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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   34722 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.

Afaik the main quote was:

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.

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.

I watched a Charlie Kirk video. Gotta say, don't like the guy. I was hoping the vibe would be "patient Mottizen explains things" or "Scott Alexander", but it was much closer to "Steven Crowder." Is he chiller in other videos?

I was particularly galled by the amount of appeals to religion (the resurrection of Christ is the most well documented fact in history, so Christianity is true, so its morals are correct) and abortion is bad.

Even worse, the use of blatantly untrue "facts" that I have trouble believing he could have not fact checked, as much as they were relevant to his soap boxes. E.g. the claim that no abortions are ever medically necessary for the health of the mother. Worse, he slimily hedged by saying this was "according to some gynecologists, I don't know if it's true, but they're experts."

This leaves me, as often, in the weird position of standing on my meta level principles despite their being in conflict with the object level. I dislike Kirk and his methods, but like (many) of his principles. I dislike Kimmel, full stop (I assume - I won't claim to have watched him much. I'm extrapolating from Colbert/Stewart, who are insufferable as of late.). But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe, or worse, on free speech.

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.

So, I agree that the quote itself seems stupidly misinformed but not horrifically bad. I watched the clip, though, and thought the whole bit was startlingly tasteless. At one point he shows Trump talking seriously with Fox about learning about Kirk's death, and then immediately segues to a mocking joke. Ick.

That said - and keeping in mind that I dislike him - I absolutely don't think Kimmel should be fired for this. Comedy is hard. Sometimes jokes go too far. Sometimes they're tasteless and don't land. This should be ok. Regardless of whether the comedians are leftist hacks or rightist hacks! I desperately want real comedy to make a comeback, and that means supporting comedians' right to gore my own ox, too.

Agreed. The right is ideologizing themselves into thinking THIS thing right here is so massively offensive. They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

  • -12

They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

Find me an example where a TV host was canceled because they went on air and gratuitously insulted someone grieving their friend being assassinated, and the right saying the cancellation was unjustified.

I'm actually curious now to wonder what the societal winds were like when JFK was assassinated. Does anyone know what the political reaction was like on the other side and the media's response to it?

I had a history teacher who voted for the other guy and remembered the day JFK was assassinated. His response was this “Yeah, I voted for Nixon (i.e. the other guy), but when I heard a president of the United State was murdered, it was shocking. It was in no way, shape, or form OK to kill someone over politics.”

The way the left has been straight up dancing on Charlie Kirk’s grave would had been unthinkable back in 1963.

The Manson murders were in 1969, and were rather infamously celebrated by portions of the far left at the time.

I think this monstrous impulse has always been there, but Twitter/social media generally tears away the walls that protect people from their neighbors’ sociopathic moments.

They weren’t celebrating on mainstream outlets though. Pretty sure Johnny Carson did not make a “lol Mansons shot a deserving pig” joke or even make a bacon reference. Weirdos on the fringe are going to weirdo. But in our moment, especially considering how relatively stable our country actually is, the fact that a mainstream TV show and mainstream news and movie/tv stars and musicians are doing this is simply not what I’d call a fringe movement.

The Manson murders were in 1969, and were rather infamously celebrated by portions of the far left at the time.

...I have never heard of this, assuming that by "portions of the far left at the time" you mean any appreciable number of people and not the Lizardman constant.

The entirety of the far left in the US is smaller than the lizardman constant when compared to the entire populace, so it’s hard to say. Honestly, it may have been limited to just some of the extreme radicals and nutters, but it wasn’t nonexistent.

Bernadine Dohrn of the Weatherman Underground (now a law professor with some influence on Barack Obama when he was starting his career) praised the murders. There were groups of supporters at the trial who shaved their heads and drew X on their foreheads as signs of support.

More comments

except your specific person being insulted is just the category of "Republican." Not the same.

