The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Late Night
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Late-Night
How Jon Stewart’s greatest joke went right over everybody’s head.
(Note: This is a rough draft. It needs a lot of formatting work, revision, fact-checking, and embedded evidence. Still, it’s March 9th, a little after 9, and I need to start getting my brain ready for bed. Obviously, I don’t expect an immediate response from the show or anyone else. I’ll come back to this later in the week to work on it.)
Chapter One: Performing Satire in a Post-Truth Future
When Jon Stewart returned to host The Daily Show in 2024, he embarked on the single most audacious—and utterly necessary—piece of political and media satire that late-night television had ever seen. On his third show back behind the desk, Stewart signed off with a passionate, tearful, and gripping eulogy for his beloved and just-departed dog, Dipper. A three-legged rescue pitbull. The light of Jon’s life. That night, Stewart’s grief and eloquence touched the nation—the world, really—and the video of his eulogy was shared and reshared, across the media and social-media landscapes, by journalist, and commentator, and everyday person alike. His speech provoked outpourings of sympathy and support from the countless millions who praised the beauty and vulnerability of Jon’s words in that moment: a moment profoundly human pain. Tens of thousands of dollars in donations poured in, providing much-needed resources for the shelter where Jon had adopted Dipper a dozen years earlier. The public discourse around pet adoption was revitalized, and animal welfare advocates rallied to the need. The world mourned with Jon. We saw ourselves in his love. In his loss.
And it was all bullshit.
Well, okay. Maybe not all of it. Jon does seem to like dogs. And it certainly seems likely that any donated money really did go to a no-kill animal shelter, and that those funds really were used toward the declared animal welfare purposes.
However…
The world-famous story of Dipper? That adorable, three-legged, rescue dog, who died the day before the show? The compelling personal details that Jon told us that night? The pain he showed us, and our society’s collective response to Jon’s tribute video?
That part was a bunch of bullshit.
(Probably.)
Phase I: The Premise
Or, at least…it would appear to have been a bunch of bullshit, based on a careful examination of the evidence available to me at this point.
Admittedly, it’s possible that I’m wrong. There are at least some reasonable explanations that could leave Stewart completely innocent in the convoluted story I’m about to tell in this article.
Nevertheless, something doesn’t add up with this whole story. Many things, really, as I’ll explain in what follows. Someone appears to be messing with all of us, either to sow chaos just for love of the game…or (I hope): to prove an important point about the present configuration and limitations of our society and our information ecosystem. In fact, given the likely scope and importance of the social and political implications at play with this whole story, my money is on Jon Stewart having a pretty good plan and a well-organized team operating behind the scenes.
He usually has his eye on the ball.
Of course, there’s a fairly self-evident question you’re probably asking yourself right about now: why on Earth would anyone attempt to mislead the public about the story of Jon Stewart’s dead dog?
Well, that question points directly at the fundamental underlying purpose of social and political satire in the first place. As I’ve already suggested, I don’t think Stewart is just pranking us for the sake of being a dick. Or in order to feel superior. Far from it. In my reading of things, the genesis of this whole wild stunt, from the beginning, was the urgent need to publicly address some truly critical questions before us, including:
How do we, as a society, collectively determine what’s true these days? How much do we all just implicitly trust the people we see on the TV, or on our phones? That is to say: if someone like Jon Stewart—a charismatic, popular, truly funny public figure, with a reputation for integrity, a gift for storytelling, experience as a professional actor, and a generationally-iconic status as a brilliant fake newsman—sat down behind a TV-studio desk one night, and he looked directly into the camera, and he just brazenly lied to the world about the most basic of facts of his personal experiences…well…would anyone ever check his story?
Or would we all just get carried away with sharing and responding to an exceptionally re-postable, emotionally cathartic story? After all…what I’m suggesting is preposterous. I mean…surely…nobody would ever lie to the public like that. Surely nobody would ever manipulate our emotions in such a galling manner. And even if someone were inclined to prank the public in such a manner, well…surely some unspecific constellation of media-landscape fact-checkers, or some obsessive critic of that person, or at least someone out there, would notice such a deception, and call it out publicly. Right?
Now, if I’m right about this whole scheme, then the stunt also raises some important corollaries, including: if anyone did try to check this person’s story…how would they even go about doing it? What would be their freely-available tools, and what would be potential sources of confirmation, contradiction, or confusion?
And, perhaps most chillingly: if a powerful, well-connected, well-organized, intelligent, wealthy, credible public figure ever were inclined to lie to us all…well, then…how successfully could such a person cover his tracks? Who could he recruit to the conspiracy, and how thoroughly could they string us all along? What damage could they do to the historical record, or to the public understanding of, or discourse around, basic facts that aren’t even on their surface politically or economically charged (though I think you’ll start to see the potential if he’d chosen another site of intervention).
Now, the scenario I’m going to lay out in this article, and the evidence I’ll present, might seem a little terrifying in some ways. That’s a reasonable response. This whole thing is a little dystopian, perhaps, in certain regards. It’s a scenario that’s just begging to be abused by nefarious political actors. In fact, it probably already has been abused, if perhaps not quite so cinematically as this incident. Jon Stewart is a TV host. There are quite a lot of people out there with a great deal more power and money than Stewart, who do not have nearly his ethical framework or good intentions. It’s almost certainly for the best that Stewart was the one to pull this stunt off.
Admittedly, I’ve never met Stewart in person, or spoken with him, even if I’ve been a great supporter of his work and his vision for decades now. So, I could be wrong about him. But I don’t think so. I truly believe Jon Stewart is messing with all of us, in order to prove a necessary point: that we as a society need to fundamentally reshape and reform how we acquire, verify, and share information—including by insisting on a healthy skepticism of exactly those people or stories that we are most psychologically predisposed to trust. And the responsibility for working toward a healthier information ecosystem rests on all of us.
Especially those of us in the media, journalism, and political arenas, some of whom might well be fundamentally neglecting the ethical duty toward the truth, as we pursuit of upvotes, re-shares, and the all-important currency of the present cultural moment: emotional attention.
We’re in a tough spot these days when it comes to news and truth.
Luckily for all of us…just when we needed Jon Stewart the most, he was right where he was supposed to be: looking into a camera, ready to call us all out on our collective bullshit, and to wake us up to the urgency of the informational crisis we must now come together to address.
