Jon Stewart admitted on Thursday that he couldn’t do his job properly because of devastation over the church shooting in Charleston.
The “Daily Show” host also blasted those who described the massacre as a tragedy, saying: “This wasn’t a tornado, this is racist.”
“I’ve got nothing in terms of jokes or sounds because of what happened in South Carolina. Maybe if I wasn’t close to the end of the run, or if this wasn’t such a
Nine people were killed in Wednesday’s shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Alleged shooter, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, has been taken into police custody.
“I honestly have nothing other than sadness that once again we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist,” Stewart continued.
“I’m confident though that by acknowledging it — by staring into it — we still won’t do jack shit,” he said with passion. “That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind … What blows my mind is the disparity of response. When we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves,” Stewart said, comparing it to Islamic terrorism.
“We invade two countries and spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe. We’ve got to do whatever we can — we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church– ‘Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?’
“That’s the part that, for the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around. And you know it’s going to go down the same path.
“This is terrorist attack … on a symbol of the black community in Charleston. This wasn’t a tornado, this is racist. This one is black and white, there’s no nuance there,” he said, to huge applause from the audience.