The week after releasing a more or less decent critique of the media’s “bulls***” and “jail-gasm” antics with the Mueller report in his The problem withJon Stewart was a waste of goodwill. With the next episode dedicated to “The Problem With White People,” Stewart and radical leftist guests (all of whom were white) engaged in a type of self-flagellation to score virtue points by suggesting all white people were at some level racist, even on the level of the KKK.
Stewart demonstrated a video before he brought on the panel. Saturday Night Live “comedian” Leslie Jones where she proclaimed “Racism is a spectrum”And asked viewers: “what degree of racist are you?”
According to this “spectrum,” racism ranged from skinheads and the KKK to “Lynyrd Skynyrd fans” and “[t]He women who believe Megyn McCain were bullied The View.” “That bitch didn’t get bullied, she ain’t get bullied,” Jones sneered.
She also suggested that even if you didn’t fall into one of her examples that meant you belonged in “the unconscious bias” category, or as she described it, “a catch-all for the rest of y’all.”
At the top of the panel discussion, La Salle University Professor Chip Gallagher warned that a “significant amount of white people” DON’T judge people by the color of their skin. “But they don’t in any way attach any meaning to the color in affecting life chances. And what that fundamentally means is that race doesn’t matter in getting ahead,” he said.
His assessment was that there was a danger. “[i]t makes white privilege invisible”This allows whites to feel that they are earning something. “[I]t also makes whites feel that whatever they did, whatever success they’ve had had nothing to do with 50, 100, 200 years ago,”He spoke in complete seriousness.
Lisa Bond from Race2Dinner, a group where whites talk about racism, followed suit with this nonsense. Lisa displayed a great display of self-flagellation as well virtue signaling, blaming herself for being racist. “white supremacy has done such a good job of teaching us as white people that racism is bad”:
You can also find them on Facebook. when we talk about racism, we’re talking about your character flaw. If we say your racist, that’s a character flaw. I’m bad. And I know I’m not bad. I think I’m a good person, I think I’m a nice person. And I’m a racist. And I know that I’m racist because I every single day uphold the systems and the structures of racism.
And if we don’t start having a conversation about that and about the ways we are complicit every day daily, if we don’t talk about it, then we are never going to see movement, ever.
Andrew Sullivan, a commentator, was the only one to make sense of the conversation. “I think it’s possibly the most absurd hyperbole I’ve ever heard,” he scoffed. Bond threw a fit of physical quirkiness as he described the experience as an immigrant. Sullivan praised America.
I come from – I’m an immigrant so I have a slightly different view of this. America is 2022 the greatest multiracial, multicultural and tolerant melting pot of all time. I know this because it is unlike any other country on Earth. That’s why 86 percent of our immigrants are non-white. Are you sure they don’t want to go to white supremacist countries?
Since this wasn’t the tone he wanted, Steward put words in Sullivan’s mouth and the whole discussion started to spiral. This continued for a few minutes and included Stewart suggesting Sullivan was a hardcore racist.
“This is what happens when white people don’t talk about it. You have racist dog whistle tropes like this that actually perpetuate and perpetuate and perpetuate,”Bond called out to Sullivan once. “That’s one of the reasons that we don’t even engage with white men at Race2Dinner,”She spoke highly of her company.
Now’s probably a good time to examine Bond’s organization. A profile of Bond can be found here New York magazine, Race2Dinner is “[a] collection of affluent white women, equipped with varying degrees of vanity and self-delusion…” Although the cost of one of these dinners wasn’t disclosed in the article, they did note that one of their eight-week seminars ran $750 and admitted Bond had “initially balked at the cost” of a dinner.
“I am 58 years old. I am not responsible for anyone before me,” Sullivan said to Bond as she proclaimed: “I’m shutting you down right now.” She then, to the roar of the radically liberal crowd, reduced every white person (including herself) to the level of someone in the KKK:
I’m going to put everybody in the thing. We all do this, even white people. I don’t care if we say we’re abolitionist. I don’t care if we say we’re progressive. I don’t care we are literally members of the KKK. These systems and structures are upheld by every white individual.It is something we must discuss.
Stewart spoke individually with Cory Booker (D–NJ) as well as Tim Scott (R–SC) in their highly-publicized interview segment. Stewart did, however, give Booker more time (4 minutes and 15 seconds) as compared to Scott (2 minutes and 49 seconds).
One of the conflict points in the panel discussion was Sullivan’s emphasis on education as a vector for improving conditions for individual black people and for the black community. Well, the look on Stewart’s when Scott said something similar said it all:
SCOTT: If you’re looking for a great equalizer, the closest thing to a panacea is understanding that education is the closest thing to magic in America. You can achieve almost everything if you have a solid education.
STEWART: Does it come down to convincing white Americas, that the investment really enriches all?
SCOTT: Jon, I don’t spend as much time on white versus black as you do.
START: This is where I spend the majority of my time.
SCOTT: You can see. But to me it’s eliminating the challenges so that everything starts off on a level playing field.