A left-wing extremist ending Charlie Kirk’s life & 1st Amendment rights with a bullet is no joke
By Jim Geraghty
ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Monday night: “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
Our National Review editor in chief, Rich Lowry, theorizes plausibly that Kimmel
“was presumably misled by the legacy media’s unwillingness to be forthright about alleged killer Tyler Robinson’s motive and by the obfuscations of Democratic officeholders and progressive commentators.”
A bunch of people on the left desperately wanted to believe that Kirk’s assassination was right-on-right violence – so desperately that they started to assert it in the absence of any significant supporting evidence – i.e., Heather Cox Richardson insisting that the shooter was
A bunch of people on the left desperately wanted to believe that Kirk’s assassination was right-on-right violence – so desperately that they started to assert it in the absence of any significant supporting evidence – i.e., Heather Cox Richardson insisting that the shooter was “a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.”
Whatever the reason, Kimmel’s monologue featured the assertion, not a joke, that Kirk was murdered by “one of them” in “the MAGA gang.” Unsurprisingly, many folks on the right were livid. Some ABC affiliates were understandably upset, but Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr also felt compelled to weigh in, publicly, saying:
"When you see stuff like this, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action. Frankly. on Kimmel, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
"Obviously, look, there’s calls for Kimmel will be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for a suspension over this and again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at.
"Again, you know, we may ultimately be called to be a judge on that."
"Obviously, look, there’s calls for Kimmel will be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for a suspension over this and again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at.
"Again, you know, we may ultimately be called to be a judge on that."
If you don’t like the way the Federal Communications Commission chairman handled the matter of Jimmy Kimmel’s false remarks, the editors of NR have a simple solution: Get rid of the FCC entirely.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said after Kimmel’s comments:
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Broadcasters got the hint, and announced they would be dropping Kimmel’s show from their stations.
Defenders of the administration have since claimed that the broadcasters did so entirely on their own with no pressure from the government. But if you don’t want to be accused of practicing bullying government, it would help for government officials to not talk like bullies.
Broadcasters got the hint, and announced they would be dropping Kimmel’s show from their stations.
Defenders of the administration have since claimed that the broadcasters did so entirely on their own with no pressure from the government. But if you don’t want to be accused of practicing bullying government, it would help for government officials to not talk like bullies.
The FCC shouldn’t have this power because it shouldn’t exist. The government’s role in broadcast frequencies need not extend further than defining and protecting property rights, which can be done through ordinary courts and law enforcement. If one station owns a frequency, others shouldn’t be able to broadcast on it, for the same reason that the station’s headquarters building shouldn’t be able to be overrun by trespassers. The country doesn’t need a Federal Headquarters Buildings Commission, with political commissioners looking to flex their partisan muscles, to make sure that doesn’t happen.
A point about Kimmel himself . . .
One of the “jokes” in Kimmel’s last monologue Tuesday:
One of the “jokes” in Kimmel’s last monologue Tuesday:
“Two years ago, these meatheads wouldn’t shut up about the 1st Amendment. Now they want to skip straight to the 2nd.”
It’s not that funny, and it’s a particularly incongruent assertion less than a week after a prominent conservative just got killed by a bullet through the neck.
Whatever Kimmel is like offscreen, his onscreen persona is about as big a jerk as you will find.
His bristling contempt for anyone right-of-center practically bursts through the screen in every show. As a host, when the topic comes to politics, Kimmel is snide, mean, and spiteful. He brings a real dyspeptic bile to any discussion of Republicans or right-of-center Americans, who are almost always a prominent target in his show’s opening monologue. That’s one of the reasons quite a few people – not just diehard conservatives – think that as a late-night host, Kimmel is just not funny, charming, or pleasant to watch.
(I know that when it comes to being snarky, my glass house is in about as rough shape as my actual house, still being reconstructed because of the fallen tree. But I hope my humor never, or at least rarely, comes across as caustic or scornful.)
If Kimmel wanted to get back on the air soon, his effort would be helped by a big, broad, bipartisan consensus that his false statement about Kirk’s shooter was a forgivable mistake, and that the network suspending his show indefinitely against his will in the face of government pressure represents a threat to his First Amendment rights.
Kimmel is not going to get that big, broad, bipartisan consensus, in part because of our intense national political divisions, but also in part because he’s been such a jerk for all these years.
I know, I know; everyone has the same First Amendment rights, even jerks. But if you spend decades – Kimmel’s been hosting the show named after himself since January 2003 – ripping into a particular demographic of people on national television almost every weeknight, you can’t exactly be shocked when that particular demographic of people isn’t terribly motivated to come riding to your rescue.
And you really can’t be shocked that few on the right are interested in arguing that suspending Kimmel’s show represents a threat to his First Amendment rights when a bit more than a week ago, a left-wing extremist decided to end Charlie Kirk’s First Amendment rights forever with a bullet, and far too many Americans jumped onto social media to tell the rest of us how happy they were about the assassination.
This is an awfully bad time for a snide progressive comedian to ask right-of-center folks to put aside all their past differences and stand up for his right to keep lying about them without significant consequence, and along the way, make sure that he doesn’t lose his $16 million per year gig.
Be nice to people. You never know when you might need them as an ally.
Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review.
