“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart spent much of his Monday night monologue exposing the “blatant” hypocrisy of President Donald Trump and others on the right when it comes to free speech.
“It’s not even the hypocrisy,” Stewart said. “It’s that they so fetishize free speech, this thing that they do not in any way actually practice.”
Stewart rolled footage of Trump celebrating free speech ― followed by clips of him trying to silence his critics, from the media to attorneys to activists.
“These guys don’t give a fuck about free speech,” Stewart said. “They care about their speech.”
In one clip, Trump claimed criticizing the judges he has appointed is “interference” and “probably is illegal.”
Just four days later, Trump attacked a judge who ruled against him.
“The hypocrisy!” Stewart said. “It burns!”
Stewart also pointed to the purge of supposedly “woke” words from federal websites, especially words related to race and gender, and then summed up the right’s real feelings on free speech:
“You can’t protest in a way that offends the right. You can’t teach things that the right doesn’t want you to teach. You can’t read things that they don’t want you to read. You can’t use words that they don’t want you to use. But they love free speech!”
“At least we’ll always have art,” he said.
Or maybe not: Stewart cut to a news report on Trump’s demand that the Colorado State Capitol remove a portrait of him that he doesn’t find flattering.
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“He’s demanding they take it down because he believes this picture is unflattering,” Stewart said, and then had a question for the president: “Do you think other pictures of you are flattering?”
See more in his Monday night monologue: