It really is kind of incredible. I just saw the clip and there really is absolutely nothing there. This is not even 10% as poignant of what Jon Stewart would say in his day. He doesn't even say anything about Kirk himself, or even about the murder—he just talks about the reaction to it.
I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?
What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.
Something I wasn't aware of before this event is that broadcast licensees, such as ABC, are required to 'serve the public interest' as a component of receiving and retaining their broadcast license, probably because there's a limited number of such licenses available and they are publicly broadcast for free. It's a significant aspect of their operational obligations including each renewal requiring a further description of how they have continued (and will continue) to serve the public interest.
This is not the case for cable licensees, which goes a long way towards explaining why ABC/NBC/CBS/etc have all remained relatively sane in an era where it's clearly become most profitable to pick a side, pander, and confirm their every possible bias. This is because e.g. Fox News or MSNBC can get away with far more than ABC. And this is probably simply an example of something that you cannot get away with on public broadcasts.
Deciding to try to 'joke' about a domestic political assassination, for which countless people are still grieving was dumb. Stating, "We hit some new lows with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them." was very dumb. I think the only issue that makes this debatable for people is the radicalized nature of politics.
If this had been a white wing extremist who murdered a liberal guy who made a living posting public (and atypically respectful) debates, and Kimmel was then mocking it in a similar way, while further implying that killer himself was a Progressive or whatever, then obviously nobody, and I include conservatives there, would see any issues with him being canned.
The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,” a Nexstar spokesman said.
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Immediately following his monologues there advertisers and affiliates contacted and were complaining to Disney. The FCC was, if anything, just the final nail in the coffin.
The quote cited in TFA claims that the murderer was "one of them". Now, why would someone take out a prominent spokesperson for their own party? They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with. But somehow, people interpret that remark to make sense? The remark only makes sense if "one of them" refers to the fact the shooter was a white male, and the reader believes all white males are on the same side, and the enemy, and that the incident serves as entertainment. So, yes, I find that remark extremely problematic, and representative of increasingly tribal and divisive "us vs. them" mentality that is gridlocking the country. Not to mention, the comment is itself using the event for political "told-you-so"-ism, while criticizing others for doing exactly that, so it's utterly hypocritical. We can and must set a higher standard for our talking heads. If you want to be a popular figure without burning bridges, maybe don't be so brazenly racist and sexist to the point of publicly celebrating murder because it was "one of them", thinking that proves anything other than that the speaker is a sociopath?
There was also the theory that it was a black person, hence all the death threats to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=death+threats+hbcu
So, yes, there was quite a bit of "see, it wasn't one of ours, it was one of yours" after the guy was caught.
Especially when the images of the shooter's mother started surfacing indicating he was raised that way. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tyler+robinson+mother+gun . Charlie Kirk's mother at the memorial service specifically blamed college for radicalizing him, saying that good mother's wouldn't send their kids to college. (I don't have that clip.)
In general, my philosophy is to not speculate publicly when the shooter was going to get caught and identified quickly anyway.
“For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn't be one of us — that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country… Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for… But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”
I took issue with that statement too. He's the governor. He must be aware that out of the millions of citizens of his own state, some commit crime. I think he went too far in trying to affirm people who believe their entire state is free of violence.
> Now, why would someone take out a prominent spokesperson for their own party?
That's a question that actually has some easy examples if you'd care to study parties like Sinn Fein or Fatah or the CCCP or... you get the point. American politics has largely been free of this sort of in-fighting (and other kinds of political violence), but a political movement's leaders or followers can be targeted because they're deemed not sufficiently radical or too radical or what have you, or they've fallen out of favor, or they've done something the membership cannot accept, or whatever.
Or, you know: maybe the person doing the "taking out" is just insane.
> They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with.
Because that's just what a political party always is. A group of calm, rational people who are in total agreement on principles, goals and tactics and are entirely content with their place in the power structure. Ahem.
>Now, why would someone take out a prominent spokesperson for their own party? They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with.
This is why I think the American government is doomed in its current construction. First past the post voting has conditioned people like you to believe that everything is binary. You describe a world with only two parties that can have no dissention in those parties and no possible disagreements among their members. Isn't it obvious how flawed that mindset is?
This country desperately needs more than two options to every issue, but our system is inadvertently designed to ensure that doesn't happen.
The US isn't designed to ensure a two party system. FPTP can allow many parties. The UK is an example of that.
America has two parties because both parties are very internally open. Democrats have given up on that in the last few primaries but that's still very new, and Republicans are still open. You can enter as an outsider and take over the parties. That's how the Republicans ended up with Trump.
