Jon Stewart's show on Apple TV is over, and I'm here to talk about why I think it was doomed from the start. I also talk about The Blaze's new ad-free website and how it's going to change the landscape of conservative media.
00:09:24.720And then all of a sudden he would pause and he would give a sermon.
00:09:29.000He would give a speech, a fiery oratory in the manner that, you know, a talk radio host would do.
00:09:35.020He would adopt that affectation in many ways, and he would inject a very serious moment into things.
00:09:42.380He especially did this during interviews.
00:09:44.080So whenever he was in an interview with someone who disagreed with him, a rival, a conservative or something, you know, he would constantly be mocking.
00:10:41.860They would cut out a lot of the parts where Stewart did poorly or lost or something inconvenient came up.
00:10:46.940They would only bring in things where he did well.
00:10:49.600You know, hour-long interviews got cut down to less than 10 minutes.
00:10:53.460This was a very consistent tactic used by Stewart to kind of bring about, you know, this air of invincibility.
00:11:02.220If you can just get on and be smug and you can mug for the audience and you can, you know, use this clown nose off, clown nose on kind of defense mechanism, then you can just control the world.
00:11:14.300You can control all the ways that people kind of understand politics.
00:11:38.260He was one of the more amusing pundits when he was on the show.
00:11:41.000That one was a little more successful, though he still has a terrible show that is not very, you know, that uses all of the same tactics that John Stewart did.
00:11:48.980He's still doing the same kind of song and dance routine all this time later.
00:12:06.140They, you know, because they just knew they were going to be deceptively edited.
00:12:09.440They knew that they were going to get lied to.
00:12:11.440They knew that they were going to be manipulated.
00:12:13.380And there's just no reason to really, you know, show back up to this.
00:12:17.060And so that started to affect the quality of the show.
00:12:19.340But I think in general, even though, you know, the quality of the show did go down, John Stewart eventually kind of stepped away on top.
00:12:28.060You know, yes, the quality had declined.
00:12:31.180However, he realized kind of where the Daily Show was going.
00:12:35.700He knew that this was not going to be a vehicle.
00:12:38.060And so so he gracefully exited at the time where, yeah, you could see maybe there might be a decline, but it was still something that was well regarded.
00:13:12.720I knew that he was lying about a lot of stuff and he was being deceptive, but at least there were funny moments, you know, like there's still at least objectively funny moments.
00:13:20.720They weren't all, you know, he did a lot of mugging for the camera.
00:13:22.920He did a lot of manufacturing labs with with kind of audience noise and stuff.
00:13:27.000But there were genuinely funny skits and things involved somewhere in the Daily Show.
00:13:32.680I was just completely absent from Trevor Noah.
00:13:48.080And obviously, the the mystique of the Daily Show has declined significantly.
00:13:54.100It's no longer the kind of this central cultural force that it tended to be, you know, at the time I was watching it when I when I was younger in high school and in college.
00:14:04.220They're just there's just has lost all kinds of event television that it used to be at that time.
00:14:12.240It lost that cultural power and status.
00:14:14.400I want to talk a little more about that, guys.
00:14:16.380I want to get into kind of why that ended up getting lost in kind of the Meilu here.
00:14:25.820But I want to go ahead and get into I want to get into kind of why Jon Stewart's reemergence, what was was a failure.
00:14:43.860Obviously, when you go out on top like that, you have a lot of cultural cachet.
00:14:48.240When you go out on top like that, it's like Jordan stepping out at the height of things, you know, he can't do this forever.
00:14:56.060So it's best to kind of step away while you while you kind of still have that momentum, still have that aura of invincibility around you.
00:15:04.060And again, this guy was very, very key to forming the political imaginations of even conservatives at the time.
00:15:10.320The way that we should address politics, the way that we should value things, this is all this is all a standard that Stewart set.
00:15:18.640And when he walked away, that model for infotainment politics, that model for kind of kind of making things less sacred, less less serious, constantly mocking that kind of stuff.
00:15:35.200That was still the way that you should deliver your show if you wanted to be successful.
00:15:40.060That was that was viewed as kind of the top, the top way to kind of get your message across, even if Stewart was losing his step, if the show is losing his step.
00:15:48.240But when he came back from when he came back from kind of that hiatus, that's where obviously things kind of fell apart for him.
00:15:56.260But we'll talk about that after we hear from today's sponsor.
