“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart on Monday railed against not only the “horrible violence” in Minnesota over the weekend but also the complete unwillingness by politicians on the right to do anything about it.
“What blows my mind is our resignation in the aftermath of this nonsense,” he said.
A gunman shot and killed a state lawmaker and her husband, and then shot and wounded another lawmaker and his wife Saturday. The suspect, Vance Boelter, was arrested Sunday after a manhunt.
Stewart spent nearly a full minute listing the locations of other mass shootings.
“That is a wildly incomplete list. We kept it to the last 25 years, and it’s still not everything,” he said. “And what’s their response to all that?”
He played clips of GOP figures defending guns and accusing Democratic lawmakers of “politicizing” mass shootings.
Stewart called out the hypocrisy of those on the right who are willing to take expensive and intrusive steps on other issues, but not gun violence:
“Why is it when a foreigner, or someone that shouldn’t be here, kills one of us, we’re gonna put $150 billion into border security. We’re gonna militarize our cities. We’re gonna spend trillions of dollars to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas. We’re gonna ban people from random countries from ever fucking visiting here. We’re gonna take our shoes off at the airport forever. But when we do it to ourselves: Nothing. Is it that the only acceptable deaths are those that are made in America?”
But he saved his harshest words for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, making light of the weekend’s shootings ― tweets so wildly inappropriate that some called on him to resign, and at least one colleague confronted him in the Capitol over them.
Stewart said he met Lee in 2019.
“He’s the best,” he said sarcastically, and then relayed a story from that meeting that shows Lee is the “avatar for the insanity of this moment.”
Stewart was in Washington with a group of 9/11 first responders lobbying to ensure funding for their continued medical care.
When one officer spoke about being in one of the twin towers and told of the aftermath of the attack, Lee responded with: “I bet you’ve got a lot of stories.”
“We met a lot of people in Washington. Some were hopeful, some of those meetings. Some were upsetting meetings,” Stewart said. “That was the only meeting where we all walked out and looked at each other and went, ‘What the fuck is wrong with that guy?’ The only one.”
See more as he trashed Lee and the “depth of his depravity” in the Monday night monologue: