Jon Stewart is a comedian, but he's also a master manipulator. In this episode of his new show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, we take a look at the tactics he uses to get his point across, and why it's so effective.
00:01:46.920And we're going to break down how they do it, what kind of language they're using, what kind of rhetoric they're using, and how we can identify these tactics, understand why they're using the different approaches
00:02:00.440that they're using when they're using when they're talking about this issue.
00:02:02.900Now, you probably have seen a clip of this.
00:02:06.160This is the interview that Jon Stewart did last week.
00:02:10.840It went kind of viral a little bit that everyone was talking about.
00:02:16.860A lot of progressives thought this was an amazing display.
00:02:20.260This is Jon Stewart just dunking on people, destroying people, wrecking some dumb chud from the middle of nowhere, a Republican who didn't know he was talking about, just a masterful cross-examination showing Jon Stewart's brilliance.
00:02:36.040On the other side, you had people on the right saying, look, this guy obviously pivoted, this guy obviously avoided the stuff that he was supposed to be talking about, he was using a lot of deceit in this.
00:02:47.340And so I kind of wanted to go over it because I think there's a lot of really interesting points in this that we can kind of pick apart, we can break down the game film, and we can understand the way that Jon Stewart does this.
00:02:57.780Now, before we get into it, a couple things here.
00:02:59.660First, Jon Stewart is really famous at this point for this clown nose on, clown nose off tactic, right?
00:03:08.140You know, I like a lot of people when I was young, I was in high school when Jon Stewart kind of started to get big with The Daily Show.
00:03:15.420I remember him making fun of the Bush-Gore election where Bush appealed to the Legion of Doom and Al Gore had to appeal the decision to, you know, the Hall of Justice or whatever, the Super Friends.
00:03:26.620And, you know, I understood that he was kind of biased at the time, but it was still funny.
00:03:32.100It was the beginning of this edutainment type stuff that we see so much today where people kind of represent themselves as half comedians, half news presenters, half journalists type scenario.
00:03:45.540I understand I just listed three things there, so it should probably be in thirds, but you know where I'm going with this.
00:03:49.760And so Stewart is really famous for playing this game where he'll talk about all the important things.
00:03:56.420He'll talk about very serious subjects, but he's a comedian, right?
00:03:59.560He did legitimately start out as a comedian.
00:04:02.200And so he'll do this thing where at some point he's making fun of stuff, but then he's also, he'll get on a soapbox and make really serious points, very, very important points.
00:04:12.020And then the minute someone kind of points out a logical fallacy or talks about how he's not really taking certain data pieces or things seriously, he'll retreat back to his comedian stance.
00:04:40.960And it's incredibly old and people should really be able to see through it.
00:04:44.780Now, Stuart, of course, stepped away from the Daily Show and it's cratered ever since.
00:04:48.820I don't know anybody who watches that thing at this point.
00:04:51.460He's got this new show and he's talking, he's basically doing the exact same shtick.
00:04:56.320I don't know why he quit in the first place.
00:04:57.720If you're just going to go back to doing the same thing, except now it's even less funny.
00:05:01.360At least at many points during the Daily Show, you could say that Stuart was legitimately funny, even if he's incredibly dishonest and biased.
00:05:09.000He at least made an attempt at being funny.
00:05:11.720In this, he's really just doing a far more serious version where he occasionally cracks a joke.
00:05:17.460But for the most part, he's just parroting liberal orthodoxy at every moment.
00:05:21.680You know, he's one of these people who's talked, you know, out of both sides of his mouth.
00:05:25.560On one side, he'll say, oh, this is bad.
00:05:29.620But then he'll immediately do one of these shows where he acknowledges every tenet of wokeness, where he embraces every aspect of it.
00:05:37.460And so he's really just doing this really sad thing where he's kind of dragging the end of his career and just acquiescing to every bit of kind of the new woke vanguard of the left.
00:05:48.360We're not really standing for anything at the end of the day.
00:05:51.960Now, he is, of course, famous during The Daily Show for doing these gotcha interviews, right, grabbing people.
00:05:58.880And even when he had somewhat formidable opponents, even when he had these opportunities where he was talking to people who were a little more complicated, he was well known for aggressively editing these things.
00:06:11.580He would cut out any point at which he was embarrassed, any time in which he made a mistake, and they would make sure to represent it in a very particular light.
00:06:22.540So at this point, really, all conservatives should know better.
00:06:26.140Like, everyone on the right should know not to walk into this blender, right?
00:06:29.640Like, Jon Stewart has done this time and time and time again.
00:06:32.640And so you really should know better than to walk into an interview where he can control everything, he's got the editing power, he's got the discretion over what actually sees the light of day, and he makes sure that you're never really going to see anything that casts him in bad light, and he's going to cut this thing to make sure that you're embarrassed.
