He’s become the very thing he once despised.
Stewart seemed like the leader of a Maoist struggle session.
LEFT IN THE LURCH, THE WOKE ASSAULT ON LIBERALISM BY GRAHAM DASELER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 101
In 2004 an episode of CNN’s Crossfire went viral after Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, tore into the co-hosts of Crossfire Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, claiming they were partisan hacks manufacturing mindless spin in lieu of intelligent conversation. He said that calling Crossfire a debate show was “like saying pro-wrestling is about athletic competition”. Neither Carlson nor Begala managed to muster more than a sputtering defense of their program and Crossfire was cancelled three months later.
I was reminded of this kerfuffle when Stewart hosted an episode of his show on AppleTV earlier this year called “The Problem with White People”. In his opening monologue he claimed that white Americans had refused to talk about race until the death of George Floyd, that the country had done little to ease the suffering of black people since 1619, and that reparations were a taboo topic in American society.
This would come as news to the millions of African Americans whose lives were immeasurably improved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and anyone who read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” which New York University named “The Top Work of Journalism of the Decade”.
When it came time for the panel discussion, Stewart and two of his guests, Charles Gallagher and Lisa Bond, pilloried columnist Andrew Sullivan for not agreeing that the United states is an absolute hellscape for black people. Sullivan didn’t deny that racism is real or that it’s wrong. But he refused to call America a white-supremacist nation.
He might have pointed out that the instances of structural racism that Stewart cited—the New Deal, the GI Bill, and redlining—are not examples of present-day racism. Nor are they particularly good examples of past racism either.
As the historian Touré F Reed points out the New Deal and the GI Bill were actually quite beneficial for African Americans. Though blacks were 10 per cent of the US population during the Great Depression they accounted for 20 per cent of all people receiving welfare payments, as well as thousands of jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration.
Stewart seemed, as Sullivan later said, like the leader of a Maoist struggle session. After a particularly sententious spiel by Bond, Stewart practically shouted amen: “If I could finger snap, I would finger snap right now.”
Except for a vague reference to a Marshall Plan for black people, no solutions were broached. Nothing to do with poverty, nothing to do with education, nothing to do with the high rates of homicide in African American neighborhoods. Zilch.
Shows of this sort are a dime a dozen, but Stewart’s transmogrification from gadfly into gasbag feels emblematic.