Two years ago, the most insightful political satirist and media critic of his generation looked out on a society in need, amidst the turmoil of technological and cultural changes we had not yet begun to comprehend, and he had a few things to say.
Even if the whole damn world missed the joke until today.
A Rambling Aside—Some Limitations and Disclaimers:
Before we go any further, I need to set some parameters of this whole discussion, because this story is going to get absolutely wild. So, to be clear on a few points:
A: I fully believe that Jon Stewart (and his apparently numerous co-conspirators) all had altruistic aims with this whole stunt. Importantly, I do not think they did anything illegal, or even unethical. As I’ve said, I think their overall purpose was to call our collective attention to certain urgent problems within our information and media landscape—in other words: to highlight how certain patterns in our norms of public discourse fundamentally undermine our society’s ability to establish a shared sense of truth and reality—and therefore to address the challenges ahead of us. That may sound a little grandiose for a late-night TV stunt. But if you stick with me, I think you’ll see what I’m getting at. All of this is very unsettling. And it has been a very necessary correction.
B: In addition…yes, I do hear myself. I understand that a lot of this story is going to sound crazy at first. Fair enough. I’m used to that by now, as you’ll probably see if you poke around my website or check out my book. I have…a lot…more to say on the subject of being perceived as crazy. But that’ll have to wait, because we have a lot of ground to cover. So, to be clear: I do understand how and why certain terms (like paranoia, delusionality, psychosis, ideas of reference, conspiracy theory, mania, and more) might seem, at first glance, to apply to the wild tale I plan to tell you in this series of articles. Quite obviously, this story is literally about a vast and intricate conspiracy that I believe has been orchestrated and executed, right under the public’s nose—kept hidden in plain sight for more than two years. Furthermore, I should admit that I do have a history of mental illness, and that I believe quite a few things that most people would not agree with, and which my doctors do not support (as detailed in my book). It’s possible that this whole thing is a detailed exploration of mental illness and sleep-deprivation—though, to be clear, I do not think that’s the case. Time will tell, I suppose. Nevertheless, the wild theory that I offer in this article does not require that I also be proven right about my other strange beliefs. Even if I’m wrong about everything else, I still do think that something deeply, fundamentally, unsettlingly weird is going on here, when it comes to the story of Jon Stewart’s dead dog.
C: I also recognize that I may well turn out to be wrong about certain parts of this story, even perhaps large parts, or elements to which I am emotionally attached. So, don’t worry: I do not think I am immune to critique, nor do I think that my theory should be considered immune to disproof. An unfalsifiable theory is inherently suspect. I am deeply imperfect, just like everyone else, even if I think I’m onto something real here. Humans are prone to motivated and emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, self-importance, and sunk-cost fallacies. I have gaps in my knowledge, and especially in my technical expertise when it comes to some of this, so I’ll try to be open about the areas where I could use advice from people who know better. For much of what I will present, I can certainly think of alternative explanations, including mistakes, misunderstandings, coincidences, or even simply insufficient research on my part. For instance, a decent portion of the sources I link in here are, in my opinion, rather questionable. Nevertheless, it
D: In this first article, I aim to provide an overview of my theory, and to offer some illustrative and interesting evidence. I will not cover everything. Not even close. I could write a whole book on this topic, and I’m still discovering new tendrils all the time. In fact, given the role of generative AI in the contemporary internet, I suspect that the scope of the evidence continues to expand, through the very act of my continuing research (which I’ll explain in more detail in a bit). In short, I do not claim to be able to concretely prove the totality of what I suspect Stewart and his conspirators have been doing these past two years, even though I will lay out my suspicions, along with some selected evidence (on which I’ll elaborate in future posts). I hope to hear from others throughout this process, and to improve my understanding of the situation, even if some of my evidence or theory is ultimately undercut.
E: Even if I’m right about this grand conspiracy, and Jon Stewart has indeed been lying to the world about his dog Dipper, I still do not doubt Stewart’s compassion or concern for animals. Whatever else is going on, Jon Stewart truly does seem to be an earnest advocate for the welfare of rescue animals, particularly dogs. Further, it does at least appear that Jon once owned a three-legged rescue pitbull, at least until relatively recently. That adorable tripod dog has not been seen in public for a couple of years now, so it may well have died…however, it’s also worth noting that Stewart owns an animal-sanctuary farm in New Jersey, so the dog could easily be living its best life on the farm, far away from cameras and the messy chaos of the big city. The world would be none the wiser. Still, if that three-legged dog did, in fact, pass away sometime shortly before Jon’s public eulogy, back in February, 2024, then Jon has my sincere condolences. And my apologies for any pain this piece may cause him. Even if I still don’t think he’s telling the truth about the whole story.
So, with all of that said…let’s talk about the rest of Jon Stewart’s Greatest Joke.
(Fair warning: this is a long walk.)
Phase II: The Setup
We’ll begin our journey on February 24th, 2024, with Jon Stewart’s touching eulogy for his beloved dog Dipper, a speech that echoed around the world, and moved millions to tears. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should definitely give it watch. Jon is eloquent, tearful, and deeply relatable on a human level, as he shares his grief and vulnerability with the public. The video is titled “Jon Stewart Remembers his Best Boy Dipper.”
In case the video isn’t working for you for some reason, here’s the basic the story that Jon tells:
· “So I know we’re only three episodes into this, but if you’ll indulge me, I wanted to tell you a little bit of a story.”
· Twelve or thirteen years prior (so 2011 or 2012), Jon’s children wanted to raise some money for an animal shelter called Animal Haven.
· The kids were six or seven years old, so they made cupcakes to sell.
· While at Animal Haven, the family met and instantly fell in love with Dipper, a one(ish)-year-old brindle pitbull, who had already lost his right leg when he’d been hit by a car.
· Of Dipper, Jon says through tears: “In a world of good boys, he was the best.”
· Dipper used to come to the Daily Show’s studio every day, and interacted with other dogs: Parker, Kweli, Riot.
· Dipper met all manner of people, including frighting Malala Yousafzeh.
· Dipper died the day before the broadcast (so he died on February 25th, 2024).
· “He was ready. He was tired.”
· “But I wasn’t [ready]. The family, we were all together…we were all with him.”
· “My wish for you is: one day you find that dog. That one dog. That just…is the best.”
· Jon closes by throwing to clip of Dipper, frolicking in the snow.
