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Are you trying to get me canceled again? Jon Stewart jokes that he wasn’t expecting the Department of Energy report that COVID likely leaked from a Wuhan lab, but he remembers a backlash when he suggested it on the 2021 Colbert show.
Jon Stewart has reflected on the backlash he received after suggesting in 2021 that Covid could have leaked from a lab.
His comments came as it is widely rumored that the Department of Energy has prepared a new report suggesting that the disease did, in fact, originate in a laboratory.
Stewart generated significant controversy and was criticized for being racist after an appearance on The Stephen Colbert Show in 2021, during which he said that the virus very well could have come from a laboratory.
At the time, the lab leak theory was stigmatized and was branded as a right-wing conspiracy theory by most of the media.
When the subject was raised on Monday during a podcast accompanying his show ‘The Trouble With Jon Stewart,’ he quipped: ‘Are you trying to cancel me again?’
On Monday, Jon Stewart joked that he could be ‘canceled’ for discussing the lab leak theory that he was criticized for bringing up in 2021, but has now become much more mainstream.
Although Stewart now seems right in questioning the possibility that the virus came from a Chinese research lab, he was also humble, saying he was just advocating for an open mind.
“First of all, I wasn’t waiting for the Department of Energy to weigh in on this,” he said during the podcast. ‘What does the Department of Energy have to do with this?’
“The biggest problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and testing each other’s political loyalties as they came out of that,” Stewart said.
On the 2021 episode of Colbert’s show, the host challenged Stewart, who suggested that he himself had seen no evidence pointing to the lab leak theory.
“Science, in many ways, has helped alleviate the suffering of this pandemic, which was probably caused by science,” Stewart said.
‘You mean that maybe there is a possibility that this was created in a laboratory? If there is evidence, I would love to hear it, I just don’t know,” Colbert said in response.
‘An opportunity? My goodness, there is a new respiratory coronavirus taking over Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we should ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus laboratory. The disease is the same name as the laboratory. That’s a little too weird!
In 2021, Stewart suggested that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, saying it seemed too much of a coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was studying coronaviruses when COVID-19 originated in Wuhan.
On Monday, Stewart how the reaction to what he thought was perfectly neutral had been so extremely polarized.
“My biggest problem with that was I thought it was a pretty good part of expressing how I felt, and the two things that came up were, I’m a racist against Asians, and how dare I align myself with the far right,” he said.
“The part I don’t like about this is the absolutes and the dismissiveness like ‘fuck you, I’m done with you’.” I will never forgive you, you have crossed an unforgivable line. You have expressed an opinion that is antithetical to mine, or it is not mine,” she added.
“What surprised me, I think, was the anger,” he said. And it has a purpose.
A co-host of Stewarts’ podcast on Monday reemphasized the counterintuitive way in which the origins of Covid had been politicized.
“The wet market means you’re a Democrat and the lab leak means you’re a Republican, and that really threw us off,” he said.