Jon Stewart knows who's afraid of the Times Square Elmo

Though we’re frequently reminded by the worst people in the world that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” many people still treat feelings like facts. Regarding violent crime, the vibes, often manufactured by partisan media outlets, are paramount to numbers. As we careen toward that presidential election in November, the bad vibes of violent crime have proven invaluable to Republicans, looking to turn good news into bad. After all, crime is down, and shouldn’t that be a good thing?

Using his finely tuned bullshit detector, Jon Stewart used his time at the Daily Show desk tonight to expose the myth of rising violent crime that’s been flooding your uncle’s third-favorite TV show, The Five. By every metric, Stewart says, violent crime is down, even in Donald Trump’s hometown and Fox News’ favorite dystopic hellhole, New York City. Who’s afraid of the Times Square Elmo? Stewart says it’s the same people who keep passing laws to keep guns on the streets and who block any attempt at regulating them.

“The balls of these right-wing mother fuckers talking about how there’s too much gun crime and chaos in our Democratic cities,” he says. “When Republicans are the ones who’ve enabled the flood of illegal weaponry into our cities.”

Pointing out the hypocrisy of Republican lawmakers is about as tired a genre that exists. It’s been The Daily Show’s stock and trade for, dear god, nearly 30 years. But Stewart and his writers stumbled upon a strong monologue, mapping the influx of guns into cities onto the corrosive conservative language surrounding immigration. If this is such a serious problem, why is there a guy in Congress who owns two gun stores that were linked to 25 violent crimes? Because if they can shift blame, they won’t have to take a financial hit from any regulations. That’s right, dear reader, we live in hell.

“93% of the illegal guns used in crimes in New York City aren’t from here,” Stewart says. “The guns come from states like Florida and Georgia and South Carolina where the laws are lax, and trust me, Florida is not sending us their best guns. They’re bringing guns for drugs and crime and rapists, and some, I assume, are good guns. Try as we might to put up some border controls to stem this invasion, this flood of literally undocumented weapons, Republicans fight every attempt to bring some kind of order and even pass laws to increase the chaos.”

Yes, it’s maddening to hear the legislators who oppose even studying the effects of gun violence talk about gun violence with such righteous cynicism. That we can’t elicit this kind of fervor over, say, school shootings makes it all the more infuriating. But, as he often does, with nothing more than a quickly improving Jerry Lewis impression and a bing and a bong, Stewart harnassed that frustration and turned it into catharsis.