If the two parties were less internally democratic you'd see the same situation in the UK where there are two dominant parties and a bunch of smaller parties that occasionally end up in coalition but mostly act to push the main parties around by threatening to take too many votes.
The UK has two major parties, the Tories and Labour. Nobody else has come anywhere near a majority for decades. All of the other parties exist in orbit around one or the other.
The Tories were in a coalition not long ago and if an election were held tomorrow Reform would win a landslide victory. The SNP has dominated Scotland for years.
I'll admit I was being somewhat simplistic blaming exclusively first past the post voting. The real problem is the combination of FPTP and our presidential system. That is what makes the US converge to a two party system, not the open primaries you mention.
The UK having a parliamentary system counteracts this due to when the coalition building step happens. In a parliamentary system, the government is formed via coalition building in the parliament after an election. However, the US being a presidential system means that post-election coalition building would be too late to impact the chief executive, the coalition must be built before the election. This combined with FPTP is what yields our two party system.
For example, imagine the US has an even 50/50 split between Democrats and Republicans. Now imagine the tension in the Democratic Party boils over and the party splits into Liberals and Progressives. Maybe some Republicans were really centrists, so they peel off to the center-left Liberal party. That might leave us with a breakdown of 45% Republicans, 35% Liberals, and 20% Progressives. This almost guarantees the president will be a Republican. Despite attracting a majority of voters, the Progressives and Liberals costs themselves a chance at winning by splitting. They would have a natural incentive to merge their parties again before the next presidential election. But if this was a parliamentary system, the Liberals and Progressives would now make up 55% of the parliament and they could successfully form a government together and choose a PM without having to actually merge parties.
The reason I blamed this entirely on FPTP in my original comment is because something like ranked choice voting is a much more reasonable change that the US could adopt. Shifting from a presidential system to a parliamentary system is an unlikely enough change that I didn't think it was worth mentioning.
Oh trust me, I saw the CGPgrey video about the issues with first past the post pretty soon after it was uploaded 14 years ago, I know that it doesn't have to be two parties who have to convert all opinions into binary and pick a side. If there's ever an initiative to change that to ranked voting, I'll gladly vote for that proposal. People will have to do a lot more critical thinking if they can't just keep pointing to the same bogeyman over and over.
It is funny that you skipped over my criticism of you to agree with my criticism of the US government as if I didn't make a clear connection between those two. If you "know that it doesn't have to be two parties who have to convert all opinions into binary and pick a side", why did your original comment reduce this issue down to a binary? Can you admit that it is possible for someone to disagree with Kirk from the right?
Yes, but the casings were engraved with things like "catch, fascist", so it's pretty clear the shooter fell into leftist propaganda, which is a thing because currently, we are forced to pick from 1 of 2 parties. Perhaps he thought he would be seen like Luigi but instead he's just a weirdo.
It is not at all clear at this moment in time that the shooter had any consistent or coherent political leanings. Do you think growing up in a conservative house he might have been exposed to more "rightist propaganda", as you would put it? He certainly grew up in gun culture, which I would guess had more to do with the sick thing he did to Kirk than having a trans roommate did.
There was a lot of fake news following the shooting trying to suggest that the shooter was MAGA and decided to kill Charlie Kirk because he 'wasn't MAGA enough.' In particular a photoshopped image of him wearing a MAGA shirt was shared millions of times on social media [1], along with suggestions he was a "groyper" which is apparently some fringe right wing group. You can see the substantial impact of this by looking at Google trends on the term. [2]
This fake news was wide spread and even leaked into Hacker News through at least dozens of comments. [3] People are still implicitly trying to promote this misinformation by flagging any comment that mentions it, and spinning Kimmel stating, "with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them" to mean anything other than what it does.
I have never seen that photo, and the one supporting source for the claim that fake news was spread is someone who apparently runs this[1]?
I was not familiar with the term before either, but afaict it was based on the the shell casing engravings, halloween costumes etc, which I don't believe have been refuted [2]?
Not that this matters to the topic at hand as that isn't a claim Kimmel made either way, nor does it play into how tragic any murder is.
The source that pushed the fake picture is this [1] account with some 5 million followers that regularly posts disinformation and agitprop. That is also the same account that claimed he was a 'groyper'. Go check its stream and you can find endless more absurd claims.
People then simply unquestioningly repeated the claims, cited the same disinformation, and away we go - social media style. For instance here [2] it showed up in an Anandtech discussion, and I already linked to the claims making their way onto hacker news in dozens of posts as well. To say nothing of the cess pools that are Reddit, X, Facebook, etc.
