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Notes -
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:
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 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).
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.
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.
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