Jon Stewart is calling out GOP politicians running against buzz words like critical race theory, saying that half of Republicans campaigning against CRT don’t “even mean it.”
“I don’t even think half of the Republicans that do it even mean it … they think it’s an appeal to emotion,” Stewart told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Sunday of the GOP’s sentiment against CRT and cancel culture. “It’s hard to not be angry about people that try and distract from the real things that people face with weaponized nonsense.”
Stewart argued that hiding behind heavily politicized issues like CRT come not from politicians truly believing these topics are the reason for issues, but instead originate from a lack of “governing ideas” that might serve to address the deep-rooted problems the nation faces.
“What would you do if you were out of governing ideas?” Stewart posed to Zakaria. “If you didn’t know how to govern a country of this magnitude, in a country of this diversity, and you basically are running on government is broken. And then when you get in office, you have to be terrible to prove the original premise.”
While Stewart said this “purposeful distortion field” doesn’t necessarily work — pointing to President Joe Biden’s win over the Republican party — it does prompt an emotional response as “it gets people upset, it gets them angry [and] it makes them fearful about threats and hyperbole.”
While members of the Republican party get wrapped up in this fear, Stewart reminded audiences that CRT and diversity initiatives exist as a “salve” that works to “pacify and mollify” the nation because “we refuse to actually fix the real problem.”
“We won’t actually dismantle the vestiges of all the systemic racism and all the systemic classism and all the systemic gender issues,” Stewart continued. “We won’t actually dismantle that, but what we will do is you can have an office in the building, and every few months we’re going to have to sit and listen to you talk for like an hour.”