No, in the full quote he specifically insulted Donald Trump saying he was grieving like a four-year-old mourning a goldfish -- https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/367826?context=8#context

Thing is, taking offense to Kimmel's comment isn't a right-wing thing. It's an anti-tribalism thing, which has few members in both the left and the right. It doesn't matter if the right is being insulted; it's the whipping up left into a frenzy (which may be background noise, but this rises to something beyond that) that's the offensive part. Even if every right-winger were a principled free speech absolutist, it wouldn't make Kimmel's behavior any less offensive.

They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

I think using a major media platform to blame the right for a murder of a rightist committed by a leftist, after the left has spent years publicly encouraging leftists to kill rightists, while leftists are actively working to deceive people into believing that this murder was committed by a rightist, should not be tolerated. You say that people like me have tolerated worse before. Can you give some specific examples? I'm not that picky about the definition of "like me", if that helps.

I don't identify as being on the right or with the republican party, and this seems transparently, massively, offensive to me. One of their own was assassinated and Kimmel said they are liars who hit a new low by saying it wasn't done by someone on their side. That'd be harsh if it were true, but since it seems pretty clearly not to be true, that's extremely offensive.

Well it's not untrue in the way saying Robinson was 50 years old would be untrue. Ideology and political philosophy don't work that way. We don't even have a manifesto from Robinson. He's directionally prog and for common conversational purposes you'd be on much stronger ground claiming he's not at all MAGA, and coming from the left. iow not enough to warrant being pressured by the FCC.

It's just vibes and vengeance. And frankly Trump's preference for talking about his ballroom over Kirk was a real zinger from Kimmel. "This must be the fourth stage of grief." On point. Who's the coldhearted demon again?

  • -19

Well it's not untrue in the way saying Robinson was 50 years old would be untrue. Ideology and political philosophy don't work that way. We don't even have a manifesto from Robinson.

I'm not going to bother reiterating all the evidence we've been exposed to thus far, but this is just hogwash. I know it hurts to lose a round of "guess the shooter's politics" this thoroughly, usually it's just some generic schizo that doesn't really map to anything, but this time the left really did get got. This routine will never fly outside of Bluesky/Reddit.

Frankly I'd respect a simple "fuck you" more.

Of all the people to understand the weird indeterminacy of 21st century ideologies interacting with the "firehose of bullshit" of new media, I'd think it was the smart "grey tribe" people who frequent this site

  • -18

Listen dog, the guy wrote shit on the bullets calling the target a fascist, along with lyrics to some old commie song, which was followed by his family coming out and saying what a lefty kook he'd become lately, and the release of the texts where he tells his transgender sweetheart how he did it to "stop the hate."

Just stop. You lose this round of Guess The Shooter. You just do. I'm sorry he didn't file a full manifesto with you in advance, but I don't really care if you think that means it "doesn't count" or how much of an attitude you cop about it.

The standards should be much higher for state-led censorship efforts though. Like fraud level deception. Claiming Robinson graduated from Hillsdale or something. Someone's perception of an ideology is much too murky.

"Just stop."

No

  • -17

The standards should be much higher for state-led censorship efforts though.

"Should be" is not "is", much less "has been". The government has repeatedly and systematically censored the internet, over which they have no remit, to keep people from pointing out they were lying about crucial policy facts. It is not even clear that the government is what got Kimmel censored here, although if it was that seems entirely acceptable given their statutory power to preserve the common interest through broadcast licensing. Lying about a highly-charged political assassination in order to blame the victims is not in the public interest.

You are of course free to disagree and make your case here.

"Frankly I'd respect a simple 'fuck you' more."

I'm sure you would, because it provides a greater sense of righteous indignance due to being up against an uncivilized beast

  • -16

Think that's covered either option, here.

It's untrue in the same way that saying the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor is untrue.

For this argument to hold water, you'd of course have to prove that the hit was ordered by the unambiguous leader of "The Left", not merely that the hit was performed by someone who subscribed to the left ideology.

Because if "the hit was performed by someone who shared some ideological traits with" is the same thing as "the hit was performed by", then Pearl Harbour was bombed by the Germans.