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00:18:34.780All right, guys, so Jon Stewart comes back, and obviously, like I said, you should know when to fold him, right?
00:18:45.360He was seen as this luminary part of the end of history, you know, one of these guys who wielded a lot of influence, well-loved and well-respected, especially by progressives.
00:18:58.080Yeah, he went out on top, and that's where he should have stayed.
00:19:00.580But as so often the case, they can't just stay out of the ring, right?
00:19:17.660You know, you don't need to go back to what you were doing before.
00:19:20.340I know you were famous for it, but, you know, there's no reason to return back to that.
00:19:25.020Well, you've already pumped it dry, and at this point, you've already handed the baton to somebody else, and Trevor Noah, even though it was a failure.
00:19:30.600And there's multiple people copycatting you, you know, Samantha Bee and John Oliver.
00:19:35.420So there's really no reason to kind of reconstitute your show in another place, but that's exactly what he did.
00:19:43.020See, the landscape had changed after Stewart had left.
00:19:46.780One of the reasons Stewart became as big as he was was that there was still very few options when it came to television.
00:19:55.920I mean, you had cable TV, so, you know, we're not talking about the four-channel era of the 1950s or 60s, but you still had most people focused on cable, television, there weren't as many channels, there certainly weren't streaming services, the internet wasn't as big a thing.
00:20:13.760And so there was this general cultural moment around The Daily Show.
00:20:18.400It was the way that everybody processed news, and Stewart was so well-respected because he kind of served that function almost as America's news anchor, for better or for worse, well, most definitely for worse.
00:20:30.920He became the Walter Cronkite of kind of his time, that next evolution of what would be a common cultural touchstone.
00:20:40.600And when he came back, that wasn't the case.
00:20:43.220Like I said, the market was flooded with all these, these lookalike programs or literally the same program under Trevor Noah.
00:20:50.300And so he's entering a flooded market that was defined by something he had already done.
00:20:54.360And on top of that, he's joining a streaming service, Apple TV, trying to put together the streaming service.
00:21:00.240And they want to do something, I guess, you know, HBO had John Oliver and then it had Bill Maher.
00:21:08.320And so they kind of wanted to do something similar with Jon Stewart for their show.
00:21:15.160He's the guy, he's the originator of this kind of entertainment.
00:21:17.920So reasonable, I guess, at least on Apple's part, to think this guy should be part of this.
00:21:22.620The problem is the landscape had changed radically under, you know, under Stewart's feet.
00:21:30.340Not only did the digital decentralization mean that he could no longer rely on that kind of cultural force to drive interest to his program and kind of give him the weight that he needed to kind of push things forward.
00:21:44.940But he also had a huge problem in the fact that the political winds had changed.
00:21:50.540There was no longer this need to take things less seriously.
00:21:54.240Again, Stewart built his career on basically laughing at politics, not taking political challengers seriously, not really addressing issues.
00:22:13.840But that's not what the left was doing anymore.
00:22:16.100See, Stewart's comedy was very good at dismantling what was left of conservative culture.
00:22:21.720When you were tearing apart Christians and conservatives and patriotism and the military and all these things, when you were destroying all these foundational parts of our culture, Stewart was the right weapon for that because his ability to mock and be unserious and grant the whole thing an air of absurdity was very powerful.
00:22:45.560However, that was no longer the mode that the left was in.
00:22:49.260The culture had fundamentally changed.
00:22:51.720And now progressives were looking towards wokeness.
00:22:55.340They were looking to create a positive vision.
00:22:59.440I mean, not that we would see it that way, but in their minds, they were trying to build up a new way to live, a new moral vision to follow.
00:23:13.980But the power of deconstruction had waned and they were looking for a way to assemble a new vision, a new woke vision that could replace kind of religion and family and truth and beauty with something else that could still kind of bind the culture together.
00:23:31.380And so Stewart was perfect for the moment in which deconstruction was the key, where he was still had a chance to throw, you know, things at people who looked more powerful than him to make he could make people who were supposed to be powerful look absurd.
00:23:48.220That was a powerful thing he was able to do, obviously, like this guy basically just made a fortune making fun of George W. Bush.
00:23:55.540It's not that hard, but he was the right man for the job at the time.
00:23:59.720Again, the world had changed and that's no longer the world that Jon Stewart is asked to perform in.
00:24:06.320In the new world, Jon Stewart has to glom on to wokeness.
00:24:11.840He has to affirm the new dictates of kind of the world we're in now.
