Satirical comedian Jon Stewart reminisced about about the “swift” backlash he endured in 2021, after suggesting that COVID-19 might have leaked from a Wuhan lab.
On the Monday episode of his podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” the show’s executive producer, Brinda Adhikari, brought up the Department of Energy’s report about the pandemic’s origins.
“Are you trying to get me cancelled again,” Stewart joked.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal released a bombshell report that the DOE concluded “with low confidence,” that based on new evidence, the virus most likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“First of all, I wasn’t waiting for the Department of Energy to weigh in on this,” Stewart remarked.
“What does the Department of Energy have to do with this?”
The comedian said that he didn’t care about the government agency’s level of “certainty” about the claim, but that in the nation’s divided state, people can’t express opinions that differ from the mainstream’s narrative.
“The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that,” he said.
“My bigger problem with that was, I thought it was a pretty good bit that expressed kind of how I felt, and the two things that came out of it were, I’m racist against Asian people, and how dare I align myself with the alt-right,” Stewart continued.
The former “Daily Show” host shocked Stephen Colbert during a June 2021 appearance on the late night show.
“I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science because science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science,” Stewart quipped.
Colbert questioned if he thought there was “a chance” the virus was man-made.
“A chance?!” Stewart barked. “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! That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”
“Then they ask the scientists ‘so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab, how did this happen?’ and they’re like, ‘a penguin kissed a turtle?’” Stewart continued sardonically.
“Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus.”
Colbert grudgingly stated that the theory should “definitely be investigated,” but Stewart snapped back, “The name of the disease is on the building.”
When Colbert suggested that the lab could have been studying several “novel coronavirus diseases,” due to the area’s high concentration of bats, Stewart shut him down.
“It’s the only place to find bats, you won’t find bats anywhere else,” he sarcastically jabbed.
“Oh, wait. Austin, Texas has thousands of them that fly out of a cave every night at dusk! Is there an Austin coronavirus? No, there doesn’t seem to be an Austin coronavirus.”
“The only coronavirus we have is in Wuhan, where they have a lab called — What’s the lab called again, Stephan?” He smugly questioned.
“The Wuhan novel coronavirus lab,” Colbert responded.
Stewart said the “backlash” from his conversation with Colbert “was swift, immediate, and quite loud.”
He noted that he wasn’t mad about the uproar, because detractors were merely expressing themselves, but he didn’t appreciate being immediately written off for bringing up a theory with a “good possibility.”
“The part that I don’t like about it is the absolutes and the dismissive like ‘f–k you, I’m done with you. I will never forgive you, you have crossed an unforgivable line,” Stewart said on the podcast.
“You’ve expressed an opinion that is antithetical to mine, or not mine,” he continued.
“And it may not be one that has any real ramifications, of anything, I was just saying: ‘This seems like it’s a pretty good possibility,’ which by the way has happened before.
“What was stunning to me, I think, was the anger,” Stewart said about the public outcry. “And is purposeful.”
“The crazy thing is that we’ve never had more speech or information, and yet, the amount of viewpoints have narrowed,” he concluded.
“So we have more speech and less of a spectrum around that.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray reiterated that the agency stands by their 2021 findings that the pandemic was likely caused by a lab leak on Tuesday.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” he told Fox News.
“Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
Wray also noted that China has been anything but cooperative about worldwide investigative efforts into COVID-19’s origins.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” he stated.
“The work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”