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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:
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.
Bullet casings suggested he was deeply left wing.
Romantic entanglement with trans suggest deeply left wing.
Text message suggests he is left wing.
People near him say he is left wing.
Left wing Discord kept saying “something would happen to Kirk on the day of the assassination.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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John Brown Gun Clubs are a thing.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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