Desperately Seeking a Victimization Narrative

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 22, 2025

 

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff got off to a solid start in his workmanlike comments during a podcast conversation, in which he condemned “violence targeting political activists.”

 

Okay, well, at least it’s hard to argue with his claim that no one deserves to be murdered “no matter how strongly we may disagree with their views.” It’s not clear why that caveat was even necessary, save perhaps Ossoff’s desire to convey to his constituents that he had no use for Charlie Kirk’s activism, even if he objects to bloodshed as a remedy to political disagreement.

 

Ossoff is, of course, right that political violence is “incompatible with a free society.” He’s still on the right track. Yet, with that out of the way, Ossoff veered away from the righteous path in what could only have been an effort to reclaim for Democrats the victimhood status they covet beyond anything else and without which Ossoff’s party is wholly unmoored.

 

“We should be united in recognizing that, for politicians, for the state, for the government to use official power to intimidate critics,” he continued, “to silence those who speak in ways the government doesn’t like, is also fundamentally inconsistent with a free society and a flourishing democracy.”

 

Where Ossoff was cagey, we should be explicit: What he is contending is that ABC host Jimmy Kimmel was forced off the air by the Trump administration. The persecution endured by the celebrity host of a late-night television show is, through the transitive magic of partisanship, also the experience of all center-left Americans. Sure, Charlie Kirk was killed for his views, but Democrats are being silenced for theirs. Does that not even out the cosmic scales here?

 

We don’t need to engage in that childish game. We might only ask Ossoff and his fellow Democrats to establish definitively and for the record the sequence of events of which the Georgia senator seems firmly convinced. Not withstanding the wholly inappropriate efforts by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to muscle entertainment companies into muzzling their hosts explicitly in response to political content with which the executive branch takes issue, we have ample evidence to conclude that ABC and its affiliates did not need a presidential inducement to give up on Jimmy Kimmel Live! If Democrats have information we don’t, they should share it.

 

In the absence of that evidence, we must conclude that Ossoff’s goal here was only to reclaim a victimization narrative. Inadvertently, his comments said much more about the state of the Democratic Party than the country.