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Jon Stewart’s last Daily Show warning: “Bullshit is everywhere”

Caroline Framke
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.

While Jon Stewart himself didn’t say all that much during a night dedicated to sending off Jon Stewart, he did manage to squeeze in one final speech to warn his viewers against a societal scourge.

“Bullshit,” he declared, “is everywhere.”

He went on to call out everything from iTunes to banks to Super PACs to the Patriot Act. Since the speech ran for only a couple of minutes, there wasn’t a whole lot of time to go in depth on much, like how “we cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats, who are going to come for our guns.” Instead, this was a summation of everything Stewart had stood for in his 16-plus years hosting the show.

Still, Stewart took this time in between getting lightly roasted by his staff and his last moment of Zen by leaving his audience with these final words of warning on the prevalence of bullshit: “If you smell something, say something.”

The New York Times’s Dave Itzkoff took his best shot at transcribing the full speech.

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