3043 Jon Stewart's Legacy: The Daily Show In Perspective #JonVoyage
In the sixteen years that Jon Stewart hosted "The Daily Show," the Comedy Central program has had an undeniable impact on our culture. On August 6th, 2015, Jon Stewart completed his final broadcast receiving praise from political figures Barack Obama, his contemporaries like Stephen Colbert and even brands like Arby’s. What can be said about the legacy of Jon Stewart? Did The Daily Show have any kind of lasting impact on the world?
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Mullen, you've been Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
It is with mixed feelings that I view the departure of Jon Stewart from the helm of The Daily Show, where he's hosted 2,600-odd episodes and been a regular fixture in the minds of young and budding socialists since the late 90s.
He's very funny, obviously.
I've learned a good deal from him about what it means to commit to a particular bit or comedy slice.
And I've really enjoyed his acerbic take on the powers that be.
I have not watched him for quite some time now, probably close to maybe half a decade.
I find that this sort of relentless partisanship and the left-leaning, I think he's a self-admitted socialist, though he does, and in many ways rightly so, criticize the Republican leadership for their socialist programs while claiming to be free market advocates.
They're all for socialist programs.
But I found that the sort of relentless partisanship is something that you kind of outgrow.
There's something about comedy that requires...
A very kind of black and white thinking, a lack of ambiguity.
So one of the things, and I hate to pull the A card, one of the things that happens when you get older is you realize that right answers in this world are very hard to come by.
And one of the reasons that I am not a fan of the left or of big government as a whole is that big government requires to me a kind of Narcissistic degree of certainty in your own solutions.
I'm not very good at telling other people how to live or what to do.
I know a few things they shouldn't do, kill, rape, maim, and so on.
But as to what they should do, well, I have a certain amount of reticence.
In fact, a great amount of reticence and rational humility in telling other people what to do.
Of course, on the left, they're very much about having government programs that tell people What to do?
And I don't know that it's even a good idea to give lots of money to the poor.
I don't know the answer.
I think it's having opportunity.
It's having better parenting.
It's having social support.
It's a combination of a lot of things.
But when you're on the left, you simply know for 100% fact that the best way to solve, for instance, the problem of poverty is for the government to take massive amounts of money from everyone they can get their hands on who has more than two pennies to rub together and then shovel it all over to the poor and Using government bureaucrats.
And anybody who thinks that that's not the best solution, according to the leftist mind, must just simply hate the poor and not care about the poor.
And for Jon Stewart, you know, this kind of comedy requires a massive amount of certainty.
There can be no doubt.
Which is why you see people on the left Not circling back to figure out why the $15 trillion that had been shoveled at the poor over the last couple of decades in America has not solved the problem of poverty.
They just keep complaining about more poverty and more income disparity and fewer opportunities.
Their solution to prior government programs is always more government programs, more spending on education, higher minimum wage, higher corporate taxes, like you name it.
It's just forever.
There's no circling back and saying, hmm, what were the promises we made originally?
Have they been achieved and why not?
So I got sort of tired.
I mean, however entertaining he is, and of course he's very funny, but I just, for myself, I got kind of tired of this Concern, troll, eye-rolling, and snarkiness, and...
Just cynical and sarcastic rejection of principles, particularly those on the right.
I'm not a Republican at all.
Neither am I a Democrat.
I guess you could put me under the checkbox of none of the above.
But it did get kind of wearying, in the same way that when you see right-wing media continually attacking the left, then it just gets kind of boring.
Now, of course, John Stewart's constituency...
I think the kind of college educated, probably a little bit smarter.
Now, young people are fairly easy to sell on government redistribution because they generally have been on the receiving end of that government redistribution.
Jon Stewart himself comes from a single mom household.
At least his parents, I think, separated when he was nine after his father, who was a physics professor, confessed to having an affair with his secretary.
Uh, and, uh, his parents separated, I think, but it's nine.
The divorce was finalized when he was 11.
And, uh, so, you know, if you're raised, this is very much a generalization, but I think there's some truth in it anyway, that when you're raised in female dominated households, you end up with, uh, feeling dominated, instinctual sarcasm rather than reason and evidence based analytical and critical.
