The Patriot Post® · Jon Stewart Trolls the Dead-Enders

The eyes have it. Specifically, the sadness, the look of utter resignation in them. It’s as if Jon Stewart is thinking, Woe is our country that I even have to explain such an obviosity to these dead-end dolts.

Those dolts, of course, are the leftists, like his buddy Stephen Colbert, who still cling to the notion that COVID-19 was naturally occurring — that it came to us innocently from a bat or a pangolin, rather than incompetently or even malevolently from a level 4 Chinese virology lab with a documented history of safety violations.

But, but … Trump said it, so it can’t possibly be true.

Stewart, who hosted “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central for 16 years and then all but disappeared, is himself a lefty, but an often-funny and occasionally fair-minded one — unlike his Trump-deranged host and one-time mentee. And if you haven’t seen his performance from Monday night, it’s worth eight minutes of your time (if you’re in a hurry, skip ahead to the 2:15 mark):

Stewart began by backhanding the Church of the Left: “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science,” he said. “Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic … [dramatic pause] which was more than likely caused by science.”

“Do you mean perhaps there’s a chance that this was created in a lab?” asked an incredulous Colbert.

“A chance?” Stewart replied. “Oh my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab.”

He then riffed on and repeatedly drove home that cosmically unlikely likelihood — that this killer of nearly four million people, this novel coronavirus with the remarkable ability to attack the respiratory system of humans, just coincidentally happened to break out in the only city in China with a biosafety level 4 virology lab in which they up-engineer coronaviruses to attack the respiratory system of humans.

“What about this, what about this, listen to this,” Stewart frantically suggested. “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean. Or, it’s the f—ing chocolate factory!”

Colbert persisted, clinging to the only remaining piece of flotsam from the Left’s natural-release shipwreck: “It could be possible that they have the lab in Wuhan to study the novel coronavirus diseases,” he said, “because in Wuhan there are a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because of the bat population there.” (Actually, there is no native bat population in Wuhan.)

“Sure, I understand, it’s a local specialty. And it’s the only place to find bats,” Stewart sneered. “You won’t find bats anywhere else. Oh, wait. Austin, Texas, has thousands of ‘em that fly out of a cave every night every night at dusk [actually, they have more than a million, and they fly out from underneath a bridge] … but the only coronavirus we have is in Wuhan, where they have a lab that’s called — what’s the lab called again, Stephen?”

Stewart could’ve saved some breath here. As National Review’s Isaac Schorr notes, the bats being studied in the Wuhan lab come from caves roughly 1,000 miles away. Maybe Stewart just wanted to belt out the heretofore forbidden word “Wuhan” once again. He did so repeatedly, and he did so with gusto. WOO-hann, he’d say, as if it were some sort of frat-boy cheer, or as if Donald Trump were pulling his strings. Pretty soon, Stewart will be replacing the “Ch” in “China” with a hard “J.”

To those of you who are disinclined to celebrate this long-overdue bit of truth-telling, we know what you’re thinking: Stewart isn’t one of us, and we don’t need his sanction. That’s true enough. Being consistently proven right about one thing after another — about masks, about lockdowns, about school closures, about hydroxychloroquine — is its own reward. Further, you ask, what is it about the science that’s changed in recent days — changed enough, in fact, to convince Big Tech that the mere mention of the lab-leak theory is no longer grounds for censorship from social media? Answer: Nothing. Still, Jon Stewart isn’t just any man of the Left. He’s among the best it’s got.

As National Review’s Kyle Smith notes, “Conservatives can deal out unpleasant truths all we want, but the culture at large has so marginalized us that nothing we say really breaks through, and both the legacy media and Silicon Valley tech firms are increasingly brazen about simply denying conservatives access to the microphone. Stewart is different. He is worshipped by the left-of-center media. … When he speaks, lefties listen.”

Boy, did they listen. And, boy, did they gnash their teeth.

This is an unequivocal win for our side. It’s okay to enjoy it.