If you were of college age back in the aughts, it was impossible to miss the late-night news parody show craze. Once Comedy Central’s saucy puppet shows went off air for the day, the syncopated sounds of smug one-liners punctuated with mindless laughter would filter from dorm rooms, cheap apartments, and coffee bars across America.
Come morning, you could count on your peers telling you all about how Bush was a genocidal menace and Fox News a brainwashing monopoly in the pocket of big business. In the same breath, they would dismiss the former as a braindead clown and the latter as a lame joke without noticing the contradiction. Which suggests where the real brainwashing was going on.
It was a masterstroke on the establishment’s part. Democrats and Republicans had spent the twentieth century arguing over economics. As dissident blogger the Z Man has pointed out, the fall of the Soviet Union dealt the Left an unexpected and devastating defeat. But while Republicans kept re-prosecuting the Cold War, Democrats pivoted to waging culture war.
The Leftist media’s invention of the late-night hypnojourno clown gave progressives a secret superweapon. The one-two punch of gags structured to alternate factoids and vapid quips with strategic pauses for consensus-manufacturing laughter; delivered by oily propagandists that would retreat inside a circus tent if pressed, mutated public discourse itself. Conservatives had won the economic debate on the facts. So the Left trained people not to think. The era of snark was upon us.
Managerial elite water carrier Jon Stewart was the mold from which all later hypnojournos were cast. His 2004 debate with Crossfire cohost Tucker Carlson still stands as an excellent primer on how the journalist-clown shtick worked. It went over everyone’s heads back then, but Stewart’s bait and switch is transparent in hindsight. He wasted no time on logic but launched into rapid-fire rhetoric designed to seize the moral high ground.
Stewart’s moral grandstanding cut through Carlson’s beep-boop Conservatarian defense like a snide laser through a stick of butter in a bow tie. The trouncing was so one-sided that Carlson lost his show while Stewart’s profile skyrocketed. Black Pigeon observes as much in his video retrospective on the landmark debate. He further examines how the hypnojourno clown tactic has aged and speculates on the implications of Stewart’s return to the Daily Show. Give it a watch:
Hat tip to author JD Cowan
The simplest explanation for Stewart’s return is that the Daily Show’s ratings have fallen off a cliff since his departure in 2015. Those who see a profit motive assume that Comedy Central is bringing him back to boost ad revenue.
It’s also worth considering Black Pigeon’s stance that Stewart is being pulled out of mothballs to help the regime fortify the 2024 election for democracy. That theory jibes with the show producers’ own statements. Maybe conditions on the ground have them worried that Trump could pull off a miraculous win. More likely, panic is setting in at the prospect of his loss making their vote fortification look too obvious. When Puppet Pal Joe shellacs Orange Man again, regime face men can point to Stewart’s triumphant return as having swung the election. That dodge’s plausibility will prove dubious, though.
Because another key factor everybody’s missing – as always – is the impact of Generation Y.
If Boomers are the Me Generation, Ys are the meh generation. As the last analog kids, they were raised by TV to value going along to get along as the highest virtue. The 1996 election was too early for Gen Y, whose oldest members were 17 at the time. In 2004, Ys were 15-25, with their party affiliation almost evenly split within the margin of error. That was the year of the infamous Crossfire debate and Stewart’s rise to thought leader status. Fast forward to 2012; Ys were 23-33. GOP support actually ticked up that year among voters aged 30-49. Support for Dems spiked among the 18-29 crowd, but that increase can be explained by an influx of Millennials.
In short, their Daily Show addiction changed the way Gen Y talked about politics, but it didn’t have a major effect on how they voted. If anything, the rise in divisiveness drove more Ys into the ranks of the independents or out of politics altogether. If you were around in that era, you’ll remember that media aimed at Gen Y audiences depicted above-it-all independents as the smart, hip camp – an affectation many Ys maintain to this day.
It’s poetic justice, in a way. Jon Stewart and his handlers set out to create a generation of NPCs programmed to vote for Democrats. Instead, they wound up with a generation of NPCs programmed to embrace edgy indifferentism. Those too cool for school Yilists of the 2010s were byblows of the late-night hypnojourno clowns.
But while Stewart’s resumption of chief TV propagandist duties is unlikely to sway many voters, the regime has proven itself shameless enough to pretend he will have anyway. No matter that most of his target audience get their news and political commentary online these days.
In the final analysis, Comedy Central’s stunt of pulling Stewart out of retirement is a positive development. Falling back on an old tactic that never had much of a tangible effect anyway smacks of desperation.
Of course, all this speculation could be rendered moot if the low party come through on the promise they made to Haley, Christie, et al. to remove Trump from contention. But if by some intervention of the Cosmic Trickster he stays on the ballot, not even the return of the original late-night hypnojourno clown will explain his loss to voters’ satisfaction.
And what follows may well justify our elites’ looming sense of dread.
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