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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.

Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.

If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?

With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.

Looks to be less cancellation and more just government censorship:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued a threat Wednesday against ABC and Disney, suggesting he would take action over comments made by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel about the alleged Charlie Kirk assassin.

Pay fealty or be destroyed. Oh, sure, you might win the lawsuit, but can you really justify the risk? Far safer to join in the coalition of corruption than fight it. One of the more consistent patterns we've seen is that businesses fear retribution from the Trump administration far more than they did from the Biden admin (and rightly so).

The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.

The ongoing problem for the right is that they have no one to replace their left-wing opponents. There can't be a long march through institutions, because after they fire all their hated enemies they're going to have to hire them back. The movement is creatively and intellectually bankrupt, as evidence by the remarkable collection of individuals they found to fill out the Trump administration. Hell, one of the biggest reasons why these institutions skew so left in the first place is that the American Right proactively retreated from them (unsurprisingly, when you build a culture that disdains artists and intellectuals while your opposition builds a culture that practically worships them, all the artists and intellectuals end up being on the other side).

Problem: It's not good for artists and intellectuals to be worshiped. It's not good for their psychological health, and it's not good for their art or their scholarship either.

(Can't we have a culture that just lets them be ordinary people like everyone else? Just two of many normal variations of humanity who just like and are good at this type of thing instead of that, because different people are different and that's OK?

...the New Left tried to do that--see also Free to Be You and Me--but my experience was that this in the end was derailed by the movement's emotional need for blank slatism...partly due to this worship of intellectuals: "Intellectual is the best thing to be, so it just has to be equally accessible to every individual, it just has to...")

I think you're correct. The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.

That said, I think it's going to get worse. Commenters here have previously speculated that the administration's attempts to crash the economy (in real terms, not in asset prices' terms) while simultaneously pushing through an enormous spending bill targeted at procuring large numbers of disaffected young men is preparation for war in some capacity. Whether with China, Iran, or "Internal Enemies", who knows.

But even among the right-wing thought leaders, this has been viewed with extreme suspicion: Musk has openly condemned it multiple times, Fuentes... well, his interpretation is obvious. And the administration has no competing narrative at all. There really isn't a single thought leader on Team Trump. Kirk was arguably the closest thing to it, and even he was feisty enough that large numbers of conspiracy theorists seem to think he was assassinated by the administration (or those behind it) for failing to toe the line properly on important matters. I do not believe this is the case, as I've previously elaborated, but this is nonetheless a narrative that even on-site was immediately perceived as worth amplifying: notice George Zinn, an old Jew, promptly rising up and claiming he was the shooter. An obvious lie, yet not one lacking in narrative meaning or intent. Netanyahu simultaneously releasing a statement with Trump confirming Kirk's death is similarly coy chicanery, like a rooster crowing to claim credit for the rising sun.

I don't pretend to know how all this will play out, but I can at least claim this with confidence: resentment and spite are not the ingredients of a winning movement, and I perceive these in abundant supply.

The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.

And you don't think you might overestimating the degree to which these polls are reflective of anything deeper? I didn't like Kirk either, and I'm not even American, but I still think deserves to be put on a bit of a pedestal just due to being the target of a political assassination.

At least Kimmel can rest easy knowing that the Biden administration as recently as last year was publicly mooting to global business elites how to address the sort of disinformation that Kimmel was perpetrating in his remarks.

From one of the Biden administration's three speakers at the 2024 World Economic Forum, a proven statesman of American diplomacy, and a Democratic in good standing-

Polls indicate that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. Those on the Right often refer to much of what the mainstream media reports as “fake news,” while those on the Left characterize much of the reporting from the Right as a “disinformation” problem. However, the approach to resolving these concerns remains partisan.

This issue has come into sharper focus recently following comments by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama, at a World Economic Forum conference. He described the First Amendment as “a major block” to achieving accountability in media reporting on facts.

Kerry’s remarks underscore the delicate balance between protecting free speech and addressing what different political factions consider fake news or disinformation.

“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts,” Kerry said. “But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.”

Kerry noted that the problem of disinformation is unique to democracies, where no single leader has the authority to define what constitutes factual information. He suggested that the upcoming elections in November could lead to changes, depending on the outcomes for Congress and the White House.

“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to implement change,” he said.

Kerry’s comments have revived sentiments expressed by progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021, when she called for greater restraint on media practices during an Instagram live video.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another entirely to just say things that are false. So that’s something we’re looking into.”

Well, Kerry's monkey paw seems to have well curled on parts of that. But Kimmel's remarks on the partisan nature of the political assassination-

"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"

-would be an almost textbook example of disinformation, i.e. false information intended to mislead. In this case, a false claim that the political assassination was a MAGA gang partisan, to mislead from the already apparent and growing weight of evidence of a left-partisan.

I'm sure if the Biden administration had won, it would have applied its desired rules, fairly.

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