Few pundits are as worthy of being ignored as Jon Stewart, Mary Trump and Tucker Carlson. Unfortunately, they imposed themselves on my consciousness, which really is needed elsewhere, by turning on each other for saying things one or more of them didn’t like. In doing so, they again drew my attention to the unethical habits of people who should not have the influence on public opinion that they do.

I briefly and reluctantly defended Tucker Carlson against hypocritical critiques from the Left that there was something unseemly about his interviewing Vladamir Putin, when liberal journalists have been interviewing various international villains for decades without similar criticism. It’s the typical double standards tactic that we now see constantly from our corrupt punditry. Jon Stewart piled on in his return to Comedy Central, where he again is posing as a comedian playing a pundit and a pundit doing comedy simultaneously. Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” act is tedious and obnoxious as well as corrosive: I hold him responsible for the all-progressive political propaganda organs that the late night talk shows have become, dividing the country by taking the unsustainable position that only conservatives are ridiculous.

Stewart also should be held responsible for further lowering the civic literacy of the younger generations, who regard him as a trustworthy source of news, and he is not. Stewart chooses which items to talk about according to what he thinks his leftward fans will laugh at, not what they need to know. As a comedian, he does not feel any obligation to be fair or to include facts that might weaken his jokes. He would have no obligation, except that he aspires to be taken seriously when he wants to be.

Stewart’s criticism of Carlson’s Big Russian Adventure was to begin by making fun of the Fox News refugee’s face while he interviewed Putin—old school comedy, cheap and unethical ad hominem punditry.

“It’s not really a straight face so much as you try to convey a mixture of what appears to be shame, arousal and I’m gonna say irregularity. For instance, like you’re constipated while jerking off to a Sears catalogue.”

Stay classy, Jon. Then it was clown nose off time, as Stewart made a valid point about Carlson’s much-maligned (and deservedly so) gushing over the clean Russian subways (which have been noted with irony at least since Kay Thomposn’s “Eloise in Moscow,” a children’s book published in 1959) and grocery stores during a videoed tour of Moscow. When Carslon said, moronically, that his Moscow supermarket bill of $104 would cost about $400 in the United States (See? Biden inflation bad!). Stewart interjected that “$104 for groceries sounds like a great bargain unless you realize Russians earn less than $200 a week.” Bingo! “But here’s the reality,” Stewart added. “You fucking know all this because you aren’t as dumb as your face would have us believe.”

Ah, the face again. But Stewart is the living embodiment of the pot calling the kettle black.

Stewart, however, found himself on the defensive when he was criticized by Mary Trump, who easily is the worst hypocrite and blight on the national landscape of the three. She is Donald’s niece, and she has made her fame and fortune lately by trading on that relationship along with the mainstream media’s eagerness to elevate to national prominence any “insider” who will trash the former President. Mary is the epitome of a disgruntled relative, having sued her uncle and been sued by him. She has no political or historical expertise, or anything in her experience or education to qualify her for political punditry except that she hates her uncle—and for the Trump Deranged, that’s enough.

Mary Trump attacked Jon Stewart for his comeback debut because he didn’t criticize Trump and Republicans, and only them, suffciently for her biased tastes. At one point, clown-nose-off Stewart pointed out that both Trunp and Biden are too old to be running, saying “What’s crazy is thinking that we are the ones, as voters, who must silence concerns and criticisms. It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voter’s job not to mention them.” Mary later went after Stewart: “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy,” she wrote last week on X, and added adding in a follow-up post: “I know Donald, and the media has to stop with the both sides bullshit.” Spoken like a true totalitarian and progressive hack—and by the way, why is Mary even in this conversation? She knows Donald? She’s his niece, and he’s been very busy his entire life. I “knew” my six uncles like most people know their relatives outside their immediate family, but I didn’t know them really, and none of my nieces, nephews, cousins, uncles and aunts really knew or know me. Mary Trump is a fraudulent authority.

Stewart had a good line in retort to Mary’s claim that it’s the duty of commentators to pick winners and heroes and to slant their messages to the “right side.” “As the famous saying goes, “Democracy dies in discussion,” Stewart said, putting the clown nose back on and pleading that he was just joking.