Jon Stewart weighed in on the Confederate flag debate raging across the country Wednesday, and ruled “it’s a small part of much larger problem.”
“Ideally, this debate is only the start of a longer conversation,” the “Daily Show” host said. “Addressing the institutional and systemic racism that we have yet to disassemble, that continues to this very day.”
Stewart then played a clip of Fox News contributor Monica Crowley stating that institutional racism doesn’t exist, to which Stewart replied, “Oh, well I guess the conversation was shorter than I expected.”
Stewart took up the flag debate during a new segment on “The Daily Show” entitled “Huh, I Guess It Is Pretty F–kin’ Weird That We Fly A Flag in Honor of a Pro-Slavery Secessionist Army.”
Stewart was also shocked when South Carolina Senator Paul Thurmond, son of the late “arch-segregationist” Strom Thurmond, spoke on the Senate floor in favor of removing the flag.
“That’s like if Kool-Aid Man’s son took to the floor of the Senate to give a lecture on the importance of wall preservation,” Stewart joked.
Stewart also took one flag supporter to task for saying that the removal of the flag would be the start of a “slippery slope” that would lead to the removal of southern Civil War monuments and changing building and street names.
“Usually when you do the slippery slope argument, you like to end it in something bad,” Stewart said. “So you don’t go, ‘The next thing you know, they’re going to take it off the buildings. And the next thing you know, black children won’t have to go to schools named after men who wouldn’t have allowed them to learn how to read.’”