No, I merely have to show that it wasn't performed by MAGA.

no, those were formal armies involved. not shifting vague weird internet politics combined with political inference from a romantic partner

  • -18

When the shooter said that Kirk needed to be killed because of Kirk's "hate", what do you think he meant by that?

Well, he seems to have meant that he supported using privately-owned firearms, which a proper Blue would consider utterly unthinkable. Therefore he is an ideological hybrid at most.

This is not an entirely sincere argument, but something of that shape seems to be a genuinely viable steelman for the claim that the "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". From a certain point of view, you only get someone like Robinson by layering leftist beliefs on top of a Red Tribe substrate which has access to, and the ability to use, guns; had he not been raised in a Red Tribe milieu Robinson would have been unable to kill, even if he was willing; therefore his being Red by birth is ultimately more relevant to why he wound up a murderer than his being Blue by indoctrination.

  • -15

You do realize exactly how persuasive this attempt to wash your alliance's hands of even the possibility of responsibility looks, right?

Even I have to push back on this one. While anti-gun people are almost exclusively on the left, the left contains people who like guns, people who think gun ownership should be possible but harder, and people who want to ban all guns.

From what I can find on Robinson, all I've found on his political leanings is that didn't really vote one way or the other and that he bickered with his conservative family on trans issues but didn't really talk about much else politically. Which seems directionally left but the limited info we have suggests he was largely single-issue trans rights.

This hasn't actually answered the question:

When the shooter said that Kirk needed to be killed because of Kirk's "hate", what do you think he meant by that?

Wouldn't it be more like saying England bombed Pearl Harbor? And Germany's the one that's saying it, making fun of USA for being dishonest enough to insist that the attack could have come from Japan.

What am I missing here?

The balance sheet of the show. Those shows are expensive to produce and slide into cultural irrelevance and lose money.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-colbert-got-canceled

It is strange that these shows would be so expensive. The content is largely free given that they are publicity vehicles for actors with new films and so forth.

Yeah probably an intersection of a cultural vibeshift, the late night format fading out of relevance and Kimmell waving a big enough red flag at the bull to provide impetuous to terminate him if he was on the precipice previously.

hit some new lows

By saying "new low" he is making the fact that MAGA [accurately as it turns out] is characterizing the kid as non-MAGA appear lower than 1) leftists celebrating the murder 2) the actual murder itself.

But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe,

Do you want the United States to return to the norms of the 80s and 90s? Because the type of one-sided vitriol exhibited by Kimmel and Colbert has no place on a broadcast network, broad audience, light-hearted variety show. They should have both told years ago to tone down the rhetoric and be more two-sided. The "cancel culture" meme has always been false, for the past 10 years leftists have been escalating rhetoric and attacks and anti-white sentiment in a way that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, without getting canceled. If you want normalcy, there must be equal fear in straying to far too the left or too far to the right, especially when it comes to talking about political violence.

Personally, I think it is too late anyways to return to normalcy. The Democrat-Republican conflict is going to continue to escalate until one of the two parties is all but destroyed. Stay safe out there.

Because the type of one-sided vitriol exhibited by Kimmel and Colbert has no place on a broadcast network, broad audience, light-hearted variety show.

Vitriol? It's all smiles. He's not Father Coughlin.

  • -13

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me.

How is, to boil the line down, "those assholes are point-scoring liars" not offensive?

I'm not saying he should've been fired for it, comedians are allowed to be partisan hacks and still get paid. But I don't understand the people who don't notice that it was intended to be offensive. It's obviously insulting, insulting the right (and people dying of covid) is a big part of Kimmel's schtick.

