Jon Stewart has a theory about the whole Samantha Bee controversy.
The Daily Beast reports that during a Q&A session at San Francisco’s Clusterfest on Sunday, the former “The Daily Show” host was asked to weigh in on Bee’s decision to apologize for calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” during an episode of “Full Frontal” last week.
“They don’t give a shit about the word ‘cunt,’” the former “The Daily Show” host said of President Donald Trump’s administration and its condemnation of Bee following her controversial comment. “[Trump] says that instead of ‘please,’ I’m guessing.”
Last week, the president asked on Twitter why the “no talent” Bee wasn’t already fired.
The 55-year-old comedian explained that his former colleague’s decision to say she was sorry played right into the right’s hand.
“Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide.”
Stewart said there is nothing anyone can do to “make them give up this ‘We’re the real victims’ game,” because “it’s a game, it’s a strategy, and it’s working.”
He then offered some advice.
“Don’t get caught in a trap of thinking you can live up to a code of integrity that will be enough for the propagandist right,” he said. “There isn’t. And so, create your own moral code to live by, but don’t be fooled into trying to make concessions that you think will mollify them.”
Stewart does have a point in regards to Trump’s and his followers’ response to Bee’s usage of the word “cunt.”
Jennifer Lin, a former reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, claims that Trump called her the see-you-next-Thursday expletive 31 years ago, after she wrote an article he didn’t like about his business activity in Atlantic City.
Ted Nugent, an outspoken conservative who Trump invited to the White House in 2017, also had no qualms about calling Hilary Clinton a “toxic cunt” in a 1994 issue of Westword, a Denver-based alt weekly.