Watch Jon Stewart Take On Confederate Flag Defenders on 'The Daily Show'

Stewart took particular offense at defenders who often employ the "slippery slope" argument, calling the flag a "archaic symbol of racist insurrection."

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

Another day, another beautiful evisceration of certified asshole symbol of the year: the Confederate flagthis time from outgoing Daily Show host Jon Stewart. On Wednesday's episode, Stewart took aim (see above) at the baffling existence of fervent Confederate flag defenders — specifically their continued insistence that the flag stands only as a symbol for the Confederacy lives lost during the Civil War. "[That's] like saying you support flying the Nazi flag because you’re proud of their robust anti-smoking agenda,” Stewart says. “That wasn’t really their thing.”

Stewart concisely describes the Confederate flag as an "archaic symbol of racist insurrection," a sentiment repeatedly echoed by his fellow titans of late-night political satire. As an exponential number of states and top-tier businesses continue to remove the flag from their respective domains, the outspoken opposition continues to pedal an anti-history agenda with an allegiance to a falsely glorified past.

Part of that outspoken opposition is the perplexing "slippery slope" argument, which misguidedly suggests that the continued removal of the Confederate flag (and other Confederacy-based imagery) will somehow damage the social progress of the country. "Usually when you do the 'slippery slope' argument," Stewart says, "you like to end it in something bad. You don’t go like, ‘The next thing, black children don’t have to go to schools named after men who wouldn’t have allowed them to learn how to read.'"

 

Latest in Pop Culture