  1. Bullet casings suggested he was deeply left wing.

  2. Romantic entanglement with trans suggest deeply left wing.

  3. Text message suggests he is left wing.

  4. People near him say he is left wing.

  5. Left wing Discord kept saying “something would happen to Kirk on the day of the assassination.

  6. The target was MAGA.

If put to a jury, that would be beyond reasonable doubt. And right now MAGA is grieving. One of their prominent own was murdered publicly for speaking by a leftist. Then, we have Kimmel go on the air and say “hey MAGa grievers, your own murdered Kirk so it’s really a ‘you’ problem” despite zero evidence to support that and significant evidence to support that the killer was left wing.

See my steelman here: it can be argued Robinson was "one of [MAGA's] own" in an essential and relevant sense, even if he was an apostate who had taken on Blue values, and that a version of Robinson who believed much the same things but had not been raised in a Red environment would not have wound up a murderer.

  • -17

I’ve m this argument being promulgated by the left. It’s nonsense. Despite the asshole being the opposite of MAGA in pretty much every conceivable way you are saying because he grew up in a red space he is basically forever red.

But nobody but nobody would make the claim if the roles were reversed (ie kid who was super maga but grew up in a left wing household). It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.

I don't buy that your upbringing forever defines your politics, that's obviously bunk anyways, but it bears noting that the guy is 22 and had attended all of half a semester of college. Of course transitions in political worldview can sometimes happen quickly, but most of the time it really, really doesn't happen very quickly. How long has he lived away from home? Not more than 4 years, but probably much less, and even when he moved away he didn't even move that far! So I think in such a case it's absolutely plausible that even if we assume he's drifting left fast, there could still be plenty of MAGA in him (famously many of these people tend to be hardcore fiscal conservatives even after "conversion", this is doubly true if social issues caused the leftward drift)

Except apparently in high school he was also left wing. And he wasn’t living as a moderate left winger — dude was dating a dude trying to trans himself.

It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview. Anyone admitting to remotely knowing how to operate such a thing in primarily Blue company would be viewed with noticeable suspicion; it's one of the strongest outgroup/ingroup markers out there. Hence when other Blue Tribers hear "A murdered B using a rifle", they know that at the very least, the murder only occurred because a thing of the other tribe was permitted to exist where A could get it.

  • -18

Maybe you could have said this ten, fifteen years ago. And maybe you can still say it today - 'temporarygunowners' as a stand in for the liberalgunowners on reddit is a joke for a reason - but I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's my odd bubble, maybe it's selection bias, but I can't help but feel that over the past 5 years or so we've seen a rise in gun owners that aren't necessarily red tribe in origin. A sort of twisted inverse of the entire Boomer-ish take of 'I'm a gun owner, but-' that's hard to define in a short, concise way. The kind of people that'll come into firearm forums(atleast on reddit) and start claiming how much they hate Trump and how bad he was for firearms(muh bumpstocks!) while ignoring all the bad behavior from Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Then, you also have the John Brown Gun Club-type deals, and there's atleast one video floating around on twitter of a blooper reel involving transtifa types larping on the flat range via tactical drills.

Mind - and perhaps I'm reading into this too much - the attitude of those two groups heavily imply that the reason they have said firearms is so they can use it against fascists.

In that light, Robinson doing what he did and how he did it makes perfect sense, imo.

That portion of the left looks an awful lot like the right-wing militia kooks from the 90's, except without the fed infiltration, self-policing, or actually-existing inciting incidents.

I’m sorry but if your position is that a blue tribe person thinks operating a gun is some kind of magic, then I don’t think we can move the conversation forward

Well, of course not. I just think it's viewed as a hallmark of Red culture - something that Reds teach their children and Blues don't - such that in a world that operated entirely on Blue norms, it would be vanishingly unlikely that a mentally unstable 22-year-old would have both access to a gun and training to use it. This doesn't seem crazy to me. Using that as an excuse to unilaterally blame the Red Tribe for a murder clearly sparked by lefty political motivations, that's obviously always going to be a massive stretch. But "if Red Tribe cultural norms had not been prevalent in Robinson's home environment, this wouldn't have happened" is a believable case, so it was the best steelman I could come up with for the offending joke.

