Jon Stewart’s monologue last night was a moving response to the racist murders committed in Charleston on Wednesday. Dylann Storm Roof’s shooting of nine African Americans was hate crime and racism pure and simple. I cheered along as Stewart declared a comic intervention: America needed to sober up to the reality of its self-perpetuating racist crimes. I’m not sure Stewart could have reacted any differently, but his comedic turn was also a reminder for me of the manipulative tool the Daily Show has always been. World events are always filled with tragedy, which Stewart highlights and lampoons, so why is the Charleston church shooting more egregious than the mosques Americans bomb every day? Is Roof’s racism any more “home-grown” than our government’s? Does Jon Stewart decide for you when the laughter starts or stops?

I applaud Stewart calling for Americans to stop laughing about racism. #BlackLivesMatter #GodDammit! #GodFuckingDammit! Now I hope in his last shows Stewart can ask his audience to stop laughing at court jesters who provide escape valves for the horrors of systemic state-sponsored injustice.

Stewart followed up his Andy Kaufmanesque cold-open with an interview of Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, the compelling child star of Pakistan, as balm for his being overwhelmed by the day’s trauma. Malala of course, the poster child for the machinations of the neoliberal globalists who need to enslave Third World young women to fill their free trade zone factories with Western-education-trafficked slave laborers. So if Stewart delivers the neoliberal agenda on a silver platter, who ordered the show-stopper?