By Jim Geraghty
Friday, September 19, 2025
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 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
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:
When you see stuff like this, I
mean, look, 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.
“Nice network you have there, shame if something
happened to it.”
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.
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: “Two
years ago, these meatheads wouldn’t shut up about the First Amendment. Now they
want to skip straight to the Second.” 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.
Pull Up a Chair, Kamala Harris Is Ready to Spill the
Tea
Katie Rogers of the New York Times has the scoop on
the rest of Kamala Harris’s forthcoming campaign memoir, 107 Days. The first released excerpt indicated that Harris saw no sign
that Joe Biden couldn’t serve another four years, and also contended that
Biden’s inner circle resented her and undermined her at every turn.
Readers, in one of the more surprising developments of a
year that’s already been full of surprises in the political world, Kamala
Harris may well have written a book that’s going to be fun to read.
The flip side of Harris’s “it’s everyone’s fault but me”
argument is . . . even after you account for her copious flaws and mistakes and
bad decisions, there is indeed still plenty of blame to go around.
Whether or not Harris intends it, this anecdote about the
president suggests to me that Biden was losing his marbles:
Minutes before she was to step
onstage at a presidential debate in September 2024, she received a call from
Mr. Biden. He relayed that his brother told him that she was bad-mouthing him,
and that several “power brokers” in Philadelphia were threatening not to
support her because of it.
Mr. Biden went on to insist that
his own disastrous debate performance had not hurt him with voters, and that he
had beaten Mr. Trump.
“I just couldn’t understand why he
would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” Ms. Harris wrote.
“Distracting me with worry about hostile power brokers in the biggest city of
the most important swing state.”
If you were underwhelmed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz,
you’re not alone, because apparently so was Harris as the campaign continued:
Throughout the book, she struggled
to reconcile her personal affection for him with disappointment in moments she
felt he stumbled. During a vice-presidential debate against JD Vance, whom she
called a “shape-shifter,” Mr. Walz began nodding along. Ms. Harris was aghast.
“You’re not here to make friends
with the guy who is attacking your running mate,” she said to the television
screen as she watched.
I can’t wait for the campaign ads next year: “Walz for
Governor 2026: Even Kamala Harris Thinks He’s a Disappointment.”
Harris writes in the book that her first choice as her
running mate was Pete Buttigieg, but she decided he would be too controversial
to get elected:
Ms. Harris wrote that she would
have chosen Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary under Mr. Biden, as a
running mate. But she did not feel that the country was ready for a Black woman
and a gay man to carry a ticket.
“He would have been an ideal
partner,” she wrote, “if I were a straight white man. But we were already
asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman
married to a Jewish man. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
Another future slogan: “Pete Buttigieg 2028: Too Gay
for Kamala Harris.”
We must assume that, at every step
of the way along the path to you reading those words, not one person intervened
to suggest that this represents an insult to the American people. Neither the
author, nor her editors, nor her publisher, nor her publicists, nor even the Atlantic’s
reviewer encountered a pang of conscience while disseminating this slight. The
apparently unquestioned assumption underlying it is that you are either sexist,
racist, or homophobic. Maybe all three!
Hey, man, let’s not forget antisemitic, too! Harris
didn’t seem all that impressed with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, either:
Governor Josh Shapiro of
Pennsylvania seemed more interested in defining the role for himself than
helping her win, and she recounted Mr. Shapiro questioning an aide about the
pieces of art he could use to decorate the vice president’s residence.
You could interpret Harris whacking Walz and Shapiro as a
sign that she’s attempting to knock potential 2028 rivals down a peg. The Times
writes, “She left open the idea that she would return to politics in the
near future.”
But this also feels like some bridge-burning. Harris
feels like she did her job, and large swaths of the Democratic Party let her
down in her effort last year. A subtext of, “All of you failed me, so you owe
me another shot at the big chair” sounds like a really subpar theme for a 2028
bid.
I’ve heard some people arguing that Harris shouldn’t have
written this book. But you know what? This is her biggest, best, most
high-profile chance to give her side of the story — to her fans, to her
critics, and to future historians. Of course, her version of events paints
herself in the best possible light and finds ways to shift as much blame to
everyone else; that’s just human nature in the face of failure.
Democrats may dread another round of finger-pointing over
Harris’s defeat. But it’s difficult to win if you’re not willing to take a hard
look at why you lost.
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