The Problem with Jon Stewart

...and Other Woke Progressives

Note from Bernie: Today’s column is a complimentary one. To read most of my columns (and get my weekly audio commentaries and Q&As), you must be a paying member. If you’re not already a paying member, please consider upgrading.

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Jon Stewart has a show on Apple TV called “The Problem With Jon Stewart.” I can think of several problems with Jon Stewart but for now let’s discuss a recent episode of his show, which went by the name: “The Problem With White People.”

The premise of the show was as simple as it was shallow: America is a racist country and always has been; that white people, whether they admit it or not, whether they even know it or not, are either racists or at absolute least are co-conspirators in that they have white privilege; and because of that they enable racism every single minute of every single day in this country.

None of this, in case you were wondering, is considered controversial as far as the progressive elite are concerned. Rather, it's considered obvious, uncomplicated truth -- not open to any real debate.

And because racism, they said, is a white problem … all the guests on the show were white.

In fact, one of those guests, a woman named Lisa Bond actually said that, “I don’t care if we say we’re abolitionists. I don’t care if we say we’re progressive. I don’t care if we are literally members of the KKK. Every single white person upholds these systems and structures of white supremacy and we have got to talk about it.”

This is how crazy it’s gotten in woke America 2022, a place where there’s no difference between an abolitionist fighting to free the slaves and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. They’re all the same. They’re equally bad. They’re white and therefore they’re racists.

While Stewart, Bond, and a white college professor all agreed that America is systemically racist – and while Stewart’s studio audience guffawed at his every smirk, lame joke, and incoherent comment -- there was one white guest, Andrew Sullivan, the writer and editor, who was the only one who offered a more reasoned, less knee-jerk take on the subject.

“America in 2022 is the most multiracial, multicultural, tolerant, diverse melting pot that has ever existed on planet Earth, and there is no other place on Earth even like it,” he said. “That's why 86 percent of our immigrants are non-white. Do you think they want to come to a white supremacist country?"

No answer on that. And at one point, Lisa Bond, had had enough of Andrew Sullivan and so she simply dismissed him saying, “I did not come on this show to sit here and argue with another white man. That’s one of the reasons that we don’t even engage white men at Race2Dinner.”

And what, you ask, is Race2Dinner? Well, it’s business where well-off white women – only women, no men allowed -- sit down for dinner and pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of being told what a bunch of racists they are.

“Race2Dinner experiences include two hours with Regina Jackson [a black woman] and Saira Rao [an Indian American woman] for 8 white women,” the business’ website says. “Participants also receive pre-dinner support and post-dinner consulting with our Resident White Woman, Lisa Bond.”

The white women are asked questions such as, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” And yes, in case you somehow missed it the first time … they pay money for this!

The New York Post got wind of the business and after the paper's editors stopped laughing, they ran a headline that read, “White Women Paying $2.5K for a Dinner to Learn How They’re Racist.” The publicity helped Jackson and Rao get a book deal to write – no fooling -- “White Women: Everything you Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better.” And New York magazine says they got so many inquiries about their business that they “raised the fee for each dinner to $5,000.”

After Stewart and his woke guests tried to turn Andrew Sullivan into a piñata he wrote about what he called his “ghastly experience” in his blog, “The Weekly Dish.”

“This view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others.”

Sullivan isn’t some dunce who denies the ugly history of racism in America. “I’m just saying any explanation for racial disparities today is much more complex than simply intoning ‘white supremacy,’” he writes.

“When I tried to explain that I immigrated in 1984 [from England] and that a white man in 2022 cannot possibly be held responsible for something that happened four centuries ago, [Lisa Bond] replied: ‘I’m going to shut you down.’”

And Jon Stewart wasn’t impressed with anything Sullivan had to say either, so he told him that, “You’re not living on the same f***ing planet as we are.”

That’s about the only thing Jon Stewart said in the entire show that was accurate. Except not in the way he meant it.  Stewart is so insulated inside his comfortable progressive bubble, where everybody thinks the same way about race and all sorts of other issues, that it never crossed his mind that he might be the one who doesn’t inhabit the same planet as most Americans, especially the sane ones who live between Manhattan and Malibu

“I think you are not living on the planet most Americans are,” Sullivan says of Jon Stewart, “which is why this kind of extremism, this anti-white extremism is losing popular support, is creating a backlash, is gonna elect Republicans and undo a lot of the good you think you’re doing.”

One can only hope he’s right.

“How painfully, cringingly super-woke must a comedian get to stay relevant?” That’s the headline over Andrew Sullivan’s essay about Jon Stewart and his “The Problem With White People” show. It’s a good question, one that Stewart and his woke guests might want to consider before they say dopey things like there’s no difference between abolitionists and the Ku Klux Klan.

If Republicans were smart, they’d turn “The Problem with White People” into a 2022 midterm election campaign ad. You think Democrats have a problem now. Just wait till America sees that!

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