“Not everybody that voted for Trump is a racist,” he explained. “I don’t give a f*ck what any of you say to me. You can yell it at me, you can tweet it at me. They’re not all racists. Or they’re not giving tacit support to a racist system … We all give tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don’t affect us that badly.”
First of all - if we are all giving tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don't affect us that badly then, by definition, people who voted for Trump are giving tacit support to that system. You can't say, "They aren't doing X, we're all doing X" and have it be true. You can only say "They may be doing X but we all do forms of X in some way."
However, in addition there is a difference between being complicit in supporting things that hurt others - like buying an iPhone - and voting to make the President of one of the most powerful nations (if not the most powerful nation) a man who openly talks about minorities and women the way Trump does. To me, Stewart's argument is a false equivalency. People who voted for an openly sexist and racist fuck are not the same as people who turn a blind eye to the abuses of people in a country far away from them. While the first doesn't make the second right, the second doesn't prevent the first from tacitly supporting racism and sexism. (Notice Stewart conveniently left off sexism in his statement - I love Jon but he definitely made my Feminist self want to say STFU a few times and, yes, by continuing to watch him I supported his sexism.) Stewart is basically saying "they aren't racist cause nobody's perfect."
Furthermore, his example of first responders who voted for Trump shows a deep lack of understanding of racism. You don't have to be burning crosses and refusing to serve people of color to be racist - you can even have friends of color and be racist just as you can be married and sexist! In addition, many of those first responders may have become actively racist (against Muslims) since 9-11.
The truth of the matter is that people who voted for Trump heard him say racist and sexist things and they decided that they were OK with that. They didn't stay home and just not vote or vote for a third party (which is what the non-racist anti-Hillary people did) - they made a conscious choice to vote for Trump. It is not like he had well thought out proposals for solving all the problems he claimed he would solve such that people could say "Well, his racist and sexist BS is a problem but 5 point plan to do x will really improve things in this country." He said he was going to drain the swamp and, without him giving a single example of how he would do that (i.e., I'll appoint so and so as Secretary of X because so and so is not part of Washington and has these bonafide qualifications), decided that made all of the negative stuff not matter. Bull shit.
(I'd like to see Larry Wilmore explain this to Jon.)
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