00:06:50.200That said, there's probably a reason that he has to talk to an Oklahoma state senator at this point, right?
00:06:56.120Like, there are, of course, many great state senators out there, you know, but in general, state senator's not exactly some kind of amazing high point for, like, debating ability.
00:07:08.320Rhetoric is not the first thing that most state senators are into.
00:07:12.680He couldn't get, like, a national senator.
00:07:14.100He's not talking to anyone of, you know, great standing on the national stage.
00:07:20.640He's got to kind of cherry pick the one guy in Oklahoma who doesn't understand how Jon Stewart does this and kind of walks right into it.
00:07:28.540So to, you know, I'm sure this guy, you know, Nathan Don, he's probably a nice guy, probably has the best of intentions, felt like he kind of knew what he was talking about and had the force of argument and said, I'm just going to step into this thing and kind of have a discussion and win people over with facts and logic.
00:07:45.560Like, we're going to see he's not the best debater, but I don't want to focus on that so much.
00:07:50.520We will point out the things where, you know, he didn't do the best.
00:07:54.180He could have done things differently.
00:07:55.320But what I really want to focus on is the way that Stewart boxes him in, the way he uses framing and language to control what the state senator is saying and where this goes.
00:08:06.720So that said, let's go ahead and jump in a little bit.
00:08:08.960We'll watch a little bit of this, and then we'll kind of break down each part of it as they talk.
00:08:13.340I'm a strong component of the Second Amendment.
00:08:14.980I believe the right to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed.
00:08:17.980That's the one right that's listed in the Constitution that uses that very specific affirmative language, you know, shall not be infringed.
00:08:24.420Oh, it's also the one right that uses the phrase well-regulated.
00:08:28.140Correct, when it's talking about the militia and the state.
00:09:03.120Even though he's regularly going to make a case at every opportunity that the state should be coming for people's guns, that the control of this should be absolute by the state in every aspect.
00:09:15.320So he's right off the bat, completely just lying.
00:09:20.140He's setting the tone to say, I'm the reasonable guy.
00:09:22.920I'm not totally against this, even though functionally I'm going to argue against kind of everything about the Second Amendment, including its basic text, right?
00:09:29.920So he jumps in here and says, oh, well, it does say, you know, a well-regulated militia.
00:09:34.880Well, if Jon Stewart is for the Second Amendment in the idea that, like, people should be able to own firearms, then the argument he's making right there is void, right?
00:09:43.960Because people who cite that part of the Second Amendment, that there should be a well-regulated militia, are usually citing it specifically for the purpose of saying individuals should not be able to own firearms.
00:09:54.660So the Second Amendment does not secure the individual right to own a firearm.
00:09:59.180Now, a lot of you know how I feel about how well constitutional rights protect us in certain situations.
00:10:04.940But either way, in the context of this argument of constitutional amendments and their ability to protect, Jon Stewart is clearly coming down right away on the side of, actually, the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right for an individual to have firearms.
00:10:22.460And then immediately following up with, but I'm for them a Second Amendment.
00:11:20.040So, this is a mistake, obviously, from Nathan Dom.
00:11:23.200Okay, so first thing, he lets his opponent frame his position.
00:11:27.520And he lets his opponent frame his position in a very easy-to-manipulate way.
00:11:34.060The phrase that more guns make us safe is not the actual argument, or at least it really shouldn't be, the argument for individual gun ownership, right?
00:11:44.340The point is not that more guns make us safe.
00:11:48.040That's not what most proponents of the Second Amendment are actually arguing.
00:11:53.340What they're arguing is that the individual has a right to self-defense.
00:11:56.940And the individual's natural right to self-defense supersedes the state's ability to secure their, you know, to take their property, to ban them from usage, and to otherwise interfere with that action.
00:12:12.380If that right requires more guns, which it probably does if an individual is going to own a firearm for protection, then that's fine.
00:12:20.740But it's not an argument of just more guns make us safe.
00:12:25.480There's not some specific tonnage at which we acquire enough weapons in the United States, and all of a sudden, everybody is more safe.
00:12:32.680I'm sure that this is what that state senator meant, but because he immediately allows Stewart to frame this discussion in this way, you'll see Stewart come back and beat him over the head with that framing multiple times.
00:12:48.760And because he doesn't push it back against the beginning, and he doesn't actually instead say, stop, no, I have something else that I want to posit as, like, the actual thing I'm contesting, he just allows Stewart to completely run over him every time he brings it up.
00:13:04.960We got 400 million guns in the country.
00:13:08.120We had an increase, and gun deaths went up.
00:13:10.580So when exactly does this curve hit that takes it down?
00:14:03.740And so him just sitting here and saying, well, at some point, gun ownership went up and crime went up, too.
00:14:09.160So therefore, guns cause crime in and of themselves, independent of the users, the people owning them, any of the laws applied, other general criminal justice reforms.
