Bassem Youssef ("the Jon Stewart of Egypt"; satirist) — PBS NewsHour interview, 16 Feb 2016 (5th anniversary of Mubarak's fall): "A revolution is not an event. It's a process. And it takes its time"; and a deadpan-satirical indictment of Egypt's repression — "There is absolutely no crackdown on freedom of speech."

A revolution is not an event. It's a process. And it takes its time.

We absolutely have no problem. Political satire shows like mine are still going on, on the air. There is absolutely no crackdown on freedom of speech.

[Source is English (PBS NewsHour interview, 16 February 2016, on the fifth anniversary of Hosni Mubarak's fall); confirmed verbatim against the fetched page. NOTE: the second passage is delivered as deadpan SATIRE — Youssef means the opposite: under Sisi there is no surviving political-satire show and there IS a severe crackdown on free speech.] Declared positions of Bassem Youssef — the Egyptian heart-surgeon-turned-satirist dubbed "the Jon Stewart of Egypt," whose YouTube-then-TV show "El Bernameg" (The Program) drew ~40 million weekly viewers during and after the 2011 revolution by mocking presidents, generals and clerics alike (the Brotherhood's Morsi, then the military's Sisi). He won a 2013 CPJ Press Freedom Award; his show was forced off the air in 2014 and he fled Egypt (now in exile in the US), where Sisi's government has jailed thousands of activists, journalists and others. His positions: SATIRE as a tool to upset taboos and confront power, FREE EXPRESSION against censorship, and a sober reading of the Arab Spring — that revolutionary change is "a process," not an instant "18-day" event, and that despite Egypt's return to autocracy the uprising's legacy endures in how younger generations think about "politics, religion, everything." (After 2023 he gained a new global profile for viral pro-Palestinian commentary on the Gaza war.) This is the satirist / free-expression / civil-society pole — a distinct TYPE in the dataset and another facet of Egyptian dissent alongside Alaa Abd El-Fattah and the wider anti-authoritarian current. [Axes: civil-liberties (free expression; anti-censorship; satire), democracy (the revolution as a long-arc process; anti-authoritarian), regime-stance (against Sisi-era repression).]