he was kicked off Apple for talking about China.
And now here we are.
Jon Stewart has appalled the left because of his betrayal for daring to state the obvious about Joe Biden.
What's fascinating about the return of John Stuart is it allows us as independent observers
to recognise that indeed the culture has changed, that it is more sensorial, that it is more
authoritarian, that it has become more tribalised.
But within that it does demonstrate to me also the possibility for new alliances.
Those of us that may not agree with one another on everything culturally or religiously or
ideologically and that would surely include basically all of us because if you drilled
into it for long enough you'd find fissures in all of our relationships because ultimately
the sovereignty of the individual and the value of the community and the family or whatever
group you identify with and want to belong to has to be at the forefront of our lives.
There is no reason for us to defer our personal power and our sacred connection to whatever
ulterior realms you might experience either religiously or intellectually to subjugate
those connections in order to appeal to centralised cultural forces that it's become increasingly
clear do not care about us, that ultimately just want to marshal and wrangle us around
on the chessboard of their reality when it seems as I pointed out with the Bush and Obama
era that their affiliation with one another is far stronger with their affiliation with
any supposed distinct cultural group.
So perhaps the return of John Stewart will be a positive thing because it will show us
that authoritarianism and censorship are on the rise, that people have become blinkered
when it comes to their ability to criticise their own side and that most of all perhaps
when criticising elderly leaders of the only two parties that a person might vote for,
for us all to take a moment to observe, the system itself is in radical need of revision.
And whichever one of those parties you vote for, you're likely to end up with the same types of institution and the same type of challenges.
Well, that's just what I think!
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