00:14:34.800This is why statistics are usually just generally useless in the middle of like a debate as it's happening, because no one actually has the time to go back and fact check this, correct all this stuff.
00:14:44.940Yeah, maybe you've got, you know, Ben Shapiro leveling out like 19 binders worth of statistics.
00:14:49.940But even then, it's just people who are going to argue over the efficacy of the statistics.
00:14:53.820The point is, Stewart is just completely manipulating the framing of this to make it sound like, oh, well, we know it's an obvious and proven fact that every time we increase gun ownership, you know, gun deaths go up.
00:15:09.280Those numbers, you know, 400 million, 50,000, you're talking about a less than a fraction of not even a percent, of a hundredth of a percent.
00:15:26.080So again, we know that that's not necessarily the case, right?
00:15:30.160And his point, and this is the point he's going to make over and over again.
00:15:33.100So this is the actual point that the state senator is going to deliver, is that it's the actions of the individual and not the whether or not a gun control, you know, is there, whether or not the gun itself exists, which is going to actually drive the violence here.
00:15:49.820That's the point he's actually going to make.
00:15:51.440But because he let John Stewart do this framing of more guns equals everyone safe.
00:15:57.060Stewart's just going to go back to that over and over again.
00:15:59.620He's completely going to ignore any of the real arguments that Nathan is making.
00:16:04.400He's going to ignore any of the actual points he's trying to make because he's not here to convince Nathan.
00:16:11.000And that's something you really need to understand as a conservative or a reactionary or anyone.
00:16:17.260When you're stepping into this arena, if you're going to step into an arena of public debate, remember that the person you're talking to is not your audience.
00:16:39.420So if you're going to walk into this, you need to be prepared for that.
00:16:41.900You shouldn't come in here thinking, I'm going to change John Stewart's mind because John Stewart isn't interested in your mind.
00:16:47.160He's not interested in winning you over.
00:16:49.200He's interested in using you as a tool, a weapon in his propaganda advance.
00:16:55.980OK, so if you're going to step in here, if you're going to put yourself in the situation, which you probably shouldn't, not wise.
00:17:01.600But if you're going to put yourself in the situation, you have to approach it specifically with the goal of using the situation to to own John Stewart's audience or create, you know, controversy, create a clip that's going to win you something.
00:17:14.940And when you know, John Stewart's going to have complete control of the editing, when he's going to have complete control of the frame and his entire purpose is to kind of just drag you through the mud like this.
00:17:25.060It's just not a good situation to put yourself into.
00:17:27.220But if you're going to put yourself into it, you need to go into it with your eyes wide open.
00:17:32.320One of the issues, a contributing factor.
00:17:34.500Again, I believe it's the individual that is the problem.
00:18:45.760If you don't have background checks and you don't have registration and permitting, how do you know who has a problem in terms of the people who you're giving a gun to?
00:19:12.800He simply said that the only solution is not just take away people's guns, which is the only solution that Stewart ever proposes throughout this entire thing.
00:19:21.820He just says, you want to give them guns, which is something that he never says, obviously.
00:19:27.920And Stewart says, so basically Stewart's reciprocal solution is just take away their guns.
00:19:35.020That's the only solution he ever has in here.
00:19:36.640And so what he's complaining about is you have removed the state's opportunity to take away people's guns.
00:20:13.720Is he going to close the border to shut down crime flowing over the border from drug cartels?
00:20:19.560You'll see the answer that is going to be no later.
00:20:22.520And so actually Stewart doesn't support any of these tools.
00:20:25.920He doesn't actually care about what's available to these people.
00:20:29.840He doesn't actually care that the police have the tools necessary.
00:20:33.560He only cares that this particular tool, this particular thing he doesn't like, is removed.
00:20:39.260And he doesn't really care about the constitutional amendment protecting it.
00:20:43.500He cares about the other constitutional amendments, maybe.
00:20:46.460But he certainly doesn't care about the second one, even though he already framed himself as someone who isn't coming for people's guns, even though that's the only solution he has.
00:20:53.700And he frames himself as someone who isn't really against the second amendment, even though, again, it's the only amendment he seems really enthusiastic about violating in the interest of order.
00:21:05.380But we'll see him talk about order here more in a second.
00:21:07.800Do you want to talk about the background checks first, or do you want to talk about solutions first?
00:21:10.960I want to talk about what you're doing is you're bringing chaos.
00:22:15.740And Stewart knows that appealing to his audience's feelings about this issue is far more powerful than nailing down any particular policy about it, right?
00:23:47.660Well, actually, in some cases it is, sadly.
00:23:49.700But in general, it's not Republicans pushing for letting violent criminals out in the streets.
00:23:55.820It's not Republicans who are justifying the release of these people and letting them be turned loose on unsuspecting victims.
