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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.
Personally I tend to think that both the Colbert firing and the Kimmel firing were partly in result to Trump admin pressure...
...but that reason, while true, wasn't at all the main reason. We heard Colbert's show was losing money regularly, and I imagine Kimmel's was too (although it's possible some Colbert defectors propped it up for a bit so may not have been recently the case, dunno there), so I believe both networks saw it as a win-win situation.
(The Kimmel quote in question is incredibly weak sauce, though. At worst he's accusing Republicans of being murderers, but that seems like a logical stretch of language. He's wrong on the facts of course but it's not like I have a high bar for comedy-ish monologues of the political issues de jour)
Am I worried about this kind of press pressure? Yes. I'm not, like, apocalyptically worried, just normal worried. I'm currently sort of on the train of thought that even if Trump 2.0 is followed by another Republican, I'm not sure these absurdities will continue. My mental model of the Trump admin is roughly that a ton of loose, low-qualified cannons running around using Trump's formidable political cover are going buck wild on their own personal pet issues and Trump doesn't care too much as long as it can be spun positively on TV, or gives off "we are strong" vibes.
I feel like "knowingly falsely accused followers of the president of murder before the victim's body was even in the ground" is a perfectly good reason to be kicked off your network TV show.
Imagine a universe where someone had blown Rachel Maddow's head off on live TV and the shooter's family immediately came out and told people how he was a right-wing lunatic. Some TV host goes off the reservation and blames it on "Obama and his thugs" or something like that. Not on social media, not on a podcast, right there on his broadcast network fluff show. You really think he keeps his job?
Nah man, this was never inside the Overton window.
Kimmel said, in essence, if we parse the quote finely (I don't really want to do this but you objected to my characterization and upgraded it to the level of knowing falsehood):
MAGA really wanted to wanted the shooter to be non-MAGA
MAGA are trying to score political points
said political points scored from "it"; grammatically this is unclear and grammar teachers advise against it for this exact ambiguity, but the next sentence suggests that he meant the finger pointing and not the murder as "it".
also not even implied, but requiring assumptions from the listener on their own: who is the finger pointing directed AT? Presumably, the left, but this is not claimed.
He then goes on to his main point, which is that Trump is not truly grieving. I agree with a poster below that this is a potentially cruel point because people grieve differently, but isn't there a grain of truth here? The response to tragedy is often commodified. Isn't calling that out fair game?
The claim that all MAGA are inherently murderers is an even more extended third-degree implication rising from the first bullet and its sub-bullet (logic goes like: not only is the shooter a MAGA but the 'denial' stems from MAGA insecurity at being themselves prone to such acts of violence). That's too far removed to count, in my eyes.
In short, "denial" is the implied emotion; denial usually implies guilt; and guilt applies to all Republicans. That's three degrees, depends partly on emotional reasoning, and I find it weak.
No.
If you accuse someone of a crime, and I say "you are desperately trying to claim this crime was committed by anyone other than yourself" then I have in fact accused you of that crime in turn. Period. You will never nuance yourself out of this, language can only be tortured so far.
You can be like the Washington Post and omit that part of the quote to imply it never happened.
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