Jon Stewart goes "old school Daily Show gotcha" on free speech

One of the reasons shows like The Daily Show are so important right now is that they offer a bit of catharsis. Sure, all the world’s bad guys never seem to face consequences for their actions, but at least, for a half hour, viewers can listen to someone who isn’t going out of their way to lie to them about what’s happening. In a country rife with incompetence and misinformation, where the Secretary of Defense unknowingly adds the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a war planning group chat, just hearing the truth in plain speech can feel like manna from heaven. But even The Daily Show has to give in to its better impulses and avoid what Pete Buttigieg called “the highest level fuckup imaginable” to focus on the hypocrisy of the Republican “defense” of free speech. Jon Stewart promised to go “old school Daily Show gotcha,” zeroing in on the hypocrisies of the Trump administration’s backward version of free speech and broke down why social media is not and never has been the bastion of free speech its billionaire owners want us to believe it is.

We’ve been hearing it from conservatives for years: There’s an assault on free speech from the Left. They’re policing our language, forcing people to say “Latinx” at gunpoint, and threatening hard-working Americans with cancellation for saying a hateful slur—even if it’s in the context of a really funny joke! But now that President Trump has restored free speech, we can say all the slurs we want, and no one can cancel us. All that needs to happen first is the government needs to purge the words “women,” “POC,” and “sex” from official documents, bar news organizations from the White House for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America,” and deport students for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. Isn’t it nice that comedy is legal again?