The Causal Link

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 22, 2025

 

It’s not always easy to determine the motives of those who are deranged enough to think exhibitions of wanton violence will beget a better world. It’s often harder to establish, even presumptively, the sources of inspiration that encourage them to act on their delusions. Anibal Hernandez Santana’s alleged attack on a Sacramento-based ABC affiliate could be the exception that proves the rule.

 

It is a blessing that no one was hurt when Hernandez Santana is alleged to have shot multiple rounds at ABC10’s offices over the weekend, although the prosecutors who charged him with “shooting into an occupied building” don’t believe his intentions were benign. And although Hernandez Santana probably had multiple motives for his attack, authorities believe the “indefinite” hiatus on which the network put late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was a factor.

 

“So there are some indications here that the motive behind the shooting of the ABC news station was political in kind,” Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho told NBC News. He added that Hernandez Santana “chose a very particular target,” and he left “notes” indicating that the “recent dismissal of the Jimmy Kimmel show” contributed to what prosecutors believe “was a politically motivated crime.”

 

We don’t know exactly what Hernandez Santana was thinking. If we did, we’d probably regard what he was thinking as disordered and chaotic. Certainly, the suspect’s notes invoking Jeffrey Epstein and threatening Donald Trump’s Justice Department officials by name — “They’re next” — does indicate the possibility that he has some exposure to the activist left. But you didn’t need to be plugged in to the fringes of left-wing discourse to hear over the weekend that the president had intervened in the effort to get ABC to purge Kimmel from the late-night airwaves.

 

It wasn’t even a controversial proposition among Democrats. Shortly after it was announced that Kimmel’s show would go on “indefinite” hiatus, House Democrats threatened a congressional investigation. “We will not be silent as our freedoms are threatened by corrupt schemes and threats. Anyone who is complicit will need to answer to us,” California Representative Robert Garcia affirmed. Donald Trump is “exploiting the death of Charlie Kirk to try to eliminate those who oppose the president’s agenda,” Senator Chris Murphy hyperventilated. “After years of complaining about cancel culture,” President Barack Obama scoffed, “the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”

 

It’s important to remember that an impressionable mind might interpret these anxious indictments as calls to action. What’s even more important about these remarks, however, is that they did not reflect reality.

 

“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy,” Disney and ABC said in a joint statement on Monday, “and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

 

What happened? Did the FCC and Brendan Carr just back off? Did the president suddenly lose his enthusiasm for punishing his enemies and silencing his critics? Or did this unfold precisely as some on the right said it probably had — that the network affiliates objected to Kimmel’s dissemination of a false narrative around Charlie Kirk’s shooting, that the host had refused to set the record straight, and in so doing, he made it easier for the network to put the kibosh on a program that is no longer generating the requisite return on investment. Indeed, it is a testament to the cultural force of the backlash against Kimmel’s tentative cancellation that it brought him back from the brink. That is also a commentary on the relative power of the president, the impropriety of the executive branch’s bullying notwithstanding.

 

If prosecutors prove that Hernandez Santana’s state of mind was heavily influenced by the untruth that Democrats so heedlessly promulgated, it is not a stretch to conclude that the alleged shooter was animated to some degree by this very hyperbole. It’s something Democrats should consider. Not everyone understands the game they’re playing.