If you were of college age back in the aughts, it was impossible to miss the late-night news parody show craze. Once Comedy Central’s saucy puppet shows went off air for the day, the syncopated sounds of smug one-liners punctuated with mindless laughter would filter from dorm rooms, cheap apartments, and coffee bars across America.
Come morning, you could count on your peers telling you all about how Bush was a genocidal menace and Fox News a brainwashing monopoly in the pocket of big business. In the same breath, they would dismiss the former as a braindead clown and the latter as a lame joke without noticing the contradiction. Which suggests where the real brainwashing was going on.
It was a masterstroke on the establishment’s part. Democrats and Republicans had spent the twentieth century arguing over economics. As dissident blogger the Z Man has pointed out, the fall of the Soviet Union dealt the Left an unexpected and devastating defeat. But while Republicans kept re-prosecuting the Cold War, Democrats pivoted to waging culture war.
The Leftist media’s invention of the late-night hypnojourno clown gave progressives a secret superweapon. The one-two punch of gags structured to alternate factoids and vapid quips with strategic pauses for consensus-manufacturing laughter; delivered by oily propagandists that would retreat inside a circus tent if pressed, mutated public discourse itself. Conservatives had won the economic debate on the facts. So the Left trained people not to think. The era of snark was upon us.
Managerial elite water carrier Jon Stewart was the mold from which all later hypnojournos were cast. His 2004 debate with Crossfire cohost Tucker Carlson still stands as an excellent primer on how the journalist-clown shtick worked. It went over everyone’s heads back then, but Stewart’s bait and switch is transparent in hindsight. He wasted no time on logic but launched into rapid-fire rhetoric designed to seize the moral high ground.
Stewart’s moral grandstanding cut through Carlson’s beep-boop Conservatarian defense like a snide laser through a stick of butter in a bow tie. The trouncing was so one-sided that Carlson lost his show while Stewart’s profile skyrocketed. Black Pigeon observes as much in his video retrospective on the landmark debate. He further examines how the hypnojourno clown tactic has aged and speculates on the implications of Stewart’s return to the Daily Show. Give it a watch:
Hat tip to author JD Cowan
The simplest explanation for Stewart’s return is that the Daily Show’s ratings have fallen off a cliff since his departure in 2015. Those who see a profit motive assume that Comedy Central is bringing him back to boost ad revenue.
It’s also worth considering Black Pigeon’s stance that Stewart is being pulled out of mothballs to help the regime fortify the 2024 election for democracy. That theory jibes with the show producers’ own statements. Maybe conditions on the ground have them worried that Trump could pull off a miraculous win. More likely, panic is setting in at the prospect of his loss making their vote fortification look too obvious. When Puppet Pal Joe shellacs Orange Man again, regime face men can point to Stewart’s triumphant return as having swung the election. That dodge’s plausibility will prove dubious, though.
Because another key factor everybody’s missing – as always – is the impact of Generation Y.
If Boomers are the Me Generation, Ys are the meh generation. As the last analog kids, they were raised by TV to value going along to get along as the highest virtue. The 1996 election was too early for Gen Y, whose oldest members were 17 at the time. In 2004, Ys were 15-25, with their party affiliation almost evenly split within the margin of error. That was the year of the infamous Crossfire debate and Stewart’s rise to thought leader status. Fast forward to 2012; Ys were 23-33. GOP support actually ticked up that year among voters aged 30-49. Support for Dems spiked among the 18-29 crowd, but that increase can be explained by an influx of Millennials.
In short, their Daily Show addiction changed the way Gen Y talked about politics, but it didn’t have a major effect on how they voted. If anything, the rise in divisiveness drove more Ys into the ranks of the independents or out of politics altogether. If you were around in that era, you’ll remember that media aimed at Gen Y audiences depicted above-it-all independents as the smart, hip camp – an affectation many Ys maintain to this day.
It’s poetic justice, in a way. Jon Stewart and his handlers set out to create a generation of NPCs programmed to vote for Democrats. Instead, they wound up with a generation of NPCs programmed to embrace edgy indifferentism. Those too cool for school Yilists of the 2010s were byblows of the late-night hypnojourno clowns.
But while Stewart’s resumption of chief TV propagandist duties is unlikely to sway many voters, the regime has proven itself shameless enough to pretend he will have anyway. No matter that most of his target audience get their news and political commentary online these days.
In the final analysis, Comedy Central’s stunt of pulling Stewart out of retirement is a positive development. Falling back on an old tactic that never had much of a tangible effect anyway smacks of desperation.
