Jon Stewart, a comedian who happens to be white, led a discussion on his Apple TV+ show last week, The Problem with Jon Stewart, in which he noted “the problem with white people,” and agreed with a white guest that writer Andrew Sullivan is a racist.
During a panel discussion, Stewart argued with guest Andrew Sullivan, who pushed back against the idea that the U.S. is a “white supremacist” nation.
Sullivan said that Stewart’s use of the term “white supremacy” to describe the contemporary U.S. minimized actual white supremacy. When Stewart mentioned racist “systems,” Sullivan asked him to describe what those systems were. Stewart then gave examples of allegedly racist (Democrat) legislation, such as the New Deal and the G.I. Bill.
Another guest, Lisa Bond, then interjected, and told Sullivan that she was “shutting [him] down right now.” She argued that Sullivan was a racist, and that by disagreeing with the idea that America is a white supremacist country, Sullivan was using “racist dog-whistle tropes.”
She then added that “every single white person upholds these systems and structures of white supremacy.” Stewart agreed with her, saying he wanted to “finger snap.”
When Sullivan pointed out that Stewart would be “finger snapping her calling me a racist,” Stewart quipped: “You’ve been doing a pretty good job of it, yourself.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.