Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show is a win for the craft, an enormous test for woke Millennials and may be the best chance of stopping Trump.
I have been an enormous Jon Stewart devotee ever since I first saw his criticism of Bush’s corrupt Iraq war.
His ability to critique the narrative and challenge it is unequaled in the TV genre.
Stewart is the Gen X God of political satire and his laser like argument brilliance has never been seen since.
The incredible jump in ratings from 300 000 to almost 2 million speaks volumes of how lost many Gen Xers have felt in terms of genuine cultural leadership.
His eviceration of Tucker’s bullshit Putin propaganda interview was evidence of a media intellectual at his peak.
I am Socialist Left as fuck and despise the American Military Industrial Complex, but I have never understood the spineless devotion of Putin apologists!
Putin is a fucking authoritarian thug whose unspeakable brutal violence marks him as a brutal dictator. His needless war with Ukraine is an abomination and he has assassinated anyone he likes.
Fuck Putin and fuck anyone defending him.
I don’t give a shit about the Donbas provocations, that doesn’t justify a war where he is minced up 370 000 of his own fucking men for a totally preventable war!
Don’t forget his naked contempt for the Gay community and his cruelty towards them either!
What possible redemption is there for Putin other than an immediate heart attack?
Stewart knows this and was brutal in his denunciation of Putin and Tucker.
Gen Xers loved being reminded what intelligence and broadcasting skills meant before social media.
Ironically his hilarious critique of how old Biden is was immediately attacked by the wokest Democrats on Twitter because snow flake triggered Millennials know only how to cancel someone and virtue signal minus the talent of persuasion.
That is what Jon Stewart actually represents, the talent of intellectual persuasion that dominated Gen X values. The Identity Politics virtue signalling cancel culture is fine for creating sharp pure temple factions that divide and exclude, when what is required is a shared agreement of the argument, which is what Jon Stewart can achieve.
In an American election year built upon radical identity and existential grievance, Jon Stewart’s ability to persuade minus the woke piousness could be the difference between Trump winning or not winning.
He is Gen Xs moment to step up between the Cultural Boomer Overlords and the self-absorbed Millennials.
God speed Mr Stewart.
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Nice to see Jon back.
This US Election is going to be even more of a shit show than usual. First Past the Post system which relegates third parties to a spoiler role, a bent Electoral College where Montana gets the same number of reps as California!, district gerrymandering and voter suppression are bad enough…
And this year there is Biden again, “Genocide Joe” in his current iteration. AOC would be a good President for new gens but she would never be acceptable to the DNC, and has been very quiet since the Jan 6 attack on Congress when she narrowly escaped death, scuttling from her office to another building. The audio is chilling…“where is she, where is she…” the fuckers that broke into her office were not there for a constituent meeting.
There is a huge non vote in the USA via alienated and excluded potential voters. Women’s votes will be vital with the Supreme Court Roe vs Wade decision which is not popular even in some Republican States, as will the new gen vote.
The corporate run Democrat DNC would not even tolerate Bernie Sanders–the best President the US never had, and his time has now passed. So if Jon Stewart assists all good.
meh. I don’t trust stewart OR fucking putin. I see a military industrial complex making money from human mince meat. That, is all I see.
I like watching Russell Brand because he’s smart enough to merely give us the facts then lets us, or rather encourages us to decide for ourselves what we’re reading, watching and seeing, what ever the fuck that is I suppose. The American military industrial complex is in Ukraine and Israel. The Palestinians and the Russians are not in the U$A. Is that a bias or am I mistaken?
“I like watching Russell Brand because he’s smart enough to merely give us the facts”
No he doesn’t. He is a master of JAQ – ing off. Not to mention he has absolutely no qualifications in anything much except comedy. He is the supreme manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect. And unfortunately Brandolini’s law. Not to mention he’s been credibly accused of sexual assault. He’s a nong.
Yes surgeon, Brand is a tosser, previously did some ok populist stuff on banking and finance capital but is essentially an egotist.
I think the Russian Military Industrial complex is in Ukraine as well. There’s certainly some dudes with guns and shit that crossed the border and started firing at people.
And Russell Brand is just an idiot that has tried to rebrand himself.
I don’t mind Rusty myself. Jon Stewart is just an establishment tool whom colours between the lines.
I think a lot of people on the left took an out of context remark Putin made in 2000 about the USSR and thought that he would be a literal communist who wanted to bring it all back. Personally I would put him in the same category as Franco, or Pinochet, though some commentators have used the term ‘Bonapartism’.
I’ll say this again, because I do live in hope that it will one day be published. There is no point in bitching about “woke and “identity politics” without knowing how and why they arose. It’s just lazy fucking journalism to throw around the term woke in particular – because it usually means – someone’s done something I don’t like. I think John Stewart would probably regard himself to a point at least, as woke. And identity politics have done some groups the world of good particularly in the area of civil rights, when conventional class-based politics have failed. You could use the union movement in the US as an example, given how conservative it was to the point of not allowing black people in many unions.
Not to mention that conservatives have weaponised both words. Whenever you ask THEM what it means they usually haven’t got a clue except they not pick some extremist lunatic and claim that all leftists are like that. You get a lot of that on Trotter’s blog to be honest, and it was one of the things that used to piss me off. Every time he mentions the word woke he gets the usual dribbling from the middle-class right-wingers on his site patronising him with faint praise. Maybe he laps it up I don’t know he’s gone funny lately.
As far as I understand it, good GS, ‘woke’ is a too insistent insistence on political correctness, to the extent of denying people who get it wrong. I’ve come across it on Twitter and among relatives.
If I never hear ‘woke’ and anti-feminism from Martyn again he and we would be the better for it
Spot on with your comments on the word ‘woke’ thanks Guerilla surgeon, this needs to be said and it’s just getting really annoying how it’s used as a term of abuse when in fact it’s been quite good for some groups as you point out, specifically black groups in the US and women generally.