The superviral episode of “The Problem With Jon Stewart” on Friday could’ve been called “The Glass Onion: The Problem With Crime.” Yet, for all the hypocrisies Stewart revealed in his skillful peeling back of the onion’s layers, his exposure of conservatives’ hypocrisy about the cherished American value of freedom clearly struck a nerve.
Stewart lasered in on the hypocrisy of “our loudest tough-on-crime advocates … trying to solve the problem with the problem.” And, on social media, millions of people reveled in his complete dismantling of Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Nathan Dahm’s illogical arguments about guns. Dahm is a Second Amendment poster boy: He has proposed a number of bills in the Oklahoma Senate to further relax gun restrictions and even authored the first anti-red-flag law in the country — red flag laws, remember, are intended to keep guns out of the hands of people deemed to be threats to themselves or others.
Sitting across from the former “Daily Show” host, Dahm rehashed the same tired arguments, including the rage-inducing claim that gun-related deaths are attributable to “fatherlessness” and “broken homes.” (This is classic misogynistic and racist language used against women who take care of themselves and their families.)
Dahm, like many conservatives, also leaned on the language of “protection.” They deploy it in pro-gun arguments, as well as in many other instances when they want to stoke public fear and rage — from their nonsense claims about wanting to “protect girls sports” by banning trans kids from participating on girls school teams to “protecting children” by banning books that recognize the existence of LGBTQ and Black people and their histories. Stewart made it a point to nail Dahm on the hypocrisy of drag show bans — which, in Dahm’s logic, are necessary to “protect children” — by emphasizing that the leading cause of child deaths isn’t drag queens. It’s guns.
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