Now, this story of the dearly departed Dipper is both detailed and powerful. It would, at least at first, seem to reflect genuine, serious, underlying emotional distress and mourning from Jon. And both Jon and other staff at The Daily Show would tell basically that same story again, both in subsequent interviews and in social media posts. The world ate it up.
After all, who would lie about something like that?
Who, indeed.
Still, there were some hints already, fairly early on in this whole saga, that certain elements were inconsistent, or at least a little eyebrow-raising. For instance, here are three such strange elements that would shake out:
First: during his initial eulogy, Stewart indicates that Dipper was a great friend and playmate to the other dogs, and interacted with them regularly, especially Riot (a statement Jon later repeated in subsequent interviews). So I find it at least at little strange that there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of such dog-dog studio interactions captured in the show’s social media history, on any platform. There’s even a whole separate Daily Show Dogs entity online, and there’s not a lot of preexisting media of Dipper with the other dogs, especially Riot. Such photos or videos may exist, to be fair, even if I haven’t seen many. Given that this three-legged good-boy was supposedly quite sociable with other pups and was pretty much the boss’s best friend, for at least the last few years of his first stint as host…it seems at least a little odd that there’s not a huge catalogue of doggie playtime online.
Second: as I’ve said, Stewart took up the habit of repeating the story of Dipper’s life and death in various TV and Podcast interviews. But the details were sometimes inconsistent. As just one example: during Stewart’s fascinating discussion with former Daily Show host Trevor Noah, as a guest on Noah’s What Now? podcast that June, Stewart again reminisced about Dipper—however, in this case he described meeting Dipper “at a shelter down on Crosby Street”. Rather famously, the shelter in question is Animal Haven, which Google Maps shows to be on Centre Street, not Crosby. Yes, it’s possible this was a simple slip-up. But that seems a little unlikely to me, since the Stewart family claims to have been working closely with Animal Haven for many years already, including going down there in person, many times, in order to volunteer with the animals directly, to help with the shelter’s fundraising events, and to adopt and/or foster additional animals. So it seems weird that Stewart would make that mistake here. As far as I can tell, Animal Haven hasn’t moved, although I suppose that’s also possible.
Third: in the eulogy video, Jon fights through tears to say of Dipper: “in a world of good boys, he was the best.” That certainly might be true. However…just a few weeks before the whole Dipper story exploded, back on February 9th, The Daily Show posted to TikTok a video tited “Jon Stewart and his Beloved Dog: A Heartwarming Bond,” with the floating text: Jon’s Best Friend. But it’s not a video of Dipper. It’s a video of another Daily Show office dog, named Riot. At the end of the video, Stewart passionately hugs this other dog, Riot, as he declares “you’re my best friend,” while pretending to break down into tears. All of which certainly casts the whole Dipper video into a bit of a different light, if you ask me. (Worth noting here: Stewart staged and posted this initial crying-over-my-beloved-best-friend video with Riot the week before he even actually started hosting again. So, if Jon is indeed messing with all of us to prove a point, then I’d say it would seem not only that he’s been working on the prank since the very beginning, but also that he even deliberately telegraphed the stunt ahead of time, to see if anyone was paying close attention, and to make us all feel even sillier in hindsight).
Anyway. There’s a lot more I could say on this part, but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. And what I just laid out should serve at least to illustrate the overall point here: that the basic details and timeline of Dipper’s story have been inconsistent from the beginning—as has the apparent seriousness of Jon’s publicly-posted videos of tearful celebrations of his beloved canine best friends.
It’s possible that there are innocent explanations here. But it’s starting to look pretty suspect.
Worth noting: this Riot video was posted before Stewart’s actual return to the desk, which might suggest that this whole thing was already in the works from the get-go.
Phase III: Doubling Down
One of the core pillars of this whole plan was to actively spread confusion and disinformation, and to muddy as much as possible the public record on the underlying truth of the story of Jon Stewart and his dog. One aspect of that endeavor was to make the Dipper video go as viral as humanly possible: to create a piece of short-form content that would short-circuit our logical and critical brains, and make us want to share and respond to the emotional story as much possible, before anyone thought to check the underly facts. That’s pretty clear from the video itself: a tearful eulogy for a three-legged rescue dog, and a wish for the viewer to share such a love in their own life, ending with a clip of that tripod puppy frolicking in the snow. Objective achieved on that front. I don’t know if Team Stewart artificially manipulated the algorithms, or how far-reaching their initial conspiracy was (as in, which media outlets or social platforms were willing participants from the beginning, stacking the deck). But it hardly mattered. Team Stewart made a video that was going to absolutely viral, absolutely globally, absolutely instantly—and stay that way for days. Everyone would see it. Everyone would talk about it. Everyone would remember it. Everyone would want to support Stewart in his moment of pain.
Which also meant, rather serendipitously, that the Dipper eulogy video, even without any artificial algorithmic tomfoolery, would—by its very nature—provoke millions, indeed billions, of individual posts, responses, reshares, videos, shorts, gifs, hashtags, photos, webpages, articles, and every damn other form of data-point that exists on the web. And all of that data would be conveying essentially the exact same story that Stewart had just told, along with a tsunami of emotional intensifiers and endorsements in the form of upvotes, emojis, moving music, and the like. Meaning that, almost instantaneously: the Dipper Eulogy story and copies thereof would represent an overwhelmingly controlling share of high-priority search engine results whenever anyone casually looked for details. And, as a consequence: the algorithmic networking that takes us automatically from linked item, to linked item, to linked item in our endless scrolling—and which now also makes up a substantial portion of the input-data for all those those top-level AI-generated summaries we get when we search for something—would also be overwhelmingly dominated by the information and story contained in Stewart’s video eulogy for Dipper.
Even though that story was a lie.
But Team Stewart was nowhere close to done. I don’t know the exact timing or extent of it all, but they appear to have actively spread additional false and conflicting information across a great many platforms and media, including the eventual recruitment of people working for major media outlets, social platforms, and information brokers of many varieties. Again, I don’t know how long this all took to set up, or if was in part done piecemeal after-the-fact. But, in sum, I suspect them of beginning with three key forms of falsification:
1) Team Stewart appears to have arranged to spread multiple, conflicting, false stories about the biographies of the Stewart family and of their pets (including the number, physical description, and names of those pets), including through directly lying during news and podcast interviews. Then they amplified it all through puppet accounts—basically astroturfing with bad information, doctored or mislabeled images, and misleading social media posts. And I think they set up a fair number of generative-AI blog-style websites, with plausible-sounding names, and back-dated posts, in order to mass-produce and disseminate that same false information. (However, it’s also possible that this last bit is just the general enshittification of our present information climate, and that it was always going to happen that way).
2) Team Stewart appears to have recruited other outlets to the cause, including legitimate media outlets, social platforms, and publishers. These allies seem to have then gone back and retroactively changed some of their own content to enhance the confusion and deception. to back-date certain posts, or to retroactively edit existing ones to conform to the new stories that they were trying to tell, in order to obfuscate further the situation. (Worth noting: it is, of course, difficult for me to say whether the actors at these outlets were rogue individual rogue employees, senior officials, or simply people acting innocently to correct posts that were found to be out-of-step with the new narrative. Indeed, it’s possible that, to some extent, the process of retroactive edits was done automatically at these sites. But I think it was deliberate.)
3) Team Stewart also, at least seems to have actively sabotaged certain archival mechanisms and database on the web, by intentionally saving/uploading falsified archival versions of the pages in question, including deceptive metadata. I really don’t know how the mechanics of this effort work, so I’m less confident in it. But, from what I can tell, it would seem to be possible to maliciously undermine and modify many of these archival efforts.
I know that all this sounds bonkers. Nevertheless, I think it’s basically true. To illustrate what I mean, let’s review the existing evidence available online, in an attempt to get to the truth of a relatively straightforward question: what are, or were, the names of Jon Stewart’s pets, including the dog that he eulogized as Dipper?
not just out for deception: they were out to cause deliberate confusion However, that was just the beginning. Team Stewart also seems to have proactively sought out co, would also be pulling, and thatWhat I’m going to present here is a partial list of what I could find, and it immediately became clear that the record was rather inconsistent as to what Jon Stewart’s dogs’ names were.
But we’re going to leap ahead a few months, to a particularly strange interview that Jon Stewart did with Scott Van Pelt of ESPN, on July 29th, 2024.
After a general discussion of their love of dogs and their shared experience of loss, we get an interesting moment, in which Stewart describes the pet situation at his house:
Stewart initially says that he has four dogs: “Barkly, Smudge, Dipper, and then Scout. Barkly and Smudge were two small dogs that they already had when they picked up Dipper. They weren’t even expecting to get a third dog until they fell in love with Dipper, and then once they moved out to New Jersey (in 2013), they picked up Scout.
Stewart then says they lost “Sparkles” (maybe he mumbles “Barkles?”) to cancer “five years ago.” And then they just had the three dogs until they found a fourth dog, Toby, while on an island vacation (timing unspecified).
Then, Stewart says, Dipper passes away on February 25th, 2024, followed a month and a half later, by the tragic death of Smudge (so approx. April 15th ?). Shockingly, soon thereafter, Scout required lung cancer surgery. Stewart declares it to have been a brutal four months (though at the time it was actually five months, based on when this was recorded).
In reflection, Jon offers some somber musings on the challenges and responsibilities of being the owner of an ailing pet in its last days: “It’s such a difficult dance, when you know they’re suffering, and you know that you have power of attorney…I wish I’d caught it a day sooner…he had a bad last night…if I had a more rational, less emotional thinker would have known, I still feel guilty about that last night…the only regret I have is that I didn’t get to spare him those hours of what looked like agony.” The discussion concludes with Van Pelt and Stewart reflecting on the close and irreplaceable companionship between humans and dogs, and they value they bring to life.
Heavy, powerful, stuff.
However…
If you, like me, find yourself wanting to know a little more about the history of those Stewart family dogs, or perhaps to read more stories about their lives—or even to hear, for instance, how Stewart reacted to the traumatic passing of Smudge, so soon after his jaw-dropping, public remembrance of Dipper…
We’ll, you’re out of luck. You won’t find anything else. (Or at least, I didn’t. There could be someone putting up additional content as we go along here.)
There appears to be very little available online in terms of concrete, confirmable details—aside from this one podcast with Scott Van Pelt—to connect Jon Stewart to a group of dogs named Barkly, Smudge, Scout, or Toby. There are a smattering of articles and pages, and a very strange book by Jon’s wife Tracey (we’ll get there). But, on the whole, the whole record is pretty sparse. As far as I can tell, those names simply do not appear to be the actual names of Jon Stewart’s dogs. Some of those names are instead connected to other people, events, or creative endeavors in Stewart’s past, but not (apparently) to any dogs he owns or used to own. Instead, Barkly appears to be the name of a leash company, and Toby seems to be a reference to a character in Gravity Falls. So does Stan.
Except for “Scout.” Scout would seem to be the name of Governor Tim Walz’ dog, who was about to become the subject of a minor scandal during the month after this Van Pelt podcast aired, after conflicting pictures resurfaced online of the then-VP-candidate Walz with multiple dogs purported to be Scout. Of course, said pictures were dismissed as “debunked conspiracy theory,” and there’s no reason to think Jon Stewart was involved in that whole kerfuffle. It certainly could be a coincidence, but let’s circle back a little later.
This whole thing just gets stranger.
You see, although searching for something like Jon Stewart dog name will return an overwhelming avalanche of stories, pages, and posts about Dipper, those results are almost universally in response to the public eulogy. If, however, you carefully constrain your search parameters to include only results posted online before the airing of The Daily Show on February 26th, 2024…well, the relevant results narrow dramatically, to the point that one can basically make a list that contains a significant chunk of the record.
So, in the next part, I’ll lay out yetin this next section, let’s do something approaching that.
Let’s do our best to make a list of any easily-accessible online sources, prior to Dipper’s Eulogy, that might shed light on a question that sounds relatively straightforward, but that seems impossible to answer question: what are the names of Jon Stewart’s dogs?
So, this raises some strange questions for me: exactly how many dogs does (or did) Jon Stewart have, and what are (or were) their names?
Buckle up, because it’s about to get weird.
Phase IV: Running with the Premise
If we look at the easily-available public information, we are faced with an archive of confusion.
So…what ensued for me at this stage of the journey was an…
Ultimately, what I’ve assembled here is an illustrative sample of the confusion that currently pervades the general record around what should be a relatively simple question: what are the names of Jon Stewart’s dogs, including that three-legged pitbull? And, remember: Jon Stewart himself declared that other dog names in his interview.Yes, it’s possible that he could have renamed them at some point, or one or more could have died, but that’s not the story he tells, and it does not appear to be supported by the online records I’ve been able to find.
In addition: it’s entirely possible that these webpages, posts, and articles have been altered after-the-fact or post-dated to appear that they’ve been this way forever. Google Cache is no longer operational, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine contains inconsistent and often spotty records for many of these pages. On top of which…some of the records that do exist appear to be manually-uploaded backups, or ones assembled piecemeal over multiple visits, rather than ones natively captured by a straightforward process. This situation could introduce the possibility for tampering with the underlying text or images—beyond which, it remains unclear to me whether it’s actually possible for a person to input false or misleading metadata into such records. I would welcome any expert insight here: could a motivated person manipulate the Wayback Machine to contain false or misleading records? It certainly seems so to me, but I’m open to the fact that I may be wrong.
An Illustrative List:
· 16 November 2006: A profile of Stewart and Colbert in Rolling Stone includes that Stewart says one dog is named Shamsky.
· 1 November 2010: Here’s a page from some sort of animal advocacy blog, describing Stewart as having two pitbulls, named Shamsky and Monkey.
· 17 June 2012: A Daily Caller article, criticizing Stewart for conducting real estate behind two limited-purpose trusts: the “Stanley Monkey Trust” (named after the cat and one dog), and the “Shamsky Monkey Trust” (Named after the first two pitbulls).
· 6 May 2013: An article from the Daily Mail, naming the pitbulls as Champ (the tripod), Shamsky, and Monkey.
· 6 May 2013: An article from E! News, naming the three-legged dog Champ.
· 7 June 2013: A Yahoo News Canada blog post (“The Juice”), indicates that the three-legged dog is named Little Dipper. Not Dipper, but Little Dipper. Per the Internet Archive, it was snapshotted once in 2022 (which seems a little sparse tbh for a YAHOO page). But here’s the thing: you can actually go and manually upload a post-dated backup of a page, so this whole thing is fucked. Yeah…something’s super fucky here. The URL of the backed-up page doesn’t match. WTF.
o There’s an inconsistency there with the URL if you scroll down and then back up. There’s an additional “OMG” when you scroll down and then back up.
o The Internet Archive doesn’t have any backups of the OMG article.
o ALSO: Though a version of the webpage was saved to the wayback machine, if you go and actually look, the page was not truly CRAWLED AND ARCHIVED in 2022. The saved version was just uploaded manually at some point.
· 28 June 2013: An article from Time’s newsfeed that refers to one of his dogs as Baby Hope Diamond (assuming that’s Stewart’s dog, which it appears to be)
· 23 May 2014: An article from The Dodo, again, naming the three-legged dog as “Champ”:
· 28 May 2014: An article from Hollywood.com names the dogs Shamsky and Monkey.
· 11 Feb 2015: Another animal blog of some kind, naming the three-legged dog as Champ, and the others to be Shamsky, Monkey, and Baby. Also, a cat named Stan.
· 1 June 2015: News.com.au article describing the three-legged dog as “Champ”
· 6 August 2015: An article from Business Insider. referring to the three-legged dog as Champ.
· 27 Oct 2017: A Facebook post from “Salt Lake County Pit Crew,” naming the three pitbulls as Champ, Shamsky, and Monkey.
· 18 November 2017: A random dog-blog post that names Shamsky and Monkey, but calls the three-legged dog “Little Dipper”. (Not just Dipper.)
· 30 April 2019: An article from NY Jewish Week, with a Shamsky bio, mentioning the dog named after him.
· 30 Jun 2019: A biographical article on Art Shamsky, from the baseball website SABR.org, echoing the story that Stewart named one of his dogs Shamsky.
· 24 August 2020: Daily Show Dogs Facebook post indicates that Riot exists. Seems to be the same dog from the other post.
· 26 September 2020: A “Hollywood Insider” article (I’m not familiar, but whatever) that calls the dog Little Dipper. Rather sketchy internet archive records, IMO. Indexed Sept 3 2025. There’s a corresponding youtube video that has a new AI audio track and posted subtitles (both of which can be done after-the-fact).
· 11 October 2021: An article from Patch noting the real-estate use of the “Shamsky Monkey Trust”
· 9 Feb 2024: Daily Show TikTok posts a video of Jon with his Best Friend (who is not Dipper/Champ)
· 26 February 2024: Deadline has the Dipper Tribute story on the 26th at 8:46pm, complete with full quotes and embedded youtube video…which is odd, because that video didn’t get posted to Youtube until the following day. Maybe they had someone at the taping and then went back to update the post, but didn’t mark any edits?
· Undated: Stewart’s IMDB “Trivia” page lists that two of his pitbulls as Shamsky and Monkey.
Nevertheless…
Ultimately, whether the three-legged dog’s name is Dipper, or Little Dipper, or Lil’ Dipper, or Champ, there’s a great deal of confusion in the information available online in casual sources, and—whatever the underlying truth of the name may be—it certainly appears that someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble to obfuscate the issue and contaminate the public record.
And, setting aside our adorable tripod friend, there’s still the matter of the other dogs.
At some point, Stewart apparently owned four dogs, possibly five, including at least two four-legged pitbulls, likely named Shamsky and Monkey. It also seems that there may have been a small dog named Baby (or Baby Diamond), but that’s less well-supported. Still, backing up: aside from Dipper, none of those names represented in the online records are the ones that Stewart claimed in his interview with Scott Van Pelt: Barkly, Smudge, Scout, and Toby.
I can’t find any reliable record of the names that Stewart claims in the Scott Van Pelt interview. So…either Stewart is, for whatever reason, inventing fictitious dog names in that interview, or I’m making all this up, and someone else has gone out of their way to spread false names throughout a large swath of internet sources, including modifying, post-dating, and perhaps outright fabricating sources, and their accompanying Internet Archive backups. (Or, as a rather more paranoid version of the thought: to deliberately confound, fabricate, and manipulate my own search results, given that I’m not really familiar with many of these sources.)
Or…the entire media architecture has been trapped in an unwitting game of telephone on bad quotes for decades, with nobody ever directly checking with Jon somehow.
Phase V: Committing to the Bit
There are also several larger pieces of media that appear to be falsified, in service of spreading this confusion about the dogs’ name and the Stewart family history. Now things are going to get a little weird. Because it’s finally time to talk about Tracey Stewart’s completely wild book: Do Unto Animals (2015*).
There are numerous posts and pages dated 2015 (or thereabouts), scattered across the web, discussing Tracey’s book, but I have reason to seriously doubt every single aspect of this book and all online discussion of it. As an illustrative example, here’s an apparent 2015 article interviewing Tracey, from the website 7x7 (never heard of them). Tracey describes the great menagerie of pets that the Stewarts keep on their farm:
“Oh boy, I'll give you the last 5 years. (They are all pictured on the inside cover page of my book.) They are Ally and Steady (horses), Barkly, Smudge, Lil’ Dipper, and Scout (dogs), Pugsley, Christopher, Anna, and Maybelle (pigs), Snowy, Blackberry, and Panda Bun (rabbits), Pipsqueak and Spud (Guinea Pigs), Maple (hamster), Jolene (parrot) and Brian Williams and Jimmy Superfly Snooka (fish).”
Tracey lists nineteen animals (some of which have truly silly names), and she says that they’re all pictured on the inside cover of the book. That part is not true. Here’s the inside cover, featuring only fifteen of the named animals, including everyone’s favorite tripod pitbull.
Well, there he is: “Lil’ Dipper,” famously missing his right leg, just like in the eulogy video and circulated photos. But check out the next illustration:
Note that both “Lil’ Dipper” and “Scout” have been mirror-reflected in the second illustration. Dipper now has regained his right leg, while Scout’s facial markings are on the opposite side.
Next up, a strange narrative description and accompanying illustration that describes Tracey’s skincare routine as being based on dog slobber, including naming specific dogs she likes to get licked by, including not just Smudge, but also both Mama Biscuit” and “Bud” (another Gravity Falls character—which, while we’re at it, Stewart’s cat is said to be named “Stan,” which is yet another Gravity Falls character). And “
Who are these new dogs? That bring us up to, what, 7 dog names now, in a conflicting an inconsistent order?
Smudge and Barkly are described as being French Bulldogs. Lil’ Dipper and Scout are described as being pitbulls. The “Scout,” we’ve seen illustrated so far in this book doesn’t exactly look like a pitbull to me, but that might be my inexperience. (There’s a brief story about a bird named “Sparkles,” so maybe Jon really did say “Sparkles back in the Scott Van Pelt interview.)
Still, later on, Tracey lists five pitbulls the Stewarts have had: Enzo, Shamsky, Monkey, Lil’ Dipper, and Scout. Enzo was previously described as thoroughly a mutt, which is a little confusing here.
In any event, the whole book is pretty funny at times, and it’s worth a read. It has some earnest advice about animals in places, but a lot of it is completely off-the-walls being silly.
Of course, there are also at least a couple of tweets that would appear to back up parts of what Stewart originally said, which is a little unsettling. I mean…yeah…sure…one of the accounts appears to be from a compromised account currently serving as a crypto-spam bot…but both tweets seem to have been retroactively post-dated to the conspiracy. So that suggests that Elon Musk himself might be a collaborator in all this. Oh…and the other account is Chelsea Clinton. So, yeah. This whole thing would seem to have created some pretty damn strange bedfellows, across every corner of the political landscape. (Really, given that I think Stewart’s plan is altruistic in its aims, the fact that he seems to have gotten Elon Musk and Chelsea Clinton on the same page for this critical issue is at least a little reassuring. People are putting their differences aside.)
(Or…Elon is still ignorant, and those tweets were the only thing Team Stewart couldn’t get to and scrub/undermine. Ugh. You see how I can spin in circles here?)
Frankly, I suspect that—gradually—as more and more outlets have called up Stewart to fact-check the dogs’ names (over the course of the past two years), he has looped them in on the whole plan, to see how long they can keep it going. Given that, for instance, Reuters outright dismissed the conspiratorial whispers about Tim Walz’s dog Scout as “debunked conspiracy theory,” I kind of hope that Reuters is in on this. Because if they’re not, then that was sloppy as hell.
Yeah. Maybe I’m sleep-deprived and crazy. Oh well. Aren’t we all?
Anyway, with no other good options, we must carry on down the rabbit hole.
Let’s talk video.
Phase VI: Letting the Audience Bask in the Unsettling Implications
You see, I am indeed telling you that Team Stewart is also messing with the video record for this whole crazy stunt with Jon’s dogs. To begin with, Team Stewart (which is getting pretty big at this point) is continuing to post misleading videos as we go along, across multiple shows, genres, and media platforms. Just like they did way back at the beginning. Hell, in light of everything I’ve laid out so far, you kind of have to wonder about John Oliver’s impassioned eulogy for this own dog, Hoagie, at the Emmy’s last year. And not just to Youtube or Socials.
Team Stewart has also been arranging to have a whole array of major media outlets, such as Paramount-CBS, or NBC-Universal, repeatedly upload falsified, misleadingly-edited videos discussing Stewart’s dogs, to their own websites, often including back-dating those same pages and stories to enhance the illusion. For instance: here’s a CBS video that names the three-legged dog Lil’ Dipper. Note that, even if the footage here is legitimate, it’s been cut in such a way that you can’t actually see the speaker’s mouth, so it could easily have been over-dubbed, re-posted, and back-dated. (Makes you wonder about that whole Scott Van Pelt podcast we talked about before).
So, yikes. I suppose what I’m saying here is: at this point, when it comes to this whole messy business with Jon Stewart’s dogs, you really can’t even trust the reliability of videos posted to big-name media outlet websites (to say nothing of TikTok). That’s a little unsettling.
I mean, really…thank the stars that we can still rely on YouTube.
I mean, sure, the AI is getting a little out of hand, but at least we can trust the posting dates and view-counts.
Yes, this has been a great lark, and it’s pretty funny how long they got away with it, but I’m starting to feel a little paranoid and unsure who to trust when it comes to Stewart’s dogs. But, don’t worry, I looked into it, and we can all breathe a little easier knowing that there’s no option for updating a Youtube video’s publication date. And, even if you somehow could alter the posting-date, it’d be obvious: it takes years for a video to amass millions of hits and a tons of comments, so if it’s something important, people woudn’t fall for it.
Then again…
I actually did find that on YouTube just now. So, I suppose if the platform has been compromised, it might be incorrect.
Although…actually…
If you were really committed to the bit? If you were, for whatever reason, just completely dead-set on deceiving the public about the historical archive of YouTube videos? Yeah…you could totally do it.
It’d be trivial to re-title an old video, to make it something misleading.
You could swap out the thumbnail or landing image to make it blend in.
You could move the video to a different playlist, so the viewer’s context is a bit different.
You could change the text in the little info-box below the video to say just about whatever you wanted it to. You could post misleading photos or links—even of credible people, if it helped. Or stick in a convenient hashtag so the algorithm knows how to find you.
You could alter the chyron and captions—or even retroactively insert pretty convincing floating graphics, distracting transitions, and on-screen embedded links.
You could probably do a lot of convincing work with some carefully-edited transcripts or shady timestamped live-comments.
And, since video creators sometimes have to deal with legitimate audio glitches, or with copyright-takedowns on backing music, or edit out offensive language to stay monetized—or even might just want to offer multilingual functionality for their viewers—you could just go ahead re-record a new audio track and re-upload it to the video, without having to ever actually take the thing down.
On top of which, from what I can tell, nowadays you could also just straight-up replace the underlying video file itself, with a brand-new upload. And, so long as you didn’t do all of these things at once, it wouldn’t count as a new video. You’d still get to keep your precious publication-date, view-counts, and running comments. Frankly, if any of the comments were inconvenient to the new story you had in mind, you could just go ahead and delete those, or even hide the comments section altogether.
So, then, if you were an established content creator, or media personality, or large corporation, with a long history on YouTube, and you wanted to mess with the public’s understanding of a historical event, you would have all the necessary tools to plant a very convincing fake in the archive. You’d just need to pick a video from around the right time—one you didn’t really need or want anymore—and then replace the whole thing, piece-by-piece, over the course of maybe just a few minutes. An experienced editor, especially someone using generative AI, might well be able to make the replacement video blend in seamlessly alongside the existing legitimate videos. Hell, if you were already using AI, and you were attempting to misrepresent someone’s actions or words on a known day, then you could probably tune their clothing, hairstyle, and even age to match the existing records.
In short, if you were replacing a real video of an event with your own fabricated version, in order to mislead or confuse the public, perhaps to make an ally look good, or to damage an opponent—or even to cover up, or maybe plant evidence of wrongdoing—well, then you could make it blend right in. And, in fact, your faked video would keep the same URL, even if it was several years ago at this point, and it would remain embedded in every news article, blog post, and webpage that originally included it in the coverage. Moreover, I’d be willing to bet good money that most of the search engines, social platforms, informative websites, and generative AI chatbots, would automatically process the false content of the newly-inserted video (the faked audio, text, and video), and they’d go ahead and update their records accordingly. Heck, given how busted and piecemeal the archival systems seem to be already, it seems probable that you’d fool those archives as well (along with perhaps the academic or journalistic databases that tend to index major publications). Perhaps you can see, now, how a person could spread a lie very quickly and effectively.
Oh. Also worth noting in all this: it would be perfectly possible to purchase an existing YouTube account from someone else, and to then change the account’s handle and profile details, in an effort to impersonate another person or organization, or even to fabricate wholesale a plausible-sounding identity or media group to embody for yourself. After all, there are a ton of sources in our fractured information ecosystem already. Do most people really even think twice if they encounter an entertainment magazine, or a news channel, or a or a movie studio, or a podcaster, with which they are unfamiliar? And if they’re not sure about you, well, that’s no big deal either. After all, a simple search on Youtube, or on a web browser, or a search engine, or their favorite app, will immediately point your curious viewer at an extensive and well-disseminated archive of videos, articles, and interviews with trustworthy faces and branding, to set their mind at ease. Heck, maybe to excite and captivate them. We all know how exactly how enthralling it can be to stumble on a new show, or podcaster, or niche-interest specialist, who does exactly what you’re looking for, with a backlog of content you can eagerly dive into.
And here’s the kicker: since this is all being done with AI, the eager new viewer can literally never run out of content, because. So, so long as they have a handful of interesting channels to hop between, the content will always be there, and it will on gain in credibility with the viewer as they get used to the style. You just paper over the seams between the short video segments, with some pleasing info-graphics, or plausible B-roll, or even well-timed jump cuts to the other panelists, and you can even produce long-form episodes with astonishing speed and consistency. The viewer will literally never get to the end of your backlog, even if they try. And if you’re making a faceless channel, like a radio show or a podcast, then all of this is even easier because they can’t even see the seams or lighting cues.
Lastly, so far as I can tell at least, you can’t yet directly edit a YouTube video’s url, even if you can insert a deceptive redirect to a different page. If that’s true, that would be reassuring at least. But, given how completely fucked all the search engines are right now, I’m gonna’ have to try some of this out myself tomorrow, once I’m gotten some sleep.
Are you starting to get why I’m glad that Stewart staged this whole crazy thing to begin with, to draw our attention to the present vulnerability? And that he picked an issue so innocuous as the names and biographies of his dogs? '
Phase VII: In Search of a Satisfying Punchline
Well, where does that all leave us? Is there some sort of funny moment to land on? Quite possibly. There may well be several.
One possibility is that the conspiracy might be pretty much what I’ve laid out here. I think I’ve found a lot of evidence of it, but we know exactly how ephemeral and unreliable digital evidence is these days.
Another possibility, which I presently think is pretty likely, is that Stewart has been doing this sort of thing on at least a few other key issues beyond just his dogs, and that he plans to go public with a full account of it rather soon, in order to lay bare some of our other blind spots. This whole thing would make a hell of a movie, and it would put us on the right path toward improving how we handle ourselves.
It is also eminently possible that someone is deliberately messing with me, and has been for over two years. You can read all about it in my book, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say. That would be dark, but pretty funny. Someone could by spying on me with malware and using pretty much exactly the tactics I’ve been laying out in this piece to run this experiment specifically on me. If that’s the case, I have a few potential suspects, but no evidence of it. I’ve certainly been targeted by ai-generated content that seems perfectly designed to make me think I’m getting secret messages from Stewart, and throughout this whole process, many of my search results were so perfectly constrained, and sometimes my computer’s behavior was a little suspicious, and the AI-generated media so perfectly targeted, that it would not be completely shocking to learn that I’m being spied on and actively shepherded, perhaps as documentary project. Based on my personality, interests, emotional desires, and weak points, I’d be pretty much a perfect target. It is, however, also plausible that the AI systems have just gotten that good at generating targeted content on their own already that they can essentially create those things without help. I’m vulnerable to precisely the sorts of manipulations I’m trying to aim at here. And I’ve only downloaded a small portion of what I believe to be supporting evidence (which is probably bad form, given how quickly all this could be taken down, or even removed from my own computer, if I’m indeed being messed with).
Lastly, it’s also fully within the realm of possibility that I’m basically making all this up, and falling victim to a complex, but entirely innocent, overlayering of excellent AI algorithms, a collapse in our information ecosystem, by own tendency toward obsessive thought patterns, and an abiding loneliness. Oh, and some pretty serious sleep-deprivation this week. I’ve not been taking care of myself these past few days.
So, time for a change on that particular front. Enough writing for now. There’s a lot more I could say, and I’ll probably come back to this to iron out some of the logical gaps, and to add more evidence (assuming it doesn’t get deleted before I can permanently capture it…which would be lame). So I’m going to go ahead and post this thing and come back for the embeds later.
Well, as I’ve said at length here, I suspect that Stewart has been deliberately fucking with the online records concerning Dipper and the rest of his dogs. But it may well turn out that I’m wrong about everything. That would be funny as hell, in a lot of ways, though I’d probably owe Stewart a rather serious apology. I hope not, though. It’d be reassuring to know he’s on the ball.
Anyway, what now? What do I think should we should do next? Soon enough for me, sleep. But as to the larger question of what we should do about all this, assuming I really am right? Well, I see three steps that seem appropriate.
First, someone more technically qualified than I am should look into all this and check my work. My own search results have been fundamentally limited (and perhaps proactively tainted), and someone with a better handle on the inner workings of archival systems should try it from a different computer, on a different internet connection.
Second, if there are any Stewart-related videos, articles, or webpages that you’d like to keep a copy of, you should probably download a backup of them pretty soon. Just in case I’m right. Hell, we should probably all download a lot of different things, as general practice. Information and media are far too fleeting and inconsistent these days, as this whole experience has made obvious. (And there’s a bit of an irony here, because I’m probably going to wait until tomorrow to make a serious effort at backing more of it up. I really hope it’ll still be there it’ll still be there.)
Third, well, we should probably all pay attention to whatever Jon Stewart has to say over this coming election season. He seems to have his eye on the ball, and to have quite a few things to talk about. Admittedly, he and I have never spoken, and I see a lot of possibilities ahead, but I’m really not quite sure what to expect. For now, I’m pretty darn tired. But I’m psyched to tune in and see what shakes out. I find Stewart’s work just…irresistible.
Two Years Later
It has been two years (and two days) since this whole grand adventure began. Two years since I just jumped on a bus to New York, hoping to talk with someone who worked for John Oliver. Two years since the wildest conversation of my life, on that very strange train with Josh and Tamara. Two years since I spoke the future.
At present, I inhabit a disconcerting limbo of radio silence. I finished and published Parasocial Activity a couple of months ago, but I’ve still heard nothing back from Stewart or Oliver, and I’ve had absolutely no luck getting the attention of any reviewers, podcasters, journalists, or book-bloggers. Not even my friends and family are reading the finished book—though some of them did read earlier drafts or excerpts. The irony is not lost on me: I finally finished something big, for once in my life, and now I have nobody to talk to about the project in full. I still hold out hope that I’ll find a breakthrough online somewhere, or at least land a single committed reader to talk with in-depth, but for the time being it’s a lonely feeling.
Which is not to say that I’m despondent about the book. Far from it; I remain quite proud of the text and hopeful about the project in the long run. I’ve read the book over several times in the intervening months, and I stand by it as an art object and a creative endeavor—to say nothing of its qualities as an investigative document. I just wish I knew how to get eyes on it.
Of course, I remain convinced of the story I tell in the book. Not that doubts never enter my mind, but they are fleeting, and they often relate more to doubting how I can effectively present my beliefs to others, rather than disbelief in the story itself. I really do think that Stewart and Oliver will—eventually—come clean and go public with the entire saga from their perspective. If that indeed occurs, the book will doubtless absolutely explode, and I will not then lack for discussion partners. I’m still unsure when, or under what conditions, they’ll go public, but I think the last major hurdle left for me to clear is attaining a year’s sobriety, which I will reach on April 28th. Until then, I wait. And I write.
This is going to be a long four months.
I need to make sure I don’t waste the time.
Winter is traditionally a very difficult season for me, and depression usually sets in with the cold. Each of the past three winters has brought its own form of crisis. In 2023, I was wrongly Section 12’d by a case-management agency (as a result of their seeing me extremely distressed after a fight with friends). Then, in 2024…well…you know what happened in 2024: I started seeing secret messages in the TV and I ended up getting hospitalized. In 2025, I fell into an alcohol-abuse spiral, which included blacking out one night and breaking my nose, only to wake up on the living room floor covered in blood and vomit. This year, I’m trying to get through the winter without any type of catastrophe, despite the predictable depression that I’ve been feeling lately. In some ways, I’m better off than I was in those recent years, both because I’ve been working on emotion-management techniques throughout this past year, and because the process of writing Parasocial Activity has itself been deeply healing for my psyche—even if it was tremendously difficult and challenging in-progress.
To keep myself centered going forward this winter, I’m trying to attend to three key dimensions of my life: fitness, writing, and social engagement. I’m in a difficult spot physically at the moment; I’m dramatically overweight (in part due to the meds I’m on, and in part due to a year’s worth of focusing on writing over all other concerns), and I find it difficult presently to engage in the types of exercise that I most enjoy. So, losing weight is a priority for me, for mental and physical health. I’m also trying to establish a healthy and regular rhythm of writing, and I’m considering signing up for a creative writing class to help provide me with structure and peer-consultation. Lastly, I’m trying to build a regular schedule of game-nights and open-mic nights around the city, to make sure that I’m broadening my social circle, rather than retreating into the winter darkness.
This blog is one attempt to habituate myself to regular public-facing writing. I’m not sure how often I’ll update, but I think it’ll be good for my mental health to keep an ongoing public journal of thoughts about writing, book promotion, and other aspects of my all-too-wintery life.