By now, most of you have probably watched or at least heard about Jon Stewart’s appearance of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he seemed to be vigorously promoting the Coronavirus lab leak theory. Everyone in right-wing world seems to have seen it and is braying on social media about how Jon Stewart just owned liberals, how Jon Stewart proved them all right, blah blah.
Here is the full video -
Question is — is Jon a serious believer in the Wuhan lab leak theory or was he simply doing comedy/satire with a dead serious face, waiting to see how the world reacts to his latest “revelation”?
Here are some statements from the segment which might provide clues to the answer —
“I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science.”
“Oh, my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”
“And then they ask those scientists, ‘So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab? How did this happen?' And they’re like, ‘Ooh, a pangolin kissed a turtle?’ ”
“When scientists were asked how did that happen, they said - maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus?”
“It’s the local specialty, and it’s the only place to find bats. You won’t find bats anywhere else. Oh wait, Austin, Texas, has thousands of them that fly out of a cave every night at dusk? Is there … an Austin coronavirus? No, there doesn’t seem to be an Austin coronavirus. The only coronavirus we have is in Wuhan.”
"Oh stop with the logic, and people, and things. The name of the disease is on the building."
“And I love them (scientists), and they do such good work, but they are going to kill us all.”
“I’ve been alone for so long … and when I realized that the laboratory was having the same name, first name and last name, of the evil that had been plaguing us, I thought to myself, that … that’s f****d up”
Hint: There is no lab named the Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.
If he was joking, is this really a good joke?
If he was serious (note that he did not offer any serious arguments, just a few flippant right-wing’ish ones), should he be taken seriously?
If he truly believes in the lab leak theory, would Jon Stewart, lifelong champion of liberal values, rant about it so vociferously on TV and give the MAGA crowd so much fodder to chew on?
Was he playing the conservative on Stephen Colbert’s show, the way Colbert used to do on his show? Was he expecting that the stupid right-wing crowd would fall for the act, hook, line and sinker?
Is this the joke of the century or has Jon gone senile?
You can guess what I am thinking 😄
What do you think?