I take it that you live in some megopolis?

The Reddest of states still pulled like 20-30% for Harris, and I can assure you that lots of those people go out hunting like everyone else. (ie. not with stone tools)

Sure and if the mom swallowed, the killer wouldn’t have killed. We can always argue over causation. But saying “the mom is responsible because she likes vaginal sex” actually misses the real proximate cause.

And yet, gun use isn't a Blue tribe anathema. Guns have an extremely long history with the left, ranging from highly-American contexts of racial-progressive awareness of the American South's Jim Crow efforts to disarm african americans in order for KKK terrorism, to gender-considerations of God making man and woman but Sam Colt making them equal, to the John Brown gun club varients of various Antifa and other bluer-than-you groups. Outside of the American context, this includes the revolutionary aphorisms up to and including 'all political power derives from the barrel of a gun,' countless cold war era revolutionary chic, and more.

Gun control in general may be a blue tribe coded program, but using guns is in no way a monopoly of red tribe.

John Brown Gun Clubs are a thing.

As a Blue Triber, I could not disagree more with this and find this description almost derogatory; a Red Triber could hardly insult the Blue Tribe better if he tried. Blue Tribers tend not to like guns and tend not to use guns, but gun-toting/gun-hobbyist Blue Tribers aren't unicorns. They're just rare, and the idea that gun usage is so out-there for a Blue Triber that simply knowing how to operate such a thing would be viewed with noticeable suspicion is something that could only apply only to particularly secluded/sheltered members of the Blue Tribe, not to just a typical Blue Tribe. I've lived in especially urban, especially sheltered Blue areas for most of my life, and even there, demonstrating/stating knowledge of how to operate a gun and even admitting a hobby of shooting guns wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

I repeat zeke5123a's statement that this is nonsense. The idea that there could be any sort of honest point to be made about concluding that the murderer was "one of [MAGA's] own" given the evidence available at the time is such transparent motivated reasoning that, as a leftist, it makes me angry to see other leftists discredit our side like this, which demonstrably fails in meeting up to our actual claim of being meaningfully better than the right.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview.

Yes, worldwiew of ordinary Clinton and Biden voting normie with "in this house we believe" sign. The shooter was not one of these people and was not interested in "blue company".

Once you go far enough left, once you cross the threshold, you get to hate liberals and love guns as much as any MAGA hat wearing redneck.

That’s even worse. It’s like saying “he wasn’t blue because he was bad. If bad, then MAGA. Bad therefore MAGA.”

Is that in the same sense that Hitler and Mussolini were just "one of the left's own", because that was the way they leaned in their early, formative years? Essential and vital that you personally eat responsibility for WW2, I guess.

There was a poll out a couple days ago suggesting 10-20% of Americans think the shooter was right wing. That's not enough to get a "verdict" from a jury.

That assumes the people are aware of the facts. Maybe they just hears Jimmy Kimmel.

Yeah but the majority of them either got swept up in Fake News or simply stopped at 'he's white so he must be a Republican'

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me.

Then you are badly miscalibrated. A right-wing figure with close ties to the Trump Administration (particularly the VP) is murdered, and this guy is (as the phrase goes, "without evidence") blaming... people who strongly support Trump ("MAGA")? That's extremely offensive to those people. Who, I might point out, make up a fairly large percentage of the populace.

If he was canceled due to pressure from the Trump administration, that's wrong. Either way Carr shouldn't have made his mafia-threat-type remarks about the license. But if he was canceled because he pissed off (or pissed on) a good portion of his audience... well, that's show business.

But if he was canceled because he pissed off (or pissed on) a good portion of his audience

If I were to give you a dollar for every american that is both MAGA and watches Kimmel regularly will you be able to buy Boeing 737, Bentley or a Starbucks coffee?

Bentley (used). Looks to me like Kimmel had ~1-2M weekly viewers, probably 2-20% were MAGA, you can get a used Bentley for $15,000.

