Comedian Jon Stewart, in a recent appearance on "The Daily Show," inadvertently illustrated the underlying difference between those on the left and right.
It happened during a bizarre diatribe about businessman Elon Musk’s recent appearance with former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
During his monologue, Stewart went on the typical leftist rant about how horrible Musk is for supporting the Orange Man What Is Bad™. But of particular interest to the host was Musk’s comments about free speech and the Second Amendment.
“The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech,” Musk said during the rally. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy. That’s why it’s the First Amendment.”
Musk then said, “The Second Amendment is meant to protect the First Amendment,” a statement that seemed to bother Stewart.
“Guns don't protect our free speech. Our free speech is protected by the consent of the governed laid out through the Constitution,” Stewart replied on the show. “It's not based on the threat of violence. It's based on elections, organizing referendums, a judicial system.”
Stewart continued, doing his best to argue against the notion that the protection of our rights could require guns:
Our social contract offers many, many avenues to remedy these issues and allows sides to be heard and adjudicated. Guns, from what I can tell, seem to mostly protect the speech of the people holding the gun. It's a tool of intimidation…It is a tool of intimidation, and one that I think is actually being irresponsibly and recklessly invoked because some people in your crowd thought they might have been shadow banned by Facebook. I mean, for God sakes, you guys are in Butler, Pennsylvania. The whole reason you're there is because some a**h**e with an AR-15 tried to permanently litigate his vision of this country's free speech. That's why you're there. The whole point of a society is guns don't decide it.
To those who understand the Constitution and the reason why the Second Amendment was included, Stewart’s ramblings sound like the incoherent ignorance that it is. But I’d suggest there is something deeper here.
Stewart’s pronouncements about free speech and the right to keep and bear arms is certainly ignorant. But it also highlights an underlying difference between how those on the left and right think when it comes to government and liberty.
For starters, the Second Amendment exists for when pursuing the avenues Stewart brings up are no longer effective or available to the governed. It’s for when the Constitution and Stewart’s supposed “social contract” fails to stop the government from steamrolling over our rights. The same principles were true in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. The colonists did not immediately resort to violence against the British; rather, they pursued diplomatic efforts to address their grievances.
The colonists submitted petitions, like the Olive Branch Petition in 1775, expressing loyalty to King George III while requesting the repeal of oppressive laws and recognition of their rights. The Declaration of Rights and Grievances in 1774 objected to taxation without representation, and called for the repeal of the Crown’s oppressive mandates and decrees. The British government rejected these pleas.
In addition to petitions, the colonies employed political resistance through their local assemblies, passing resolutions that challenged British authority. For example, the Virginia Resolves and similar actions across the colonies aimed to push back against Parliament’s control by rejecting taxation without representation.
It was only after these efforts failed that the colonies decided to use violent force to throw off the yoke of the British Empire.
The same applies today. There aren’t many who are advocating for taking up arms against the government currently. But the Second Amendment is intended to ensure that if the state becomes too tyrannical, we the people have a way to fight back.
The difference between folks like Jon Stewart and those who understand the concept of liberty is that he places his faith in the government and its systems. He seems to believe that our form of government will automatically protect us from unconstitutional violations of our liberty despite the Mount Everest of evidence to the contrary.
Conversely, those who see that the government has already disregarded the Constitution on countless occasions understand that the document is not worth the paper on which it is written if we have leaders who routinely ignore it. What happens when government leaders simply decide to give up all pretense of adhering to our nation’s founding document? What happens to Stewart’s beloved “social contract” then?
Well, that’s when the Second Amendment becomes necessary to protect our First Amendment rights, as well as the others laid out in the Bill of Rights. This is what Stewart’s ilk does not seem to understand. The Framers understood that government is never to be trusted blindly, nor should it ever be powerful enough to encroach on our natural rights. Unfortunately, this concept has been lost on far too many Americans.