00:24:04.140It's not Republicans who are pushing to normalize violent race riots in the streets in response to some policing video they don't like or some judicial decision they don't agree with.
00:24:17.380It's very clearly the left, who are constantly keeping their supporters in a state of disorder, constantly trying to force disorder and narco-tyranny onto the country.
00:24:27.340So the idea that if we just didn't have these pesky Second Amendment, then order would suddenly appear on our streets is just insane.
00:24:36.340It's not forcing chaos into order at all.
00:25:12.560He's using these words because he specifically wants this guy to use the terminology that he thinks links himself to gun control and say, well, if you're for order in this situation, you should – with registration and everything, then you should also be for order when it comes to the registration of guns or whatever.
00:25:31.920First, obviously, Jon Stewart doesn't care about the border.
00:25:36.580In fact, not only does he not care about the border, he's probably for these – for open borders, amnesty, all of these things.
00:25:44.240Like these things – I've not heard Jon Stewart – maybe, I don't know.
00:25:47.140Maybe he turns out to be an amazing border hawk somewhere.
00:25:49.460But I have never heard Jon Stewart speaking about the importance of shutting down the border, and I certainly have not heard him chastising Democrats for being more than fine with his open border policies.
00:26:03.500It works both ways, but he doesn't care because the rhetoric matches the thing he wants, so he wants to hold his opponent to a standard and then apply that standard to the issue that he is addressing.
00:26:13.320He's not going to hold himself to that issue.
00:26:15.160He's not going to hold himself to that standard, and you'll see here that Nathan doesn't do something like come back at him and say, hey, well, then you're for closing the borders, right?
00:26:24.080You're for getting rid of all these illegal immigrants in the country.
00:26:27.420Since you're someone who's very pro-registration, you must be for ICE raiding every single area of the United States until every single illegal immigrant is registered and deported, right?
00:26:37.260Since you care so much about order, since you're so committed to order, or is it only this issue on which you care about order?
00:26:43.660And actually, you're more than fine with ignoring it in every other issue, but he doesn't do that.
00:26:48.400He lets Stewart control the frame the whole time, and you can see that, by the way, he eagerly jumps into the fentanyl crisis.
00:26:54.420Now, he's going to make legitimate points about this, and this is something that conservatives do all the time, right?
00:27:03.300So I'm going to ignore what my opponent just did, sidestepping the issue we're talking about and the leading questions that he's setting me up for, because I want to make a legitimate point here, except Stewart's already going to win this, right?
00:27:15.880Because he's already put you on the defensive.
00:27:18.040He's already led you down the path he wants you to go.
00:27:21.240He's already using the language that he wants you to use, and you're going to embrace it while you try to make your point to him.
00:28:46.100Like, and by the way, solving the problem that the state senator is talking about, the fentanyl crisis, would actually not infringe on anyone's constitutional right.
00:28:55.480So you want to solve a problem and your only solution to solve it is the complete vacation of the Second Amendment, basically.
00:29:04.320But you don't want to solve a problem that has more deaths attributed to it.
00:29:08.240So if you're really talking about bring order, if you really care about that, why aren't you willing to solve the problem that doesn't affect anyone's constitutional right and has doubled the body count?
00:29:17.560But again, unfortunately, our state senator here is just, he's not up to stuff.
00:30:49.940Now, this is something that happens all the time in normal conversation.
00:30:53.800When you're just sitting there talking to your buddy and, you know, you end up having a conversation on something like this, you probably address things in exactly this kind of way, except obviously like you're not trying to embarrass each other.
00:31:04.960But it's very clear that he, very clear that this is the kind of conversation that most people would have.
00:31:11.820But when you're having this type of conversation, when you're involved in a conversation where you are directly trying to basically dunk on your opponent, that's all you're here for, okay?
00:31:20.680Then you can't have this kind of conversation.
00:31:22.840You have to stay laser focused on your points.
00:32:32.300This is the stuff that's destroying people.
00:32:34.580And his point is that kids that have good fathers, that have vigilant parents, that have positive male role models, are far less likely to take all kinds of dangerous routes, including ones that put them in prison and ones that actually end in gun deaths.
00:32:49.840But, of course, Stewart doesn't care, right?
00:32:52.500Because addressing the issue of fatherlessness might mean asking people to take personal responsibility or asking the government to actually help families stay together and form cohesive units.
00:33:06.860It might ask certain communities that are protected by the Democratic Party and the left to take some kind of action that might, you know, actually change the way in which they form families, the way in which they live their lives, and have better outcome for their children.
00:33:21.280He doesn't want to address any of that.
00:33:22.440The only solution is get guns out, right?
00:34:33.680We're not going to have any kind of, you know, I wonder if, you know, they just had that Texas, I think, state rep who suggested that we should have
00:34:44.720a, he put in a bill saying that they should reduce the income tax or the property tax for people in Texas based on the number of children they have.
