Jon Stewart devoted the entire opening segment of Monday’s “The Daily Show” to the subject of “cancel culture” and how very real campaigns of censorship and suppression of speech exist.
In a twist from the usual way whining on this topic tends to go in comedy, Stewart didn’t rage against purported left-wing cancel campaigns against conservative freedoms. Instead, while he showed multiple instances of right-wing commentators complaining about it, he pointed out how there aren’t really any examples of conservatives actually being “canceled” like that.
And then Stewart pointed to actual instances where people have been canceled — all of which involved conservatives who criticized Donald Trump. “Trump is the real cancel culture,” Stewart declared.
Watch the whole clip in the video above now.
Stewart got into this topic by bringing up Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, a conservative Catholic who gave a commencement speech at a conservative Catholic university over the weekend. Stewart noted that his speech has been widely reported on and mocked for being really sexist.
But other than that, Stewart demonstrated, nothing else has happened. His job isn’t in danger, he’s still invited to the White House alongside his teammates to celebrate their Super Bowl victory. “All that’s really happened is some people roasted him on TikTok. So I guess this is just kind of a passing distraction. Or if you happen to tune into more conservative media …”
At this, “The Daily Show” cued up a supercut of various right-wing media figures insisting, without any evidence, that Butker has been the victim of some kind of massive censorship effort and the center of a major national controversy.
“My question to the right, I guess, is have you ever been on the internet before? Because that’s all it is. It’s just people giving each other s–t all the time. I mean, my God, you’re all so thin-skinned,” Stewart said. “Jerry Seinfeld took more s–t over the past two weeks promoting a Pop Tart movie than Harrison Butker did for his entire speech.
“And I ask you people,” Stewart said with a pause, then added, nodding to the popular impression of Seinfeld, “what is the deal with that?”
“Of course, nothing about the right-wing reaction is surprising. Because the idea that there is an all-pervasive, all-powerful threat to free speech called ‘cancel culture’ has become a central tenet of modern conservatives,” Stewart continued.
“They celebrate their being silenced at conferences. They celebrate their being silenced on podcasts and streaming outlets. They celebrate their being silenced with over 700 book titles about being canceled.”
“Conservatives have an entire industry devoted to complaining about not being allowed to say the things they say all the time. Their victimhood is the entire brand,” Stewart added, cueing up another supercut of right wingers doing just that.
“But this is their identity now: constant victimization. They say what they want, and if you get upset about it, you don’t believe in freedom,” the host continued. He then played a clip of Sean Hannity claiming not to be the kind of person who gets outraged over anything, something he said plagues the left.
Stewart rebutted this immediately, mocking in particular how Hannity was outraged over Bud Light for a sponsorship deal with a trans influencer. “They’re so full of s–t that Sean Hannity can say with a square head, ‘I’m not the kind of guy who gets outraged.’ Sean Hannity? He’s basically just a meat bag support system for a forehead vein.”
Stewart conceded that “it is absolutely true that in our modern social media driven-society, our interactions are incentivized and monetized for outrage and it is exhausting for everyone. But contrary to your conservative book industry, the outrage isn’t just coming from the left. It’s coming from the left, the right, for the right, for the left and the Swifties and YA readers, and anybody who dares to lift their head up to say anything.”
“We are not censored or silenced,” Stewart argued. “We are surrounded by and inundated with more speech that has ever existed in the history of communication. And it is all weaponized by professional outrage hunters of all stripes scouring the globe for graduation speech snippets, offhand comments during promotional tours, out of context comedy bits, lame marketing ideas or any words and phrases they believe they can latch onto to generate monetized clicks. Outrage is the engine of our modern media economy. And sometimes someone loses a job or something else happens like that that should never happen.”
“But contrary to conservatives’ victimization complex, there is no organized cancel culture conspiracy, where even the slightest misstep can 100% get someone on the right canceled,” Stewart said, pausing before he continued, “but actually there is one.”
Stewart showed news footage about how Liz Cheney was drummed out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government, prompting Stewart to say, “It turns out that when it comes to cancel culture, the ones who smelt it, dealt it.”
“There is someone canceling people on the right. The only one canceling people on the right is Donald Trump. And anyone who dares speak out against him, refuse to buy into Trump’s stolen election claims, and you’ll lose your job like Liz Cheney or countless others. In fact, everything the right says cancel culture does to them is actually being done by MAGA,” he said.
After listing numerous other examples, Stewart concluded, “Truth is, Trump is the real cancel culture, emphasis on cult, because on the right you can say whatever you want about gay people and trans people from TikTok to Patreon. You can decry DEI from podcasts to, I don’t know, the Governor’s Office of Florida. And chances are not only will you be fine, you’ll get a raise. But if you ever dare speak out one iota against Donald Trump, be afraid.”