Uh, You know the number of times where women say, don't say this true thing because it will upset someone.
In other words, feelings take primacy over facts.
Emotional often overreaction takes primacy over a critical and rational analysis.
And that's where the left, I think, kind of gets...
It's kind of like a matriarchy of mafils rather than somewhat of the critical and objective thinking that, you know, we've got this problem called poverty.
We've been trying to solve it for 50 years.
We've shoveled $15 trillion at the poor.
How are we doing?
And if we're not doing what we want, why not, right?
As opposed to, oh, you're critical of the welfare state.
You must hate the poor.
Right?
That's the level of...
Nonsense that goes on.
And of course, I think a lot of his audience, you know, his audience grew with the rise of kids from growing up in single mom households and single mom households in general and by and large are so incredibly dependent upon the state to survive.
You know, massive amounts of wealth transfer from responsible married couples or single men, largely men, who pay more taxes than women.
There's a huge transfer to single mom households.
So single moms vote overwhelmingly for leftist redistributionist policies, of course.
And so guys growing up in single mom households tend to skew left because that's how their families survived.
And I include things like, you know, the quote free education that goes on for kids.
Single moms can't afford private school.
They rely on government education almost exclusively.
It's pretty easy to sell single mom kids on the virtues of the state since they perceive that that's what allowed them to survive, plus the state probably enforced alimony and child support and all that kind of stuff.
So, you know, the old don't bite the hand that feeds you, I think, is pretty strong in that, which is why people uncritically, when they're young, accept so often this redistributionist income stuff.
I mean, there's a great...
Dilbert cartoon where everyone's like, ooh, the intern is opening his first adult paycheck.
Let's everyone gather around and watch his heart break as he realized what a tiny slice of the pie he's left over with.
And I remember, too, I got my first professional job as a COBOL programmer.
I got $40,000 a year, and I was just out of graduate school, and I was like, wow!
I'm going to be taking baths in liquid gold.
And then you get your paycheck and it's like, okay, there must be some kind of mistake because I'm only getting a portion.
And of course, up in Canada, it's not a very large portion of that which I was officially promised, right?
Because income tax and pension plan deductions, unemployment insurance deductions, and just because we can deductions and you're not left with a whole lot left over.
And then you go and buy stuff and you pay tax on that too.
And it just goes on and on and on.
You probably live in Canada On 30 to 40% of your gross paycheck if you're lucky.
So, yeah, it's a little bit different when you're on the paying side than when you're on the receiving line.
But when you're young, right, you've gone through government schools, your family's probably been supported by a lot of government help, and then you're going to go and borrow loans subsidized or backed up by the government in order to go to schools, colleges where you're going to be indoctrinated about how great government is and how evil the free market is and all that.
So you're just kind of receptive.
To all of that stuff.
And I think it's pretty harmful, though.
We grow, like muscles grow with resistance, right?
You strengthen with resistance.
And I'm concerned that Jon Stewart, what I got bored of was Jon Stewart just never really brought that many challenging people and arguments to the audience.
To be fair, you know, we had Ron Paul and Judge Napolitano one and other people We're good to go.
is a form of selling the unborn into economic slavery.
They're really serious moral issues at the basis of our current system.
All the politicians, with very few exceptions, that you get to vote for have already been bought and paid for by special interests who tend to donate equally to the liberals and the conservatives or the Republicans and Democrats in America already.
Massive problems with our existing system.
Massive moral problems.
Of course, Jon Stewart didn't bring really any of that to bear.
He just brought this treacly kind of Of sympathy to everybody who was, quote, an underdog and helpless and so on.
And I think that kind of sympathy is not that helpful for people who are on the downswing in life who have started off hard.
I think having high standards, expecting everyone to meet them is a pretty good way of getting the best out of people.
But he didn't really do much of that at all.
And he was also, you know, pretty disingenuous, right?
So...
The studies have been shown, and we'll put links to these below the video, but studies have been shown pretty clearly that show that, first of all, he had, like, triple the number of liberal viewers as conservative viewers, whereas there are, in fact, more conservative viewers than liberal viewers of a lot of the mainstream media outlets.
So he very much skewed to the left, and he was very much aware of that.