Again, I don't think that picture is relevant to the claim, and you ignored everything else from my comment.
> Halloween photos showing Robinson riding on the back of an inflatable Donald Trump or dressed as a gopnik offshoot of Pepe the frog, the now-anachronistic alt-right meme that evolved into the groyper mascot.
> Groypers had hassled Kirk at public appearances over the years for what they saw as his insufficiently radical conservatism. (Fuentes has forcefully denied any connection to the shooting and told his followers he would “disavow” and “disown” any who “take up arms.”)
> But as the internet quickly pointed out, “Bella Ciao” is both an anti-fascist anthem from post-WWII Italy and a remixed track on a groyper Spotify playlist.
This would be misinformation if it would turn out to be false, but it would not be misinformation based on whether or not the shooter is leaning this way or that way or no way.
If you have sufficient evidence to make reasonable conclusion, which is negated by newer evidence. It is not misinformation.
Misinformation would be if you know something is not true and you twist facts around and present speculation in a factual manner to imply that it is true.
The source for the killer being a groyper is solely the disinformation account. The things you've mentioned are postfacto efforts to try to support the disinformation, in rather nonsensical ways I'd add. A Spotify playlist from some random guy, to try to create some 5d chess argument - also known as mental gymnastics, and Robinson riding around on a demeaned looking Trump doll 8 years ago? [1] If that's the best people can dig up, you should realize you're obviously being lied to.
> The source for the killer being a groyper is solely the disinformation account
No, the source is the string of corroborating incidents.
Sure, the two examples you bring up could be innocuous by themselves, but together with a "gopnik offshoot of Pepe the frog", his upbringing, and the fact that there are clearly fractures within the otherwise very top-down right-wing movement?
You're very adamant to dismiss any pieces of evidence as inconsequential (not as incorrect, mind you), yet resistant to provide any counter-factuals?
No, the source is literally the disinformation account. What you're seeing now is people trying to further spread disinformation by searching through his entire online past and trying to connect them to the groypers. And the best they've been able to come up with is him dressed as a gopnik (and that's all it was - the pepe stuff is more misinformation), and another with him with a Trump doll in a demeaning pose.
Nobody would, in a million years, reasonably think 'Ah hah - this must mean he's actually a groyper.' Stuff like this is exactly why Trump won the popular vote, something no Republican had done in 20 years. There is an increasingly rampant level of mental illness in the liberal camp regularly paired alongside outright denials of reality, and child-like efforts to gaslight.
A few more assassinations other degrees of political stupidity and we'll be well on our way to a one-party country. And I say this as somebody who has never once voted Republican, and until recently I would have readily identified as liberal. But now? It's starting to feel like a tainted term. My views haven't changed, but the distribution of views amongst self described liberals have, and I do not want to be associated with this madness.
Kimmel made that exact claim. Fake news has been spread by the left by way more people than him. The lying is so far off the charts that the left is having a massive collective break from reality. YouGov has found Democrats mostly believe that Kirk's killer was either right wing, or they aren't sure.
> "The evidence that Robinson was a “Groyper”—a member of an online further-right-than-thou movement that had harassed Kirk and President Donald Trump—was paltry. Why did anyone believe that idea to begin with? Already it bore the marks of an incipient conspiracy theory, a soothing nugget of esoteric knowledge, suppressed for political purposes. Many of those suckered in were victims of their own motivated reasoning. It hurts to admit that a movement you like has produced a bad person, and it hurts even more to admit that bitter truth to a gloating member of a movement you hate."
They're soothing themselves. Nobody on the right is "gloating" over Kirk being killed. This really happened because leftists have deliberately tried to confuse everyone about the truth. On their safe space Bluesky they even admit to it:
> "Anyway probably for the best if everyone asserts he's a Groyper whether he is or not. The narrative really does matter more than the truth in this case"
> "Lying to flood the news is good actually"
> "Spending the last week repeating that the killer was one of the right's own may have helped take the wind out of their sails. Regardless of whether that ends up being true it was rhetorically useful in the interim. Now you can pivot. Nobody is going to care what your last position was."
These tactics work. The internet has filled up with leftists who genuinely believe Kirk was killed for not being right wing enough, and anyone who tries to talk them back to reality gets answers like "I won't read any right wing sources". It's a self-created filter bubble of madness.
He said, "The MAGA Gang is 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"
Which is repeating the lie that Robinson is right wing. 100% false. He deserved to be fired for saying this, because it is delusional misinformation.
> He said, "The MAGA Gang is 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"
What he said is a critique on the "MAGA Gang"'s handling of the murder, in that they are less concerned with doing anything productive and more concerned with "scoring political points".
