In September 2010, Jon Stewart, then the popular host of The Daily Show, sat behind his desk and held up a bright yellow poster. On it were scrawled the words: “I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler.”
The idea behind the poster was simple. Stewart was arguing that some 70 to 80 percent of Americans were being overruled in the political realm by a small percentage of extremists. This argument was the thesis for what would become the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, an event Stewart co-hosted later that October with fellow Comedy Central star Steven Colbert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in front of an estimated crowd of 215,000. “This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear,” Stewart proclaimed. “They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.”