00:24:28.680It no longer had the power that it once had because those people no longer had the power they once had.
00:24:33.740It was too clear that he was just punching down constantly, that he was just attacking people who were socioeconomically, just, you know, social status.
00:24:44.400It was very clear that the establishment was on Stewart's side at this point.
00:24:50.400And so the idea that he could harass the powerful, he could bring them low, he could make them look absurd, that just wasn't there anymore.
00:24:56.960And again, it's not what the left wanted anymore.
00:24:58.600They didn't want politics to be absurd anymore.
00:25:05.820That's a big part of what wokeness is.
00:25:07.720The funny thing about, of course, wokeness is the more holy you try to make it, the more absurd things get.
00:25:12.760But, you know, obviously their worldview is warped, so they don't see that.
00:25:16.800But that was the new world in which Stewart existed, is a world in which you needed to create a positive moral vision.
00:25:23.860And you needed these things to become re-sacralized in a political context.
00:25:29.280So everything was very serious all of a sudden.
00:25:31.780It was very, very important to treat issues of race and sexual identity and everything else as just the most important things a person could imagine.
00:25:40.860And insulting them, making light of them, bringing any kind of levity to the situation, that was a huge issue.
00:25:47.480And you could see it in Stewart's performance.
00:25:50.100He looked tired and haggard most of the time.
00:25:53.660You know, he had lost kind of that jovial nature that he had constantly brought even to the most serious issues, issues of war and everything else that he had once joked about.
00:26:04.160This guy was joking about, you know, dead children in foreign nations, and he had no problem keeping a joviality about him during that.
00:26:13.000But all of a sudden, he couldn't make jokes about, you know, someone's attempt to become a woman.
00:26:18.880These things that are obviously absurd, he could no longer bring any kind of comedic context to.
00:26:25.360And you could tell that this really was wearing on Jon Stewart.
00:26:31.500Guys like Bill Maher can still get away with a little bit of that shtick because Bill Maher has couched himself as kind of the anti-woke liberal, right?
00:26:45.660You know, conservatives shouldn't fall for it.
00:26:47.860People should stop pretending that Bill Maher is on their side.
00:26:51.140But the reason Bill Maher still kind of works is Bill Maher can still rail against the most absurd leftist stuff because he's taken this position of, okay, I'm a liberal, but there's a line at which we cross into this positive vision thing that I'm not on board with.
00:27:06.860And so he still gets to attack the positive vision.
00:27:09.720It's just instead of attacking the positive vision of religion, traditional morality, the church, the family, you know, American patriotism, all that stuff, instead he gets to attack the positive vision of wokeness.
00:27:21.720And that's working for him to some degree.
00:27:23.640He still has some jokes that are funny, not as much as people tell – you know, he's just not as funny as people pretend he is.
00:27:29.520But at least he still has got some things that land, and at least he still says some things that are correct.
00:27:34.280And so he still has some cultural relevance because he gets to have leftists on.
00:27:39.100He gets to play kind of their game and speak their language to some extent.
00:27:45.220But then he also still gets to kind of throw slings and arrows at people who are clearly more powerful, and so that bit still works for him.
00:27:55.100He's completely bought in to left-wing propaganda.
00:27:57.760He's not willing to take a stance against political correctness.
00:28:01.300I mean, he's said words here and there, but it's very clear by the way that he's been conducting himself that he's bought in to all these new narratives.
00:28:10.080And it's become a disaster for him because the show was already suffering from, again, like his just inability to be jovial, and it's already a tired formula, and there's already a million competitors.
00:28:22.360There's already all those problems with kind of the way that Jon Stewart was attempting to do the new show.
00:28:28.220But on top of that, Jon Stewart started doing, like, struggle sessions.
00:28:33.700He stopped being the guy who was joking, and he became the joke.
00:28:38.840People would come on and berate Jon Stewart for, you know, all kinds of privileges that he had.
00:28:49.720You know, he did shows about the problem of whiteness.
00:28:52.760He did these anti-white tirades and cast himself as one of these people and that he was punishing himself.
00:28:59.360And so all of a sudden, this, you know, this show that was all about, at one point, this formula that was all about breaking down standards, breaking down morality, breaking down positive visions and mocking the seriousness of politics and mocking the, you know, the idea that you would take your culture or what's happening to your country seriously.
00:29:20.460That got turned around, and now there's a show that was almost entirely about Jon Stewart just berating, you know, himself and people he associated himself with while also attacking, you know, just everything that he once did, everything he once stood for.
00:29:40.400It's like Jimmy Kimmel, who once used to be on The Man Show and now does all these politically correct jokes.
00:29:44.840It had that same feel where there's a really struggle session is the name for it.
00:29:48.160There's just this constant need to say to the audience, I'm guilty, I'm the one at fault, you know, and I need to be a better ally and I need to listen.
00:29:57.560It's like a constant HR mea culpa that he was just doing over and over and over again.
00:30:05.060It became very clear that, you know, he was just not able to do anything.
00:30:09.220And he tried to get back into, you know, the rhythm of going on and bringing in conservatives and cutting up the interview and making them look stupid.
00:30:18.160But like I said, at this point, everyone knew the game.
00:30:21.000Everyone of any kind of real standing knew not to get involved.
00:30:24.320So increasingly, Stewart went from, you know, getting major conservative authors who wanted to hop their book and major conservative politicians who thought they would own points with or earn points with the youth.
00:30:35.140And he started getting just, you know, random state senators from, you know, flyover states in the middle of the country.
00:32:10.960However, Stewart started running into some problems.
00:32:14.300Most notably, the one was that he and Apple were no longer aligned on certain things.
00:32:20.860Stewart wanted to do shows criticizing China.
00:32:23.260He wanted to talk about some subjects like AI.
00:32:25.420And Apple was just not comfortable with his public disagreement with a lot of things that they were moving the direction of.
00:32:32.520Obviously, Apple is very reliant on kind of this relationship with China and the Chinese government.
00:32:40.180China is famously not yet doesn't really, you know, broker deals with people who constantly berate them, who constantly bring insults towards them or criticize them.
00:32:50.460And so Apple looked at what Stewart was planning to do, and they said, we need you to stop doing this.
00:32:55.740And that caused kind of Stewart to walk away.
00:32:58.900And, you know, to some degree, good for him.
00:33:01.060You know, there's a level of principle there.
00:33:03.160But I think he also saw the writing on the wall.
00:33:05.220He also kind of knew that the show was floundering, that he had lost a step, that his time had kind of passed him by.
00:33:12.940He was no longer relevant in the world of today.
00:33:16.500I literally cannot think of a single time someone shared a clip of the problem with Jon Stewart as if it was some kind of good thing, you know, as if it was funny and it was something, you know, it was only it was only because it was cringe or he had done another ridiculous segment or it was stupid or it was another struggle session as the only only reason that it was ever around.
00:33:37.660And so it was very clear as cultural relevance was gone.
00:33:39.920And it was a good time, good reason to fold things up.
00:33:43.740And it's really appropriate that Stewart be canceled by somebody like Apple, because that just represents so much about what's happening in the progressive movement right now.
00:33:54.960Guys like Stewart, while Stewart obviously was very rich and very famous and gained a lot of power by working with huge media companies, he existed at a time where the left could still pretend that they were the underdogs.
00:34:07.840And he could still do things like rail against big corporations, even though he was on a big corporation, you know, like he could still do that kind of stuff.
00:34:15.540And it would still be plausible to some extent that the narrative still felt culturally relevant.
00:34:22.320And now it's so clear that progressives own corporate America woke, woke, you know, woke, woke capital is just a real thing.
00:34:32.940It's obvious to everybody that these are the people who are kind of controlling everything.
00:34:38.620Your bank will confirm your pronouns, you know, that Apple is out there making donations to BLM.
00:34:47.420These are the kind of people who will do everything they can to double down on the woke narrative, which is probably why Stewart felt pressured to kind of do the struggle session episodes in the first place.
00:34:58.500However, at the same time, they're willing to bow to totalitarianism and censorship from something like the Chinese government.
00:35:07.980And so it's very clear that, you know, they're only progressive in the sense that it gives them some level of cultural cachet and power.
00:35:15.700I mean, they are I think there are true believers in these corporations.
00:35:19.320I think they are captured by the ideology, but it's just very clear that the principle of we don't take these things seriously or, you know, we have a commitment to truth or something like that.
00:35:30.540All that goes out the window the minute that, you know, business with China might be disrupted.
00:35:34.780And so they're totally willing to tell that one of their main talents whose job it is to mock power that he really needs to sit down and, you know, shut up when it comes to China, because at the end, of course, John Stewart's job isn't to mock power.
00:35:48.920John Stewart's job was to align with power even way back in The Daily Show is very clear.
00:35:54.480John Stewart was picking up the corpses of what had once been powerful in the United States by the time that he became popular.
00:36:03.000And that was so true of the 80s, 90s, early 2000s.
00:36:07.900It was very clear that Christianity and the traditional family and conservatism, you know, just just patriotism, all of these things were being hollowed out.
00:36:17.900But at least the kind of the skeletons of the skyscrapers still looked intimidating.
00:36:23.600Yeah, I mean, the buildings were crumbling and all of this stuff was was really ultimately not in power anymore.
00:36:28.980But at least you could still point to the skeletons and of these giants and say, oh, well, there's something that holds influence and people might actually believe you.
00:36:38.200But even in Stewart's original run, that just wasn't true.
00:36:41.000It was very clear that he was on the side of power.
00:36:43.760He was aligned with power, at least a power that was ascending at the time.
00:36:47.000And he was just, you know, picking at things that were dead or dying.
00:36:51.220But now it's become so clear that that's the case.
00:37:27.540It was always so clear that he was using rhetorical devices and mockery in one sense, but then trying to be self-righteous in another.
00:37:35.500And now he's the very guy who the progressive movement is saying they don't want on board anymore.
00:37:42.620And, you know, predictably, he's just not relevant.
00:37:45.840And he gets discarded because he's running into corporate barriers, corporations that are happy to buy into his progressive narrative, but are not going to push back against some place like China, which is essential to their operation.
00:38:02.280Like, I just wanted to kind of explain this this this fall from grace of Jon Stewart, you know, why he became popular at the time, why he was so influential and why he ended up reentering into a marketplace that simply could not sustain his kind of comedy more.
00:38:19.320The time for his kind of irreverence has passed.
00:38:23.160And now these comedy shows so-called are just lectures.
00:38:27.580There's just more lectures that we get from people who play a laugh track every once in a while or do do a gag and then go right back to their moralizing.
00:38:36.080And you think that given Stewart's, you know, history of delivering those kind of speeches, maybe he'd slot into that, but it just doesn't work.
00:38:44.080And he just ends up, again, going through these struggle sessions as he tries to prove his woke bona fides to a group of people who've already kind of passed him by.
00:38:52.700But we do have a number of super chats here, guys.
00:38:55.320So I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the super chats here real quick.
00:39:04.200Well, if you if you look upside down, close one eye and staple your tongue to your leg, the left is crap that hates you and your way of life has some vague theme, right wing themes and ideas.
00:40:06.100For those who don't know, I have a longstanding bet with my friend, Academic Agent, whose YouTube channel I've been on many times and he's been on here.
00:40:16.180And our bet is that that the regime will not will whether or not they will put the woke away.
00:40:21.740Academic Agent AA, he believes that the regime is capable of limiting itself, that ultimately it is run for power.
00:40:30.880And so once it becomes clear that wokeness is kind of no longer a useful ideology, as it should already be, because we see how terrible it is and how much it costs everybody, how it's just destroying civilization, and it's destabilizing the hold that the regime has on people.
00:40:48.280Then they should just put it away and transition to some other narrative.
00:40:51.280They've had other narratives in the past.
00:41:35.740And that's become increasingly clear, especially here recently with the inability of the left to contain kind of the pro-Hamas movements that have arisen on their side.
00:41:46.380If the left can't put that away, it's very unlikely that they'll put anything else away.
00:41:51.420I think that they are in a runaway train.
00:41:54.540You will see, of course, ebbs and flows.
00:41:56.800There will always be some effort to put the woke away by the saner parts of the left.
00:46:32.920While I think meme warfare is still essential, I think that there does need to be a reintroduction of the sacred into the argument.
00:46:42.560I think that for too long, conservatives have attempted to make functional, logical arguments, which should still be made, but they would not include appeals to the sacred and appeals to the true and the good and the beautiful.
00:46:56.920And the inability to make those appeals had made their technocratic arguments uninteresting and just ineffective.
00:47:06.060And while I think that it is essential that you continue the comedy, eventually that deconstruction will also not be enough in the same way that the left's deconstruction was not enough.
00:47:15.080And they had to start trying to replace that deconstruction narrative with some kind of positive project like wokeness.
00:47:21.960Wokeness is the attempt at a positive, cultural, religious reconstruction of the good and true and the beautiful.