Maybe a Starbucks coffee from 10 years ago, those things have gotten expensive.

Certainly not the 737 (unless Qatar gives it to me for free); that's significantly more than Kimmel's total audience. Probably somewhere near the Bentley; the last poll I find (2016) has 26% of his audience claiming to be conservative, and a good percentage of those would understand Fallon Kimmel (sorry, wrong Jimmy) to be referring to them even if they don't actually consider themselves MAGA.

I first heard of Kimmel when he did The Man Show way back when. I suppose his trajectory to the left is not surprising but he certainly seemed more right (in a bawdy, jokes-about-tits way) at that time.

Late night comedians always used to take potshots at whoever was in office, right up to Obama...and then suddenly the President could do no wrong. Then Obama's sainthood juxtaposed with Trump's Trumpiness happened, and "making fun of both sides" went out the window. Anyone on the right had horns drawn on their image. The rise of the Daily Show and John Stewart's (and Steven Colbert's) extremely politicized humor stirred the pot, and voilà.

Kimmel’s Karl Malone sketches were also a sword of Damocles for his career during the awokening, which made sure he stayed on the vanguard of the left.

Yeah I'm sure there's enough retirees who are habitual late night watchers and don't really agree with his politics but it's on because it's on. This stuff is the classic 'Internet resident has never heard of 18-season beige Cop Procedural that's actually the highest viewed thing in the country outside of the NFL since there's a fuckload of people in the Midwest who just don't engage online'

My boomer relatives watch reruns of pre-90's sitcoms or make fun of Finding Bigfoot and Ancient Aliens if they stay up late. They might put on a game show(usually a rerun). But I've never heard of them watching The Late Show or Jimmy Kimmel Live or any of those. They're more likely to pull up a more rural-oriented reality show as a last resort- anything from one of the seven zillion Cops knockoffs about game wardens to Swamp People.

Obviously anecdata but still. I'm sure there are Hanania-esque republicans watching these things, but socially conservative boomers have other choices of brainrot.

I've seen generally right-wing churchgoing Republican boomers habitually watching these things before, but I wouldn't characterize them as Hanania-esque so much as WALL-E background characters. They aren't watching the leftist slop because they want to temper their media diets with some leftist perspective, they're watching it because they're addicted to slop in general. It goes along with Marvel and Funko Pops and the like for them.

The claim seems to be that Kimmel is not blaming MAGA for the murder, rather Kimmel is claiming that MAGA are trying to claim non-MAGA murdered Charlie. I feel like this is probably the correct strict parsing of what Kimmel said but I wouldn't be surprised if you asked his audience directly after he said this whether MAGA killed Charlie a lot of them would have the impression that MAGA did based on what Kimmel said. This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect. Also, the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker instead of treating the speaker in the most charitable way possible.

This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect.

I mean, this is certainly what's going on. This is standard operating procedure for all non-fictional media on all sides of the aisle all the time. As such, people in media who practice this have no plausible deniability; either they're following this playbook knowingly, or they're so oblivious to the reality of such a playbook (intentionally or not) that everyone listening to them is dumber for having listened to them, they should be awarded no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Now, wordcel lying is infinitely adaptable to circumstance, but that doesn't mean the adaptation always happens. The part where I see the biggest weakness, by wordcel lying standards, is the inclusion of "desperately" in describing the MAGA gang's actions. The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality. Which many many people find perfectly fine in their late night talk show host, as long as that poor ability pays out in making fun of people they disagree with. It's just that, if even more people (or possibly the people with the actual power, like the owners) seem to believe in some higher values than just beating up people they disagree with.

the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker

Surely with years of evidence it's safe to acknowledge Kimmel openly hates Republicans and the malice isn't so much assumed but a known intention?

Yes, a "strict parse" based on denotation only doesn't get you the claim that the killer was MAGA. But I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of native American English speakers would get that from what Kimmel said. You would rarely say someone is desperately avoiding some conclusion if you don't think that conclusion is true.

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