Jimmy Kimmel Has Nothing to Apologize For
It feels like at least a decade has passed since Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt that played a crucial role in his re-election and the nightmare we’re all living in.
In the delicate aftermath of the shooting, Jack Black cancelled the remaining dates of a world tour and put Tenacious D on indefinite hiatus when, during a concert, Black asked his bandmate Kyle Gass about his birthday wish, and Gass quipped, “Don’t miss next time” in regards to the failed attempt on Trump’s life.
It was an overreaction from a movie star and family favorite with everything to lose. If Black hadn’t punished his longtime friend for making light of Trump’s brush with death, apoplectic MAGA maniacs would encourage boycotts of his films on the spurious grounds that the star of their kid’s favorite movie thought it was funny that someone millions of Americans revere as a messianic figure was nearly killed.
Black made a wrong decision rooted in pragmatism and self-interest, but I understood the logic behind it.
I thought about the dissolution of Tenacious D when I saw that Jimmy Kimmel was being pulled off the air indefinitely in response to something that he’d said about Charlie Kirk.
Because I give the GOP way too much credit, I assumed that Kimmel had, at the very least, said something that could be seen as tasteless, offensive, tone-deaf, or, at the very least, too soon explicitly about Kirk.
I was disheartened, if not particularly surprised, to learn that that wasn’t the case.
So I watched the clip of Kimmel ostensibly defecating lustily on the sacred memory of Charlie Kirk and had a hard time pinpointing anything about it that would be offensive to Kirk or his grieving family.
In what is presumably the offensive portion of the monologue that temporarily cost Kimmel his show, he said, "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 and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
MAGA were so enraged that Kimmel would have the evil audacity to suggest that the saints supporting Donald Trump would score political points off Kirk’s assassination that they immediately decided to score political points off it by insisting that Kimmel should lose his career for saying something that might be offensive if you’re a thin-skinned, butthurt snowflake looking for things to be offended by.
In a similar development, MAGA is so enraged at being called fascists that they’ve re-committed to behaving like Nazis.
Kimmel did not insult Charlie Kirk’s sacred memory. He called the murder “senseless” on air and posted a message on Instagram the day of the shooting, sending love to the Kirk family.
That did not matter to Kirk cultists, who decided that the best way to honor Kirk’s fake legacy as a free speech advocate was to get as many people fired for using their right to free speech by speaking about the late far-right activist in an insufficiently reverent fashion.
Bear in mind that Kimmel never explicitly stated that Tyler Robinson was a Trump supporter. This is in sharp contrast to a far-right wing that immediately asserted that the shooting was the work of a far-left Antifa trans radical, who, for good measure, was also part of a “vast domestic terror movement.”
Plenty of right-wing commentators saw the actions of the gun-loving product of a Trump-supporting family as the opening gambit in a civil war pitting abortion-loving Muslim trans BLM activists against God-fearing, flag-waving, firearm-collecting patriotic real Americans.
Far-right activists did not suffer adverse consequences for their actions, but Kimmel was yanked off the air and informed that he must apologize to Kirk’s family and make a “substantial” contribution if he wants his indefinite suspension to end.
In the monologue that cost Kimmel his job, he shows a clip of Trump being lobbed a softball question about how he’s doing following the death of his good friend and ally.
If Trump had an ounce of decency, he’d reply that Kirk’s death was a tragedy and that it had affected him deeply, but that his thoughts were with Kirk's family during this terrible, traumatic time.
Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are part of the extremely large club of people who offended Donald Trump’s delicate sensibility by treating him with insufficient reverence.
That’s not how Trump answered. He started by saying that he was doing “very good”, then immediately started bragging about the fabulous two-hundred-million-dollar ballroom he was building.
What’s more offensive to Kirk’s memory: answering a question about how his death is affecting you by not mentioning him or his family at all, so that you can boast about how excited you are about a gaudy construction project, or pointing out that that’s a strange, tone-deaf way to answer a question about the death of a close friend and ally?
In an interview with Fox News Channel’s The Story with Martha MacCallum, Trump responded to MacCallum, saying, “Charlie said, you know, that there was no such thing as hate speech” by quipping, “Yeah–. He might not be saying that now!”
I’m not sure whether he’s saying that Kirk isn’t saying there’s no such thing as hate speech because he’s dead, and consequently isn’t saying anything, or because getting assassinated would have changed his mind on the subject and turned him into a fierce advocate for censoring speech. Yet I nevertheless find Trump’s joke far more offensive than the non-existent “terrible thing” he supposedly said about Kirk.
Trump insisted that Kimmel's being taken off the air had nothing to do with his posting regularly about how he hated Kimmel, and he had no talent, and he wanted him fired, or his administration’s eagerness to abuse its regulatory powers to punish critics and silence dissent.
Instead, Trump claimed that Kimmel was yanked off the air due to low ratings (the worst crime imaginable, in Trump’s estimation), and because he “said a horrible thing” about Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel didn't say ANYTHING about Kirk. If I were a reporter, I would ask Trump what horrible thing Kimmel said about Kirk, but that would probably lead him to say that I was a bad person for asking a bad question, and had hate in my heart, and that he’ll have Pam Bondi investigate me for hate speech. That’s how Trump responds to questions that he doesn’t like. Hate speech is now any speech that Trump hates.
When it comes to inflammatory speech and trampling on feelings, Trump is a blackout drunk sociopath waving around a flamethrower while screaming, “Burn! Burn! Burn it all to the ground!” In sharp contrast, Kimmel is lighting a single match, and all of MAGA is pointing in his direction and howling in unison, “Stop that maniac before he burns this place to the ground!”
MAGA was looking for any excuse to silence Kimmel, no matter how feeble. Trump’s actions are supposed to have a chilling effect. Kimmel’s suspension is supposed to inspire self-censorship from television personalities who don’t want to be targeted by an FCC that exists to serve Trump’s petty grievances or a MAGA mob hungry for revenge.
It’s already working. The View, a frequent subject of Trump’s ire and consequently of the FCC’s rage, did not comment on Kimmel being yanked off the air the following day, when it was a topic of heated conversation all over the world.
This is, ironically, a turning point in our culture. We need to stand up to Trump’s oppression, or the march toward fascism will only speed up.
I never thought the guy from The Man Show would become a free speech martyr because the cornball from The Apprentice and Ghosts Can't Do It turned our country into a cultish dictatorship devoted to crushing dissent and silencing the opposition, but truth truly is stranger than fiction.
Shittier as well.
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