00:37:06.460So, again, Jon Stewart is not for any of the other things that the police might want to increase their safety in this scenario, right?
00:37:16.440He doesn't support, like, stop and frisk.
00:37:18.860He doesn't support any kind of profiling.
00:37:21.580He doesn't support any of the additional tools that police might want for the ability to reduce the chances that they're going to walk into a bad situation, to reduce crime on the streets.
00:37:47.280He just wants guns out of the equation.
00:37:49.100He doesn't care about the tools available to police.
00:37:51.240He doesn't care about their safety in these situations.
00:37:53.920He specifically just wants guns to be off the table, which, again, goes against everything he said about the Second Amendment, right?
00:37:59.980If the state has the ability to seize your firearm at any time because a police officer thinks that, you know, it might improve their ability in some way or their safety or something, then you just don't have a right to the thing.
00:38:19.900You just want the state to be able to seize a firearm at any time for any reason at the discretion of pretty much anyone involved.
00:38:27.180So just say that instead of pretending like you care so desperately about the safety of the police when you wouldn't be willing to do anything else to invest in the safety of the police when they're arriving at some domestic violence call.
00:38:37.360Because police treat every situation as a potential.
00:38:43.840Again, we just see this phrase over and over again, should have never let it slide, should never give it to his opponent.
00:38:49.620All he does is get beaten over the head with it relentlessly.
00:38:52.620And the police go to a house filled with guns.
00:38:55.800Why don't they breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this Second Amendment that shall not be infringed is being exercised so fruitfully?
00:39:06.220So to be clear, there are plenty of communities across America where the police are fine with people having guns.
00:39:13.080In fact, encourage people to have guns.
00:39:14.940There are sheriffs in Illinois that specifically said we're not going to enforce the government restriction on guns in our county in which we've been elected because we specifically support the ownership of guns by our community.
00:39:31.640There are actually plenty of really high trust communities in the United States where the police are more than fine with the citizens providing additional security for the community.
00:39:42.100But Stewart doesn't like those communities.
00:39:43.760Those communities aren't the ones that he wants to prosper.
00:39:47.800He wants these laws enforced everywhere, even though really there are plenty of communities where the sheriffs would love to have the support of the people and the people to feel safe in their ability to protect themselves.
00:40:02.360I know I'm in one of these counties where the sheriff has specifically said, don't mess around.
00:40:09.300The citizens of our county are armed and they will protect themselves.
00:40:12.340But Stewart just acts like every police officer has exactly the same feeling about this and that it's uniform across all communities.
00:40:19.780Maybe it's not so much the gun as the community in which the law is being enforced.
00:40:32.340When the police actually go to a house.
00:40:34.640She had a restraining order on her ex-boyfriend.
00:40:36.700I can run through hundreds and hundreds of examples of women killed by their domestic partners by guns that were not taken away through the lessening of red flag laws.
00:40:47.620So this is just a good move by Stewart.
00:40:51.020This is exactly how you should treat people who bring in this kind of stuff.
00:40:55.380Not that he's like logically consistent on this.
00:40:57.900I'm sure he'd be more than happy to bring up whatever anecdote serves his purpose whenever it's useful.
00:41:03.560But whenever someone brings in something like this, you just step over it because that anecdote's going to have all kinds of trailing things.
00:41:09.640You're not going to have the actual information involved.
00:41:11.780It's obviously cherry picked specifically for the purpose of the person who's making the point.
00:41:16.360I'm sure that the one that Nathan had teed up probably was a good one and probably made a good point or whatever.
00:41:22.040But Stewart's correct in his tactics here.
00:41:28.480You're just going to be sitting there listening to your opponent spin a tale that just builds up his side without any kind of interaction or any kind of point that you can really make.
00:41:37.260So there's no point to sit there through this.
00:41:38.880Now you notice at the very end he talks about red flag laws.
00:41:41.340And again, you can tell that even though Stewart started with, I'm for the Second Amendment and I don't just want to take away your guns.
00:41:49.500Again, the only solution he ever has besides pumping a bunch of money through maybe a bunch of NGOs and government institutions into communities that will give Democrats and leftists a bunch of jobs is taking away guns.
00:42:43.960There are plenty of people who are like, yeah, no, the government should just be able to go ahead and seize people's guns without any kind of due process.
00:42:49.940Look, either you have the due process for the constitutional right or you don't.
00:43:02.820If we had gun registration, if we were able to track purchases, if we are, they have a technology that every bullet would be stamped with an individual like a fingerprint.
00:43:12.940If we had an ATF that wasn't defunded, we would be able to enforce gun laws more effectively and we would be able to solve gun crimes more effectively.
00:43:22.520So, yeah, if I had every single thing that a police state wanted, I could be more effective as a police state.
