Jon Stewart uses the racist Oklahoma frat chant to show conservatives racism isn't dead

There is no excuse for the horrible, racist, caught-on-video chant by a group of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) frat members on a bus, said Jon Stewart on Wednesday night's Daily Show — unless you were on MSNBC Wednesday morning, when "Morning Joe" Scarborough and some of his conservative guests argued that the University of Oklahoma frat bros were only using words they heard on the rap music they purchase.

Stewart was having none of it. "The kids on that bus weren't repeating a rap song that they'd heard," he said, "they were gleefully performing one of their fraternity's old... let's call them anti-Negro spirituals." Also, Stewart added: "How come when conservatives talk about African-Americans, they say, 'These people need to take responsibility for themselves, pull up their pants, get a job' — but when white people do something racist, they're all, 'Well, you can't blame them, how could those poor children know wrong from right after being driven to madness by the irresistible power of the hippity-hoppety'?"

And this was the larger point Stewart was steering toward: Conservative media outlets try to argue both that racism has been reduced to a string of isolated incidents, and that other, actual isolated incidents are symptomatic of huge attacks on their viewers' way of life. "I guess in Fox world," he said, "poverty is a choice, but being racist is a product of your environment." Watch below. —Peter Weber

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