Whether or not "this kid" is one of them or not is inconsequential to the statement, and that sentence does not claim so.
Desperate. The meaning of "desperately trying to characterize as anything other than one of them" is clear. Kimmel either didn't know the killer is a left wing fanatic, which is so ill informed that's a firing offense, or he knew and decided to lie about it anyway as the Blueskyers are busy justifying, which is also a firing offense.
The Sinclair statement is just bizarre. Kimmel is to pay restitution to Kirk's (millionaire) widow because of statements he made about the political reaction to his death?
Media and the public have been going soft on the Trump admin for extorting law firms, businesses, and institutions because "Ah, it's just money. Just a settlement. No big deal".
It's not about Kimmel or the money, it's about the next person not stepping out of line so they don't face the consequences.
Trump and Co. are the biggest "snowflakes". Anything that even hints at not being in line with their thoughts, they put the power of the government to work to punish it. It doesn't even matter what anyone says or thinks, once they're set on it being bad, they're on it and it's always played up to be the worst thing ever.
There's no discussion, no indication what really happened, facts are irrelevant, all lies and threats:
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because this is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because this is according to my principles. - Frank Herbert
Both Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel do funny anti-governmental shows, but the difference is the former is kind of silly, superficial, low-impact, short-sighted while the latter is more influential, serious and capable to generate opposition.
To continue my comment. I enjoy both, even Jon more. My point was that the seemingly broader public impact of Jimmy lead to his ban. If it escelates to Jon then I do not see any difference than nations like Russia or China.
Even more worth reading are the Federalist Papers, cover-to-cover, as he suggested. The depth to which the Framers considered the kind of situations we are in today is amazing.
Also read the anti-federalist papers. Their criticisms of weaknesses in the Constitution predict exactly how those weaknesses have been abused. Both sides of the argument understood the nature of power and humans.
I'm not convinced it was an oops. Hamilton was a power hungry twat that tried to expand federal power almost immediately after ratification.
But, the anti-federalists lost the argument at the time. That doesn't mean the argument was resolved completely. It just means the federalists convinced enough people the Constitution was "good enough" for ratification. We are meant to continue improving it.
Now that we know for sure that the anti federalists were right about the necessary and proper clause and the interstate commerce clause we should be arguing for amendments. Convince enough people and it happens.
You, and I, and millions of others. Yet another example of how this shooter was stuck in some serious online bubbles. If there was even a vaguely contrarian voice, they would have mentioned his entire idea would, and has, turned a guy most people have never even heard of into a vastly more well known martyr.
Anyhow, the post that was "giving context" linked the actual video that likely got Kimmel canned second. Here it is timestamped to the section: https://youtu.be/-j3YdxNSzTk?t=122
Kimmel was clearly pulled because the fuhrer doesn't like him, because Kimmel is critical of him. You won't see conservative commentators scrutinized this closely, or at all, nor is there any precedent for the FCC acting in this way.
He implied that MAGA is trying to exploit the killing to create the image of the "terrorist left/antifa/BLM/immigrants/arab" conspiracy to their audience.
Which they are 100% trying to do, like they did with Trump's shooter, who was a lunatic just like Kirk's murderer (and all the others)
> Kimmel said the shooter is MAGA and the MAGA 'gang' assassinate their own.
Oh, so the last X political assassins have been white, male, and apparently strong supporters of the second amendment, but they don't hate minorities enough to be MAGA? (A recent study found a link between prejudice against minorities & support for political violence[0] so...)
> You now have the world you deserve, and smart people will ignore your pleas because you will never be more than a stereotype for the other side to use. Enjoy.
That's funny. Multiple people have lost their jobs for basically saying the exact same thing to conservatives after Kirk's assassination.
I don’t think you should get downvoted but I don’t agree either. He insinuated the shooter was maga, but in a way that was “perfect” in terms of deniability. I think that sort of rhetorical sleight of hand by our media elites is why we are where we are now with killing each other and societal Discord, so alas it’s better for society if Kimmel is off the airwaves. But the quote itself is rather tame. First, they came for glen beck, and we said nothing…
The FFC should not have power over broadcasters. I totally agree we should weaken or even get rid of the FCC if needed to preserve absolute freedom of speech. I also think advertisers and big corporations should not dictate what cannot be said, hence my comment. So we agree after all?
I think we should find out who wrote the joke, if that matters to those who are downvoting me.
Everyone is acting like Kimmel wrote the joke he is getting canceled for (ostensibly), but it’s quite likely the joke was written by one of his team. It is possible even that he was “set up” and there’s more to the story than being presented.
I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?
What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.