00:43:31.660Like, yes, if the government has the right to secure the location and knowledge of everything all the time, then, yeah, of course, they're going to be better at apprehending the people that they want to apprehend.
00:43:45.040And maybe the people that they want to apprehend is you, right?
00:45:27.980And if your argument is it's not, then just get rid of the Second Amendment and replace it with something else, which is actually what it's supposed to be.
00:45:47.960Yes, if the government has the instantaneous knowledge of where every single gun and every single bullet is, it'll have a better job at crushing criminals, which it won't do because it wants those people to be free and raining terror on its political enemies.
00:46:03.120But it will be much better at securing the compliance of any of its political enemies, which is the actual usage that would occur.
00:46:19.720The person and the individual is the one that is the concern here.
00:46:22.440But you don't want anything that could help law enforcement or society determine whether or not a person is a good guy with a gun or a bad guy with a gun.
00:46:35.420Again, Stewart doesn't want this either.
00:46:38.460Stewart wants it specifically with guns.
00:46:40.660But he doesn't want the state to have the ability to determine who's a good guy and a bad guy.
00:46:45.460They don't want the kind of surveillance that police want.
00:46:49.900He doesn't want the kind of ability to profile.
00:46:52.940He doesn't want the ability to stop and frisk.
00:46:54.580He doesn't want any of these things, the police want.
00:47:52.160We don't get to know what he said, what mistakes he made.
00:47:54.700If there are any good points that were brought back by the state senator, we just don't get to know because the state senator put himself in a situation where his opponent controlled every outcome.
00:48:04.560That you are making it harder for police to manage the streets by allowing all of these guns to go out without permits, without checks, and without background stuff.
00:53:01.200Do you believe voting rights can be infringed because it doesn't say specifically shall not be infringed?
00:53:08.560To be clear, Jon Stewart started this interview with a semantic argument, right?
00:53:13.300He started with exactly this kind of argument.
00:53:15.380He said, oh, it says well-regulated militia.
00:53:18.840So because it says well-regulated, the government has the ability to take your guns at any time and you have no constitutional right to them.
00:53:24.700So he started with exactly this type of argument.
00:53:26.800But now he's going to jump on him for making, I guess, the same argument.
00:56:22.840He specifically said, oh, you think the fentanyl problem has like double the deaths of guns.
00:56:27.640So, but why are you saying that we can't ban guns until, or restrict guns, whatever, you know, he only talks about banning guns this whole time, but whatever.
00:56:39.820Why can't we go ahead and do whatever gun legislation I want until we do the fentanyl?
00:56:45.560Why can't we solve this problem until we solve that problem?
00:56:53.480We can't ban drag shows for children if we're not willing to ban guns.
00:56:58.540Okay, but you literally just made the argument a few minutes ago that we should be able to ban one thing and not the other.
00:57:05.680We should be able to address one issue even if we can't address the other immediately.
00:57:08.760So, if I can address the issue of drag shows for children, and it is deleterious to children, then I should be able to go ahead and do that, whether or not we have then decided to also violate people's Second Amendment rights.
00:57:22.280Those two issues, we should be able to work on both if that's the real, if that's the standard.
00:57:54.460That would never stand up with any argument.
00:57:56.940But that's exactly the argument he makes here, is we should be able to do this, right?
00:58:00.700We should not be able to ban this just because it doesn't kill children.
00:58:05.000And we should be able to ban this other thing, even if it violates the constitutional right, because, you know, no children would die from gun violence if you ban guns.
00:59:20.260You're standing on, I'm going to stand on the backs of these dead kids.
00:59:23.460And I'm going to take your constitutional rights.
00:59:25.060And either you agree with that or you're a monster, right?
00:59:27.060This is like when Pierce Morgan tried to ambush Ben Shapiro with the guy, the child in the wheelchair, right, from the gun death thing, from the school shooting.
00:59:40.760Like, he is specifically just going to stand on the backs of these kids and declare your constitutional rights are over because I say so.
00:59:47.640And if you don't agree with that, you're just a horrific person.
00:59:51.720Here's the really interesting thing about this.
00:59:53.660I'm going to show you what Stewart's referencing here, right?
00:59:57.660So let's take a look at what he is actually referencing.
01:00:06.780So Stewart is looking at this study here, okay?
01:00:12.920And we can watch why are gun deaths up?
01:01:04.580But that's not what Stewart cares about.
01:01:06.380He doesn't care about the fact that fewer children are actually dying from motor vehicle crashes.
01:01:12.160And over the same time of that drastic drop of the deaths of children during those motor vehicle crashes dropping, that the gun deaths stay more or less the same.
01:01:32.640So here's another thing that gives lie to what Stewart's talking about.
01:01:36.140When you actually look at the statistics he's referencing, okay?
01:01:39.320When you actually look at the statistics he's referencing, you see that, again, over this time, the gun deaths go up, they go down, they go up, they go down, even as gun ownership probably increases.
01:01:52.340So, again, the increase in gun ownership over this 20-year period doesn't seem to have any kind of significant impact on the number of gun deaths for children.
01:02:02.740It has pretty much no impact over this time.
01:02:06.140So his whole theory of more guns equal more children dead doesn't actually hold.
01:02:13.320However, we will see there is a drastic spike right here in 2019.
01:02:17.940And all of a sudden, gun deaths, which had kind of held steady on like a peak here from 2016-17, all of a sudden they jump up around 2020.
01:02:29.060Now, I've heard some people call this into question.
01:02:31.700They say that this stat isn't legitimate.
01:02:35.140Again, we can get into the veracity of the stats all day.
01:02:37.940But just assuming for a moment that he's correct about this stat being reliable, obviously gun ownership didn't just like drastically spike in 2019.
01:02:48.320It's not like Sig Sawyer or, you know, S&P just like dropped a massive shipment of guns on the country.
01:02:59.600It's not like, you know, all of a sudden Colt just started sprinkling .45s across the country and gun deaths skyrocketed.
01:03:08.760Gun ownership generally steadily increases in America.
01:03:12.060It was probably doing so this entire time.
01:03:14.140But the increase suddenly happened in 2019.
01:03:17.000So, yes, technically we probably went from some level of gun ownership to some slightly more elevated level of gun ownership between 2019 and 2023.
01:03:27.660Is there any other trends that we could think about that probably was far more likely to have an impact on child gun deaths?
01:03:35.440Well, yeah, actually, there are huge amounts of things like the fact that we have prosecutors that have decided to stop actually locking up criminals, violent criminals.
01:03:44.900We have many people, again, sadly, some even in the Republican Party that think that they're going to make friends with different communities by releasing criminals onto the streets early.
01:03:58.000And so, all of a sudden, the number of people incarcerated for these crimes is lessened, right?
01:04:05.840The people in, fewer people are getting serious sentences.
01:04:11.180Prosecutors, often backed by people like George Soros, are specifically handing out lesser sentences on a regular basis, making these crimes incredibly common on the streets.
01:04:20.640Also, we start to see the lack of policing for smaller crimes, right?
01:04:26.360We start seeing basically the legalization of shoplifting in many major urban areas.
01:04:31.520We see the police stop responding sometimes because they simply can't, but also because they've been told specifically not to, to different lower crimes.
01:04:42.520And we know from experience that if you don't police the lesser crimes, crimes in areas skyrocket.
01:04:52.640The summer of George Floyd, where police learned that you don't go into certain areas and you don't engage certain people.
01:05:00.320Because if you go in and something happens and the person that you are arresting is of the wrong color and that gets spread around on social media, you might be the guy who starts the next riot.
01:05:13.320You might spend the next 15, 20 years of your life in jail after sparking some national crime wave that Jon Stewart's not going to talk about.
01:05:27.960And when those communities aren't policed, the gun deaths in those communities, which is where the gun deaths are, OK, they're not they're not in the middle of rural Montana.
01:05:37.160Those gun deaths are happening in the very communities that are having their policing reduced by these efforts.
01:05:44.940OK, and so we see is Stewart ends this by referencing a stat that doesn't prove anything that he was talking about.
01:05:52.240He specifically and maliciously avoids all the other contributing factors and all the other things that are likely involved in inflicting this on people.
01:06:15.480So this is how we see how Stewart does this and does this all the time.
01:06:19.660And again, the moral of this story is if you are a conservative, you're a Republican, you're somebody in the public eye, do not, do not, do not walk into this stuff.
01:06:32.240OK, don't go on to The Daily Show or whatever Stewart's calling his new version of this.
01:09:43.540But my centrist buddy says, yeah, again, you know, he's probably putting himself in this situation because he feels like Jon Stewart's got a big audience.
01:09:51.040And I can, you know, I've got the force of argument on my side.
01:09:56.240So these people will eventually be swayed.
01:09:58.240I can reach out to the centrist audience.
01:10:00.720But, again, when you know this person has total control over what is being said, when you know this person is going to be able to control everything that you're talking about,
01:10:09.880you should know that you're really not going to get the opportunity to kind of speak to his audience in a honest way.
01:10:23.440Look closely and you can see George Soros over his shoulder, feeding him money and talking points.
01:10:28.680Yeah, again, amazing that we're not noticing that these George Soros prosecutors are contributing directly to more violent people being on the street, right?
01:10:48.800We're not actually interested in any kind of wider discussion on why society is this way.
01:10:54.400He certainly doesn't want to address issues of fatherlessness.
01:10:57.320He doesn't want to address issues in specific communities.
01:10:59.920He doesn't want to talk about disparities in violence.
01:11:03.160He doesn't want to talk about communities in which gun ownership is a total positive and the sheriffs and law enforcement are fine.
