Breaking Faith: When Liberals Realize They've Been Useful Idiots
It is no exaggeration to say that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are the most influential opinion shapers of the hip North American generations under 50. First Stewart and then Colbert inherited the prime late-night legacy of Johnny Carson and David Letterman (when he was funny).
But Stewart and Colbert were not doing Art Fern or Karnak in their time slot. Instead they used their pulpit to normalize the Woke revolution grown in their college base. Where once they made jokes now they made class dialectics. By demonizing conservative and even liberal thought in America— and excusing excesses by the radical left— they paved the way for Trump Derangement Syndrome and the acceptance of BLM/ CRT.
They epitomized the smug SJW sanctimony of the “resistance:” cohort stunned by Trump’s 2016 win. The two men met again last week as Stewart was the first in-person guest on Colbert’s show since Covid-19 shut down the Ed Sullivan Theatre. What transpired was seismic in terms of the progressive thought police.
Stewart broke with the Woke narrative on Covid’s emergence from the Wuhan lab. Ever since Trump opined that the virus had escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan it was a reflexive article of progressive faith that no, it had instead come from a wet market in that city. Or something something. Just not anything Trump said.
Yet here was Stewart mocking the loyalty oath. "This is not a conspiracy," Stewart said about the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. "The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!… There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, what do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean. Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory!”
He rolled on. ”I will say this -- and I honestly mean this -- I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science. This is the problem with science. Science is incredible, but they don’t know when to stop, and no one in the room with those cats ever goes, ‘I don’t know if we should do that.’ They’re like, 'curiosity killed the cat, so let’s kill 10,000 cats to find out why’.”
This was the late-night version of the Two Popes, with Francis and Benedict debating the catechism. The reaction has been seismic. “Stewart is weirdly anti-science” is one of the milder rebukes. Don’t believe us? Watch as Colbert’s head explodes when Stewart does his heresy on the virus. Colbert’s only retort is a stammering, “When did you start working for (Wisconsin GOP senator) Ron Johnson?”
”It's tone-deaf to the collateral damage that it has on scientists and the scientific community,” blustered one medical cultist. Late Show slappies online immediately decided Stewart must have been sarcastic. The Great One could never let us down!
No. He was serious. Stewart’s sudden scepticism echoes the broadsides against Woke World from another lefty darling, Bill Maher. Here is Maher railing against “Progress-aphobia” and the epic historic ignorance of the late show cult— even as Chief Slappy Rob Reiner looks on. It’s “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress. It’s like situational blindness, only what you can’t see is that your dorm in 2021 is better than the South before the Civil War.”
So what does this say about the post-Trump left and its even more devoted acolytes in Canada? In a time when unbelievers are crushed by Google, Facebook, Twitter and the howler monkeys of social media, why are Stewart or Maher allowed to mouth heresies?
Could it be that, with Trump muzzled and Biden/ Kamala floundering, these aging liberals now realize they’ve lost control of their fellow travellers in the Democratic Party? Have they become useful idiots to the radicals? Having allowed the incursion of CRT, BLM, antifa, deranged Hollywood, the Squad, climate fanatics and others too numerous to mention so long as they wounded #OrangeManBad is there suddenly a realization that they can no longer assert Boomer privilege?
That the civil liberties crushed in the Covid-19 panic created by their health bureaucrats might not be coming back? For sure, this is not the Bill Clinton Democratic alliance— even if his poisonous wife Hillary pretends otherwise. If AOC and the nightly rioters in Portland now call the shots, where is the room for hipsters who grew up watching Carson?
Stewart and Maher are well-read enough to remember that, when the liberals who had devotedly served the 1917 Russian Revolution were of no use to him, Stalin had them all shot. Ditto Mao in the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot in Cambodia etc. with their supposed comrades. The landscape the MSNBC/ CNN loyalists are seeing is rapidly less about Pete Seeger politics and simply about the uses of power, something Stalin exploited too well for 35 years.
It might also be that liberal Jews like Stewart have noticed the virulent antisemitism of the new Left. While they’ve long supported Democrats even when it went against their interests, Jews have seen the steady creep of antisemitic policies in BLM and the mouth-breathing antifa nihilists of “defund the police”.
The recent flare-up in Gaza has re-ignited the hate brigade in the Democratic caucus. Party luminaries are flocking to the thugs who run the endless intifada. If Jon Stewart and like-minded libs don’t see it as a threat they should. It’s no joke. Johnny Carson could tell you that.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx