According to some commercials, driving an SUV means you support terrorists. The answer is the hybrid gas-electric car, which only supports terrorists when going uphill.

Stewart satirizes early-2000s American consumer politics, when fuel economy and Middle East geopolitics were often rhetorically linked—especially in the wake of 9/11 and during the Iraq War era. The joke targets the moralizing logic of advertising and punditry that frames personal purchases (like driving an SUV) as direct political complicity (“supporting terrorists”) because oil revenues can flow to hostile actors. By proposing the hybrid as a supposedly ethical alternative, then undercutting it (“only…when going uphill”), he exposes the oversimplification: complex global systems can’t be cleanly redeemed by a single consumer choice, and “virtue” marketing often collapses into absurd accounting.