Of course, all this speculation could be rendered moot if the low party come through on the promise they made to Haley, Christie, et al. to remove Trump from contention. But if by some intervention of the Cosmic Trickster he stays on the ballot, not even the return of the original late-night hypnojourno clown will explain his loss to voters’ satisfaction.
And what follows may well justify our elites’ looming sense of dread.
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Coming from a family of liberal white people, I think Jon Stewart really popularized white self-hatred amongst Gen X and Y; particularly post-Trayvon and Michael Brown. My liberal sisters and cousins are basically suicidally anti-white to the point where they view the Great Replacement as a correction of a societal injustice.
The great joke being that Stewart doesn’t consider himself white.
The West has been on a shallow level of course of suicide since modernism began. In way, the Great Wars of the 20th century can be seen as something like that, a collective attempt at suicide. Hopefully we are at the bottom of the sentiment, as it’s pretty open and obvious right now.
“The Suicide of the West” by James Burnham was written in the early 1960’s. Highly recommend as read, as it’s an outline of how liberal thought is at core about the fall of civilization. As a post WWII book, it will not mention the issues of the Mr. Leibowitzes of the world. Burnham himself was a Trotskite as a young man and the subject was an open discussion in the 1920’s. It seems likely that he understood more than he felt he could get published. He does dabble in a surprising amount of race realism however. A Goldberg did publish a book with the same title a few years ago, but I haven’t bothered with it.
It isn’t that the Daily Show really convinced anyone to vote for anything. I would say it generally didn’t have any affect on that arena for very long. Their influence on policies and politics was miniscule. The true insidiousness of what it did was weaponize basic discourse, turning younger audiences (mostly Gen Y and Millennial, which is obvious in retrospect) into snark-filled irony poisoned bootlickers for the mainstream.
However, what ended up happening was because of how cordoned off and separated the internet was, different groups and organizations used the tactics he popularized through his show. The most famous of all of this was the Nu Atheist / skeptic movement. Go back and watch any of their material and they sound like segments on the Daily Show in how they treat religious people (almost entirely Christians) as less than human in between snark and dimwitted cultural commentary.
But if you’ve paid attention to even that sphere over the years, none of them even remotely believe the same things as each other, especially not these days, and very many of them aren’t even atheists anymore. Whatever lasting effect Jon Stewart had with his schtick is gone.
Also, when considering what Gen Y and Millennials are like these days, the snark has morphed to either general defeatism (ego death) or overwhelming neuroticism (anxiety) over not knowing how to process the knowledge that they were wrong. That is why converting to Christianity has been happening more and more among these age cohorts. Once one gets over themselves and admits they were wrong, they can finally embrace truth. Either that are they don the wig and change their name to become a favored regime class member again. It’s one or the other.
This is actually why I hate what Jon Stewart and his ilk did to discourse more than anything. A lot of people were completely broken and destroyed over this junk being pumped into their mind, and the only resistance were crusty boomers (and boomer wannabes) screaming about facts and logic while they continue passing the ball to the Harlem Globetrotters.
To usurp an old meme: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s that they let culture and community die and still have the gall to screech about bootstraps like none of the above madness over the last quarter century even happened. No one is going to fight for you to be able to ignore your neighbor and sneer at them for building a fence too high while your community is flooded with crime and suicide victims.
As for Stewart himself, his Apple+ show bombed and failed, much like all the regime puppets’ projects do these days. They will declare anything a success, but I doubt it matters anymore. That era is over.
What’s coming next should probably scare them more since they’re dealing with untethered generations who have no loyalty to anything. That chaos is going to be interesting to watch.
You’ve hit upon the real crux of the matter, here. Like I was saying on Twitter, something always bothered me about many of the YouTube personalities that came out of GG and 2016. I’ve dropped a lot of them since making the connection that they’re just Stewart/Colbert/Kimmel wannabes, minus an ethos, plus libertarian-flavored hedonism.
You are right that there are wide swathes of young aimless men with no prospects, no hope for the future, and no loyalties. There is a generation of men waiting for someone to pick up the crown from the gutter with his sword.
That man is not Jon Stewart or his ilk
Eloquently said.
There’s a saying that there’s no use in arguing with a fool. The left has weaponized that to an expert degree. The game some people play is expecting to debate and win people over with facts, it’s the game we are gaslit into thinking still exists. Instead it backfires because they wind up going to war with a pigeon who poops on the chessboard and struts around like it won (because it did).
So while the Right is debating the fools with “facts” expecting they’ll see the light of reason and abandon their causes, the fools they debate will continue unopposed because they’ll never be convinced to stop. Fools don’t care about facts and the Right still doesn’t understand that.
