In a lengthy episode for The Daily Show, Jon Stewart waded through the sheer slog of violence over the weekend, including Israel’s strike against Iran and the shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers.
“But let me just say this to start off: F—! Just to start off,” the host began. “This weekend — terrible! Again. I’m so sorry.”
Addressing the wildly differing responses by ultra-right-wing pundits against U.S. involvement in the Middle East and pro the “invasion” of Los Angeles in the wake of (largely mild) anti-ICE protests, Stewart noted, “The only problem with their posture — that I see with it — is their reluctance to commit the American military to fighting drawn-out and often pointless wars doesn’t seem to extend to America.”
He added, “The MAGA mindset appears to be: We didn’t vote for foreign wars, we voted for civil war.”
“They are looking for any pretense to sic their robot dogs on Democrats, and the strategy that they’re using is to inflate the threat that this country now faces, to so rile up their base as to make the left in this country — represented by over 75 million votes in the past presidential election — as a legitimate military target for the United States of America. It’s a strategy that’s been used before to gin up military conflict,” Steward continued.
The show then played clips of the likes of George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and John McCain using militarized language to justify the Iraq War, which a majority of Americans now view as a mistake, and their eerie similarity to those currently advocating for the “liberation” of L.A.
“We must invade Los Angeles. We cannot have the world’s most dangerous people, eating the world’s most delicious tacos,” he said in faux-seriousness.
In the middle of the segment, Stewart proceeded to “break form” by taking an intermission. He pulled out a lunchbox, unveiling the standard fare of a sandwich and bag of chips — and six miniature bottles of alcohol, one of which he hastily chugged and spit back out. After two seconds of mini stretches, the host packed up his half-eaten lunch and got back down to brass tacks.
While making a point about the disproportionate response by the GOP against crimes by undocumented immigrants versus homegrown gun violence, Stewart took a minute to list out the recent mass shootings that have left their indelible mark on U.S. history.
“Violence should never be accepted, it should never be tolerated — but that’s for their issue,” he said. “In the wake of Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and Parkland, and El Paso, and Lewiston, and Aurora, and Buffalo, and Boulder, and Binghamton, and Highland Park, and Monterey Park, and San Bernardino, and San Jose, and San Francisco, and the Pulse nightclub, and the Colorado Springs nightclub, and the Little Rock nightclub, and the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, and the Ned Peppers Bar in Dayton, and the Waffle House in Nashville, and Virginia Tech, and UVA, and MSU, and UCSB, and FSU, and NIU, and SMC, and the Sutherland Springs Church, and the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the Living Church of God, and the Tree of Life Synagogue, and the Allen Mall, and the Westroads Mall, and Fort Hood, and Lockheed Martin, and — what are we f—ing doing? What are we doing? By the way, that is a wildly incomplete list. We kept it to the last 25 years, and it’s still not everything.”
He concluded, “Why is it when a foreigner, or someone that shouldn’t be here, kills one of us, we’re gonna put $150 billion into border security, we’re gonna militarize our cities, we’re gonna spend trillions to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we’re gonna ban people from random countries from ever f—ing visiting here, we’re gonna take our shoes off at the airport forever — but when we do it to ourselves, nothing? Is it that the only acceptable deaths are those that are made in America? Our only response now is to tally-up the psycho scoreboard on whose side the perp belongs to?”
Watch the full episode below: