The theater is all about the production. Lines are memorized, actors go through rehearsals, and then they perform in front of an audience.
Jon Stewart is not a commentator even though lefties insisted on pretending he was a deep political thinker, and creating two dozen political shows hosted by comedians. He’s an actor. (Seriously, he appeared on everything from The Nanny to Newsradio.)
Guest appearances on talk shows, certainly those of the top guests, are rehearsed beforehand. The guests go through some stories. They get a sample of the topics. Do you think that Stewart suddenly surprised Colbert by endorsing a lab leak theory? Or that he delivered that speech with lines like “Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus?” off the top of his head?
Nah. It’s a good line. It’s a bunch of good lines. The kind of lines that were written beforehand, possibly by someone who isn’t Stewart, were then rehearsed and delivered.
Why am I even wasting time talking about this? There’s a bigger picture.
Some conservatives, especially at a site that’s big on hot air, have fastened on to Stewart’s comments as a big event. They’re not.
The only reason Jon Stewart is talking about the lab leak theory is because the media has given people permission to do so. It’s why Big Tech stopped censoring references to it.
Why? Good question.
The post-Trump media liberalization made it possible to touch on Cuomo’s nursing home killing spree and question the level of overreach of COVID hygiene measures. (Not government overreach measures. There’s such a thing as going too far.)
It goes without saying that if you can talk about something, it didn’t really matter that much or maybe it never really did.
Jon Stewart isn’t edgily pushing a dangerous idea. He’s being presented as if he were. There’s the appearance that he’s wading into dangerous waters. And that might have been true two months ago. That’s exactly why he didn’t say it.
The dangerous thing about the lab leak theory, for those outside the People’s Republic of China, is that it validated President Trump’s statements about the Communist dictatorship. But these days the elites have decided that a little China-bashing (not too much) might be okay. It won’t be okay in 2024, but for now the proles will be allowed to And that means Jon Stewart gets rolled out on his old buddy’s show to give them a little taste of the forbidden. A year from now the lab leak theory may be forbidden again. For now it just has the heady aroma of the taboo. And that’s enough to make guys like Stewart, who live on the political plantation, seem edgy because they’re saying the things that we were just now allowed to say.
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