No one cares about facts anymore because who can trust something that has proven to be so easily manipulated a lied about? You know what doesn’t lie? A good joke or quip. That’s why we see people politically discourse through quips rather than facts. It’s not about what’s right, it’s about making your opponent look like a loser and a loser is a loser even if he’s right.
A.I.’s growing ability to fake photo, video, and even audio evidence that’s impossible for most people to tell from the real thing will accelerate public abandonment of fact to light speed.
Considering how useless Conservative dialectic has been, that might be for the best.
Jeff Hendricks talks a lot about going analog with minimal digital support. Technology (AI supported) may get so bad it implodes because people will be forced into the analog options again.
When AI is brought up at school, some worry about how they will maintain academic integrity for tests and papers. Other laugh because the solution is simple: pencil and paper, yet there is a reluctance to return to it. Perhaps out of necessity, if schools have to go back to pencil and paper, they will trim a lot of fat in the education process to spare them the inconveniences of not being digital. That I’d see is a win for everyone, students and faculty alike.
With art it’s a little trickier because most industrial art is digital. Some universities around the country address this by requiring a citation if AI is used at all, but given how inconsistent some AI detection software is, it’s difficult to enforce a policy like that. It’s more or less there to save face. The only option is for art school to embrace it fully and teach students how to integrate it into their workflow. The exceptions would be for students whose concentration is a more analog craft like sculpting, ceramics, (trad) painting. Don’t have to worry about AI touching those things.
It’s not like they’d have to abandon the digital realm entirely for pencil and paper. Scantrons (fill in the bubble) and OCR are still a thing. But then they’d have to teach the kids how to physically write again.
“When AI is brought up at school, some worry about how they will maintain academic integrity for tests and papers. Other laugh because the solution is simple: pencil and paper, yet there is a reluctance to return to it.”
I laugh harder when it comes to papers. Students have been getting other people to write their papers for them for decades (for pay or not.) Even before AI, it was very cheap for students to hire someone online to write a paper. The quality of the English was usually questionable, but since the quality of MOST student English is questionable it doesn’t really matter.
This highlights something about AI: it’s not so much that it’s causing problems in and of itself, but that it’s highlighting existing problems that no one wanted to talk about. Student cheating on tests and exams has been rampant for a while, but if we can pretend it started with AI, we don’t have to deal with it. Similarly mainstream book covers have looked like crap for at least a decade, with no market for artists because they’ll just make a collage of public domain images anyway (or maybe just straight up use a public domain image.) But if we can pretend that the trouble started when AI stole a vibrant market for book artists, we don’t have to worry about that. You can’t trust anything that AI says, because it lies regularly. But then again, official sources have lied to us for years, often in quite blatant ways. Etc., etc., etc.
I was watching one of Ross’s Game Dungeons and I started thinking about this. The problem is not just so much that the right argues “facts” over rhetoric, it’s that many of their facts aren’t. They’re just slogans.
What made me think of this was Ross getting frustrated at people saying “if you don’t own your games, then piracy can’t be illegal.” This is in response to game companies openly saying that you have no rights to your games. Ross’s point was that sure morally that might be true, but many new games haven’t been cracked, so even if you want to pirate them you can’t. Just saying “piracy is now legal” doesn’t change anything if you can’t pirate them in the first place. Similar tons of gamers say “I always buy physical, since then you own your games” even though most physical discs only install a program that needs to immediately update to run, and which is functionally identical to an online-only game at that point (even consoles do this.) But people keep saying these things, since they like the slogans too much to see if they apply anymore.
The equivalent for conservatives are things like “free trade always makes everyone wealthier,” “if you work hard you can pay your way through college, and then you’ll earn a high paying job,” “immigration is fine, as long as its legal,” etc. These things might have been true at one point, but they don’t match the current reality. Not that it matters, since the conservatives love the old memes too much to abandon them. The result of course is that they can’t even conserve ladies’s bathrooms.
I have been looking for your posts on there being two Wests, Protestant vs Catholic. Do you have the links on hand?
https://brianniemeier.com/2023/09/west-vs-west/
I used to watch Daily Show back in the day and have a strong memory of one of my professors bringing it up randomly during orientation and calling him “a genius”. The Obama years was when it got truly insufferable and was entirely about what horrible thing Tucker Carlson did last night. Did they even cover the prism leak or collateral murder? I remember the mood on the left at the time was, “so what Obama droned a hospital, nobody cares.”
Last year I looked up the net worth of his rather poor replacement Trevor Noah and was surprised to see it was $100 million. It really must pay to be an establishment mouthpiece.
Never forget that everyone you see on TV is a paid mercenary.