By Dan McLaughlin
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel was back on ABC last night, if not on many of its affiliates. Judging from his opening
monologue, he has learned nothing about his own behavior, he’s not sorry,
and if anything, he’s now emboldened to do it again.
The Big Lie
Recall that this whole brouhaha started with Kimmel’s
monologue on Tuesday, September 16, in which he asserted: “Many in MAGA-land
are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk. . . . 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.”
Now, two things here. First, this is a demonstrable lie,
and part of a pattern from the left of falsely claiming that Kirk’s
killer had to be a right-winger and couldn’t possibly be motivated by ideas and
impulses of the left side. And yet, the statements of Utah Governor Spencer Cox
and, in particular, the press conference on that very day by Utah County
Attorney Jeffrey Gray made quite explicit that the evidence (especially in the
assassin’s own words) pointed to his being politically on the left and
targeting Kirk for Kirk’s “hate” (the killer’s word) — likely derived from the
killer’s romantic relationship with a transgender roommate — which happens to
be not only how Kirk’s left-leaning critics described Kirk when he was alive,
but how they are still attacking him now.
There was no basis in fact, when Kimmel tried to persuade
his audience that the killer was MAGA, that the killer was anything but
anti-MAGA. It was a lie, made with deliberate or at least reckless disregard
for the truth. He had to know or not care that it was a lie. Kimmel’s troubles
started not from being insensitive or tasteless, but from lying to his
audience.
The desperate effort to distance the killer from the left
is still ongoing, with media organizations arguing that the assassin was not tied to left-wing groups, that his family
was conservative (as if alienated progressive children of conservative families
aren’t one of the most recognizable archetypes in American politics), or that
it must be “a complicated picture” because “there is no
evidence of his positions on other issues of importance to the left, such as
immigration or labor.”
Really? Did we ask Timothy McVeigh to tell us his views
on the capital gains tax before classifying him? Did we care what Osama bin
Laden’s opinions were on unions before figuring out his motive?
Kimmel’s lie is best understood as a part of that
collective resistance from a lot of progressives to admitting what happened to
Kirk. As Graeme Wood observed in The Atlantic:
The evidence that Robinson was a
“Groyper” — a member of an online further-right-than-thou movement that had
harassed Kirk and President Donald Trump — was paltry. Why did anyone believe
that idea to begin with? Already it bore the marks of an incipient conspiracy
theory, a soothing nugget of esoteric knowledge, suppressed for political
purposes. Many of those suckered in were victims of their own motivated
reasoning. It hurts to admit that a movement you like has produced a bad
person, and it hurts even more to admit that bitter truth to a gloating member
of a movement you hate.
It’s also been very hard for them to admit they were
wrong. At last check, historian Heather Cox Richardson still hasn’t corrected
her own misinformation for her 2.7 million subscribers after writing on September 14 that the killer was “not
someone on the left,” that he had “embraced the far right,” and that “the
radical right” was “working to distort the country’s understanding of what
happened” by claiming otherwise.
Second, Kimmel’s defenders staged a lengthy effort to
claim, preposterously, that Kimmel was not actually asserting this as fact. Again,
who are we kidding here? If, say, Tucker Carlson said in December 2020, in the
same sneering tone, “the Democrats are desperately trying to characterize this
as anything but a rigged election,” would anybody deny that he was
conveying to his audience that it was a rigged election? Like Carlson, Kimmel
may use sarcasm to straddle the line between entertainment and advocacy, but
his meaning is intended and understood by his audience, and the rest of us
aren’t such fools that we should pretend otherwise. As Jeff Blehar explained, the full context of that
monologue is only more damning in that regard:
I have seen a number of people
currently rushing to the defense of Kimmel call this a “joke,” or some sort of
light-hearted jape. But I can read. No, it was a blunt statement of a lie, and
done in the typical style Kimmel (or his writers) typically employs to get
enormous lies across in his monologues — as indirection, something mentioned in
passing to set up a nominal joke — the fact-based premise you’re supposed to
take seriously, not the punchline. The inference he wants you to draw from his
phrasing is clear: “Obviously the killer was a MAGA freak, and now these liars
are trying to pretend it was anyone but them.”
This is obvious from context, too.
Have you seen the entire monologue, as opposed to the brief one-minute clip
circulating on social media? (Given Kimmel’s current ratings, my firm bet is
“no.”) Click and watch, and then you will understand that what immediately
preceded it was Kimmel ranting about JD Vance’s assertion — made while
guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s show — that statistically speaking a
disproportionate amount of “spectacular public violence” (mass shootings,
assassinations, etc.) comes from killers either inspired or deranged by
left-coded causes.
You and I both know that Vance was
on to something with this, and that’s why Kimmel (or his staffers) really spit
the bit: It is the left’s fear of seeing their ideological chickens finally
coming home to roost that has quietly motivated this entire (only semi-organic)
campaign to cast Charlie Kirk’s killer as a Groyper rather than the
trans-addled, online radicalized, vacant-eyed killer that he is. With his
carefully bland untruth, Kimmel — long after many of his internet-savvy peers
had given up the ghost — was attempting to subtly inject the idea that Kirk was
killed by his “his own team” into the minds of an audience that is notably less
up-to-speed on current events, because they are older and disengaged.
Having been caught out in this lie, Kimmel should have
been called on the carpet by his bosses. Had the government not gotten
involved, it would be a very easy conclusion that Kimmel was very rightly
suspended for telling a flagrant lie to his audience, and deserved to be fired
unless he was willing to recant and apologize. Even by the minimal accuracy
standards of comics, that’s a legal and reputational problem for a TV network,
and his show was not exactly a money tree before this. And when Disney pulled
him off the air, it was reportedly because he was planning to dig in his heels
and make it worse.
Enter the FCC
What happened instead, of course, was that the Trump
administration’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, went on
Benny Johnson’s podcast to publicly pressure ABC/Disney to sack Kimmel, and
when Kimmel was pulled off the air, Donald Trump himself celebrated it, sought
to claim credit for it happening, and argued to boot that more of his critics
should be taken off the air.
This is thuggish, completely inappropriate, and — as the
Supreme Court held unanimously in NRA v. Vullo (2024) when
Andrew Cuomo tried to debank the NRA — a violation of the First Amendment. It
is worse rather than less bad for the fact that it was also thuggish when the
Biden administration conducted extensive campaigns of regulatory power to
suppress speech. Lots of people on the right, including Carr and Trump,
criticized that at the time; they were right then, and they’re wrong now.
In the long run, the proper response is to take away the government’s power to do this, because the
other side will always abuse it, and now our side is abusing it, too, in
retribution. I won’t rehash here our
excellent editorial on why the Kimmel controversy should persuade us to
abolish the FCC, or the rest of our coverage of why even bald-faced lies on the airwaves shouldn’t be
policed by the feds, just as they don’t have the power to police the same conduct on cable
networks. Conservatives should be trying to do that now, while Republicans
still have power in D.C., because the left will happily use the same powers for
bad ends again. Prominent California State Senator Scott Wiener was on X on
Monday vowing to do just that: “Can’t wait to break Sinclair up.
Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy.”
In the meantime, Carr deserves to be sacked, and the
Trump administration deserved to get a big black eye by having Kimmel
triumphantly restored to the airwaves. While ABC could legally have defended
firing Kimmel, it was in a bind with the public so long as doing so appeared to
let Trump decide who takes the air.
But that also means that Kimmel got away with it. And
judging from last night’s monologue, he has learned nothing and will do it
again.
Not Really Sorry
In his return last night, Kimmel hit a few good notes. He
choked up praising Erika Kirk for forgiving her husband’s murderer. He also
showed some grace in thanking by name the people on the right who criticized
the Trump FCC:
Maybe most of all, I want to thank
the people who don’t support my show and what I believe, but support my right
to share those beliefs anyway, who I never would have imagined, like Ben
Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old
pal Ted Cruz, who believe it or not said something very beautiful on my behalf.
. . .
I don’t think I’ve ever said this
before, but Ted Cruz is right. He’s absolutely right. This affects all of us,
including him. I mean, think about it. If Ted Cruz can’t speak freely, then he
can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.
Even though I don’t agree with many
of those people on most subjects, some of the things they say even make me want
to throw up. It takes courage for them to speak out against this
administration, and they did, and they deserve credit for it. And thank for
telling your followers that our government cannot be allowed to control what we
do and do not say on television and that we have to stand up to it.
And for a moment, at least, Kimmel seemed to grasp why it
was that the campaigns of censorship and cancellation that dominated the past
decade were so wrong: “Should the government be allowed to regulate which
podcasts the cell phone companies and Wi-Fi providers are allowed to let you
download to make sure they serve the public interest? You think that sounds
crazy? Ten years ago, this sounded crazy.”
Of course, making common cause with political foes when they
are sticking up for you is one thing. When it came to taking
responsibility for his own egregious lie, Kimmel fell into the sort of weaselly
misdirection that comedians are supposed to mock when it’s done by politicians.
First, Kimmel addressed the charge that he had been
tasteless in using a comedy monologue to come out swinging in full political
combat over Kirk’s death:
I’ve been hearing a lot about what
I need to say and do tonight. And the truth is, I don’t think what I have to
say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you
don’t, you don’t. I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind. But I do
want to make something clear because it’s important to me as a human and that
is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of
a young man. I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.
Well, it’s a bit late to decide that it’s an
inappropriate subject for a wisecracking monologue, but lest you think Kimmel
has learned anything, he immediately pivoted to this mealy mouthed stew of
excuses:
Nor was it my intention to blame
any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously a deeply
disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was
trying to make. But I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed
or unclear or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger,
I get why you’re upset. If the situation was reversed, there’s a good
chance I’d have felt the same way.
I have many friends and family
members on the other side who I love and remain close to even though we don’t
agree on politics at all. I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk
represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was
a solution and it isn’t it ever. [Emphasis added.]
Now, I do not argue that the shooter represents the
left, because unless you’re in an explicitly violent movement, the perpetrators of
political violence are a tiny and unrepresentative minority. But note that
nowhere does Kimmel acknowledge that the shooter was not a MAGA right-winger.
Nowhere does he say the least bit to correct the lie he told his audience previously.
Instead, having been caught in the lie and having played the “I’m sorry if you
misunderstood or were offended” card, he pivots to the it-doesn’t-matter theme
— a theme we know he doesn’t believe, given what he was doing a week ago — and
to painting the killer as “deeply disturbed” and “a sick person” even though
this was not (unlike many other such atrocities) the act of a delusional
individual suffering a mental breakdown. This was evil, and while evil
is always in some sense a break with rationality, it is simply not the case
that this assassin was incapable of forming political opinions and acting on
them.
But sincerely recanting and apologizing for what he
actually said was beyond Kimmel. And now, he knows that he got away with it.
Which makes it that much likelier that he’ll do it again.
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