01:11:08.400He doesn't want to talk about the fact that the left and the Democrats and the media have been pushing for early releases, reductions in penalties, lack of prosecution, and all these things that are going to lead to far more violent criminals being on the street and committing these crimes.
01:11:23.360Jon Stewart's going to stand on his soapbox.
01:11:25.280He's going to tell about, oh, you don't give an F about kids.
01:11:27.820But what he's definitely not going to do is actually do anything that shows he gives an F about the issue, right?
01:11:36.120He's not willing to entertain any other subject during the debate.
01:11:40.840And to his credit, for what he's doing, that's exactly what he should do because he's not there to convince the state senator.
01:11:48.800He knows he's not going to convince the state senator.
01:11:50.520He's not there to convince any of the state senator's audience or any of their constituents.
01:11:55.140He's there to embarrass this guy and make it look to people in the center and to the left like there is no intelligent opinion and that he's just this master class debater that can destroy these people because they're so stupid and they're so easy to run rings around.
01:13:59.920I've been told that they're a blessing of liberty.
01:14:03.120Yeah, again, obviously, we know that the state has the ability to limit these kind of performances, especially to children, right?
01:14:13.740That's been upheld many times by the Supreme Court.
01:14:18.200This would have been a very common thing.
01:14:19.980If you had tried to show anyone this kind of performance and say that it should be presented to a child through almost all of human history, they would have become very angry with you.
01:14:30.780And there probably would have been very immediate consequences for your desire to expose children to this, regardless of what the law was.
01:14:39.240But the law would have totally backed them up on the inappropriateness of that kind of presentation to a child.
01:14:46.740George Washington, you know, Thomas Jefferson, these guys would not have understood free speech as drag shows story time or whatever.
01:14:56.440And so it's very clear that it has nothing to do with it.
01:14:59.960And the state has total interest in regulating and protecting children from that.
01:15:03.860But again, Jon Stewart's not going to take both sides of that argument, right?
01:15:08.480He's not going to be like, OK, I am fine with gun control.
01:15:10.420And also, I'm going to ban this stuff.
01:15:12.000Same thing with the border, all this stuff.
01:15:14.500He said he's trying to show the GOP state senator as a hypocrite without at any point addressing the fact that he's totally hypocritical on all of these issues at every point.
01:15:57.060And this is what the left is all about, right?
01:15:59.100They want this power so they can manipulate procedural outcomes, right?
01:16:02.000This power is secured initially to only be used in a specific scenario in a particular way.
01:16:08.060And then over time, the people who control the system are able to manipulate it and go through the procedure and show that, you know, well, actually, these people were violating it, even though that was not the initial intention or whatever.
01:16:20.160And now the state just punishes its enemies with this power over and over again.
01:16:23.660So, yes, you're 100% right that, you know, you let a red flag law happen.
01:16:30.480And then it turns out that, you know, the FBI investigates anyone who goes to a Latin mass.
01:16:36.020And so actually going to a traditional Catholic service red flags you, right?
01:16:40.940And all of a sudden, this thing that was supposed to initially stop violent crime is now just a tool of the regime to de-arm anyone they think might disagree with them.
01:16:50.200So, glow in the dark for $2, framing is 75% to 90% of any argument.
01:17:04.620In an actual conversation with someone who is really interested in your opinion and wants to have their mind changed and wants to understand things, you should be able to work inside like an honest and mutual frame, right?
01:17:16.140But if you're not, if you're at odds and the person who you are talking with doesn't like what you're saying, they're going to reframe, right?
01:17:40.460Give examples from old videos to show he always was this slimy man.
01:17:44.680Thank you very much, Glow in the dark.
01:17:45.640Yeah, I thought about this, but that's why I actually started this series because I felt like it was better to break these things down, right?
01:17:52.120So I feel like it's more useful to like read these articles, talk about what's happening, go ahead and, you know, start and stop the video so we can interject and like pick this apart.
01:18:02.480If I do it in an article, it's a little more complicated.
01:18:04.780It's harder to pull apart pieces of media quite the same way when you do it in purely written form.
01:18:09.480So that's actually why I thought about doing a written series on it.
01:18:13.100But I actually decided to turn these into live streams because I just feel like it's a far more effective way to kind of do the thing that you're talking about.
01:18:20.460But I do hope these things are helpful.
01:18:21.860I hope understanding this, why the rhetoric is used the way it is, why these people approach the way they do, how they use these tactics.
01:18:28.760It's helpful for people to break down and understand kind of why this is dishonest and why you need to prepare for that.
01:18:34.560That said, guys, going to go ahead and wrap this up.
01:19:11.580And I believe that Academic Agent is starting his stream right now.
01:19:15.460So if you want to go over and check out Academic Agent's stream, if you want to go ahead and watch that, you should definitely do that as well.