Jon Stewart is getting a ton of criticism this week – but this time it has nothing to do with COVID conspiracy theories.
The Daily Show host recently appeared at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival and spoke with editor David Remnick. During the talk, Stewart defended his 2020 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “I enjoyed being on Rogan,” he claimed, calling the controversial podcaster a “curious comic who fell into this thing that got fucking enormous” and pointing out that he “has opinions all over the political spectrum.”
When Remnick argued that Rogan has had “Nazi curious” guests on the show, Stewart again defended the former Fear Factor star. “I’ve interviewed Kissinger, and he was carpet bomb curious, I don’t know what to say,” he argued.
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Of course, the big problem with Rogan is that he frequently allows guests to spout hateful and dangerous rhetoric to a mass audience without challenging it. Stewart, again, took issue with the idea that comedians should avoid platforming right wingers because “there’s no one in this world right now that isn’t platformed.”
In addition to his recent controversial interview with former Fox News host and sexual harassment lawsuit collector Bill O’Reilly, Stewart pointed out that he also agreed to talk with one of the architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2011. “I interviewed Donald Rumsfeld. I lost more sleep over that interview than he did over the entire fucking war,” Stewart stressed. “And do you know what he did afterwards? He wrote me a note saying ‘That was fun.’ Do you have any idea how much that still hurts? He wrote ‘That was fun, I bet if we had known each other when we were younger we would have been friends.’”
The fact that Stewart still seemingly regrets the overly-chummy interview with the late alleged war criminal is perhaps a good example of why TV shows giving airtime to terrible people is actually a bad thing, no? Still, Stewart continued to defend interviewing problematic guests, and dragged his family members into the conversation.
“I love a good argument, I love differing points of view in all facets of things,” he told Remnick. “But I also love grace. I’ve got people in my family who are to the right of Atilla the Hun. And when people tell me like, ‘How can you platform that person on your show?’ I go, ‘I platform my uncle every fucking Thanksgiving.’”
“And by the way, I love him,” Stewart added. “He’s a three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire… And we’ve lost that. We’ve lost the ability to love people because we litmus test at every point at every single moment.”
A clip from this portion of the interview soon made the rounds on social media, with users pointing out that speaking to an uncle at Thanksgiving isn’t remotely the same as hosting someone on a television show, and thus isn’t “platforming” at all. Also, Stewart’s “fascist uncle” isn’t the one who needs our empathy and protection in 2025. The political “litmus test” he’s complaining about isn’t about shaming family members during turkey time, it’s about whether or not the people in your life support basic human rights.
These have to be the worst reviews Jon Stewart has gotten since Death to Smoochy.
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