A sneering Jon Stewart on Monday wondered, “When was America great?” The former Daily Show host appeared with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago and mocked conservatives. Connecting Donald Trump to the right, the comedian lectured, “He makes sense if you view it through the prism of talk radio.... Republicans, conservatives love America. They just hate, like, 50 percent of the people living in it.”

On the subject of political correctness, Stewart dismissed, “When was America great? What is this time that he speaks of? ‘81 to ‘82? Like, what are we talking about? And who took your country away from you?”

“Who's country is it? Take up the argument with the Founders. Take it up with the Age of Reason. All men are created equal. That's fucked the whole thing up.” This was proceeded by Stewart’s attempt to seemingly explain the good and bad kind of political correctness:

JON STEWART: And the trigger points to me seem to be on one side grounded in a certain reality of life that only those with no experience or empathy to what those with individuals are going through or having and the other seems to be a clinging to a societal paradigm that just doesn't exist anymore and probably never did.

Of course, this is the same person who joked about Dick Cheney’s “torture boner” and called the late Robert Novak a “vampire demon.” So, clearly, venom is okay some of the time.

The introduction was typical of the fawning praise Stewart gets from liberals. Student Jenny Keroack compared the comic to Shakespeare: “I wrote my application essay comparing Jon to a Shakespearian fool in both the ability to speak truth to power and his position as interpreter and voice for the audience.”

A partial transcript is below: