What’s a leftist to do when even a hero like comedian-turned-political-podcast-host Jon Stewart can no longer defend the scandal-ridden Biden family or its allies in the legacy media?
With just a little under two weeks to go before Election Day, Stewart welcomed Gabriel Gatehouse, a BBC television host and journalist to his podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
Gatehouse, to his credit, admitted that he had “ignored” the Hunter Biden laptop story when it first came out, and that wasn’t the most surprising moment of the podcast.
Of course, Gatehouse found a way to blame the right for the laptop story being suppressed. Because of course he did. But the clip below is still worth listening to.
Gatehouse said that when he first heard of the laptop, he wrote it off as just another conspiracy theory in a political environment rife with conspiracy theories.
“I don’t — I just don’t have the bandwidth for another conspiracy theory,” he said in a tired voice to the laughter of the podcast crew. “I’m not even going to touch this. This is such bulls***, right? I am literally not even going to go there.”
“And that’s what I did. I ignored it.”
You and everyone else in the mainstream media, Mr. Gatehouse. But please, continue.
“Well — big mistake,” he admitted. “It turned out, the laptop was real.
“Facebook essentially censored the story. Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account. Fifty former national security experts and officials came out and said it was Russian disinformation,” he said, as Stewart agreed with him.
“Turned out that not only was it real, but the FBI had the bloody laptop all this time. Hadn’t really looked on it. Hadn’t figured [it] out — And then it took the establishment media in the U.S. — The New York Times and The Washington Post, let’s say, the kind of, you know, the big boys, the serious boys and girls — it took them nearly two years to go through the laptop,” Gatehouse said.
After vetting the laptop with cybersecurity experts and others, the legacy media was forced to admit, “Huh, do you know what? Actually, turns out this thing is real.”
Gatehouse said that proclamation should have been made with more fanfare. The mainstream media made a huge error in discerning the truth just before a presidential election, treating the about-face as “business as usual.”
That’s where he found opportunity to blame the right for the fake news, when someone suggested that misinformation from the right caused the media to assume the laptop story was just more of the same.
“As Steve Bannon said, ‘Flood the zone with s***.’ Right?” Gatehouse commented. “The laptop made its way into the media via Steve Bannon. So kind of — I assumed this was Steve Bannon flooding the zone with s***. And that’s why I ignored it.”
Never mind the fact that Gatehouse had literally just given a different reason why he initially ignored the laptop story. I mean, who’s flooding what zone here?
But Stewart didn’t even seem to care about that — he had already moved on to the fact that the lap only provided additional evidence of what was, to him, obvious corruption in the Biden family.
“Let’s say it was real and people just thought, well, the one thing in it maybe is ’10 percent to the big guy,’ which is circumstantial at best. But as far as like, look, Hunter Biden being on the board of –” Stewart said.
“Burisma,” Gatehouse offered, with Stewart apparently lost for the name.
“To me, that’s corruption straight up off the bat,” Stewart said.
“They always call it a ‘corrupt Ukrainian gas company,'” Gatehouse said. “That’s like, you don’t need to say that — all Ukrainian gas companies are corrupt.”
You can listen to the segment here:
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“It’s corrupt on its face,” Stewart said. “I don’t need a laptop with like a hint of circumstantial evidence. Now tying Joe Biden to it, yeah, that’s gonna take some digging, and if it’s real, you know, that’s a thing.
“But the idea that nepotism would allow much larger amounts of money to flow into the hands of people unqualified to be in the positions that they’ve been accepted [into] because you think those countries are trying to buy influence? Yeah. Welcome to the f***ing world,” he said.
“And I think, I think it’s a huge problem on its face,” Stewart concluded. “Forget about any secret laptop.”
Well, he’s right and he’s wrong — which is how I usually think of Stewart, actually. He’s a smart guy, but he’s coming at the truth from such a fundamentally flawed worldview that he’s never quite going to get it.
In this case, he’s dismissive of what can only be called massive interference in the 2020 presidential election by the mainstream media — either through incompetence or something more nefarious — but at least he’s seeing that there’s a real problem in the Biden family and a system that allows the improper enrichment of a presidential family member simply because he’s a presidential family member.
That’s something, at least, and from a guy like Stewart, I’ll take what small doses of truth he’s able to offer.
But that’s because I’m not a leftist Democrat committed to propping up Joe Biden no matter what. I’m not a committed Republican, either, for whatever it’s worth — I’m far more interested in truth than I am political party.
If I were a leftist, I’d be really at a loss to decide what I thought about Jon Stewart’s comments about Hunter Biden. I mean, the right keeps pointing at Hunter as a symbol of corruption within the political class, and how Stewart’s siding with them? It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the American left.
Almost.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