And his viewers were actually less well-informed than just about any other group you could think of outside of, say, people lined up next to Walt Disney in cryogenic freeze chambers, They were very uninformed.
So he really wasn't doing a good job of informing people at all.
He did a good job of making fun of people, and he actually went for a friend of mine, Peter Schiff, in a way that I thought was pretty unconscionable, but I did a whole show on the radio about that, which, again, we can put a link to below.
So I just think this relentless making fun of people, this relentless anybody who wants to assign responsibility to Whoever the left considers to be a protected underclass must automatically be a mean, bad, evil guy.
His relentless railing against Fox, you know, Fox does represent, like it or not, does represent a significant portion of American viewership, as does the right-wing radio that is very popular, the Hannity's and the Beck's and the Limbaugh's and so on.
That is a big constituency in America, and just attacking those people relentlessly without trying to understand where their viewpoints are coming from is...
Well, it turns Jon Stewart into what he accused Tucker Carlson and some other guy on Crossfire in 2004 of being a partisan hack, of not giving intelligence and respect to other people's viewpoints.
However, you may disagree with them, but having it out rather than just rolling your eyes, doing all this console and troll snarkiness and all that kind of crap.
I mean, that's just junkie.
Now, of course, when he went for the Crossfire guys, you're You're hurting America!
That's such a girly argument.
I mean, good lord, I'm sure the Japanese schoolgirl anime have more robust intellectual spines than Jon Stewart on a crying fit, but you're hurting America, really.
But for him to say, because they came back and said, well, listen, you had John Kerry on.
You didn't ask him any tough questions at all.
What the hell are you talking about us being partisan for?
And Jon Stewart's response is, well, you know, the people who come on before me are puppets making crank calls, so I'm just a comedian.
Right, so any time Jon Stewart was criticized using the same standards he held other people to, he'd generally retreat behind this, I'm just a goofy clown stuff.
But, of course, that's ridiculous, and anybody with half a brain knows that's ridiculous, because I'm pretty sure, I haven't checked, I'm sure enough to not check, that the...
The clowns making Crank Calls show did not have people like Bob Dole and John Kerry and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on the show.
So when you're interviewing those heavy hitters in the realm of American politics and you're asking them questions, then saying, well, I'm just a goofy clown is just ridiculous.
So that was a very cowardly way, I think, of trying to deflect legitimate criticism against his partisanship.
And I think that was just kind of lazy and boring.
And, you know, however entertaining someone is, if they just keep saying the same stuff over again with different joke spins on it, it just does get kind of boring and kind of repetitive.
So, yeah, I mean, he was basically, as he's been called, I think it's quite true, the face of progressivism in America, which is basically there's no social problem so complex and challenging that massive amounts of government force, power, counterfeiting, borrowing and printing of money can't solve.
That driving engine behind the endless expansion of government, this goal that the progressives had, starting from the Fabian socialists at the early 20th century under Webb and George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells a little later, this goal of turning a free market,
limited Republican democracy America into just another version of America with massive welfare states and hyper-regulation and so on, It has been, in general, a complete disaster.
I mean, studies have shown pretty conclusively that if the only thing that had changed in America was government regulations had remained at the levels they were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American GDP would be $53 trillion a year now.
$53 trillion a year, almost four times higher than it is.
If incomes were four times higher than they are right now, would we have enough money to help the poor in terms of charity?
Of course we would.
Would we have enough money to have everybody be sent to great private schools if that's what they wanted?
Of course we would.
So this idea that we're just going to shovel money back and forth, which is basically just buying votes, of course, not anything to do with helping people, it's just people dependent on the government, vote for more government.
No kidding, right?
It's just a complete disaster, but on the left, they can't process that or process any foundational criticism to that.
So in the end, I think the best way to characterize He was a political hack and a political operative.
Keeping people reliably lined up at the Democrat trough and scaring away anyone who dared question the value of massive government intervention for the sake of alleviating social problems, scaring everyone else with his giant megaphone of character-shredding snark And tragically, that's what has turned in.
You see people in the world, and particularly on the internet, who just like eye-roll, rolling on the floor, laughing out loud, L-O-L-O-L-O. These are just people attempting to ride that bandwagon, that snark, and eye-rolling is some sort of argument.
