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.
Kimmel discussed the political response to Kirk's death, not the man, which is a class move that respects his family and the law. I can't see the problem.
How many companies, media people and politicians need to bend the knee before someone stands up and says this has all gone far enough?
"Well, we needed to acquiesce to fascism for our stock price" is not acceptable. Over and over and over we are told about how corporations are job creators and serve a valuable function in our society. We are told that having power distributed across corporations that are in competition with one another is a protection against tyranny.
I mean, to be fair, it did. There are other media personalities syndicated by other broadcasters that aren't bending the knee to autocratic rule. ABC has shown its not ripe for the fight, and has separated itself as the chaff from the wheat.
If there were a monopoly on media from ONE broadcaster, and that broadcaster didn't fight back, that's a wrap.
But to be sure, competition is NOT an innate feature of capitalism (economic power naturally consolidates in laissez-faire markets), but competition is an external check on capitalism's power; which is empowered by government regulation; and creates mixed market economies. Just as well, mixed market economies - and the ability to have multiple companies for goods and services - are an external check on government AND society power, as well as other companies themselves. It allows people to choose who to work for, buy/sell from, and build their own enterprise if they don't agree with present-day offerings.
I had never seen Kimmel until I watched the YouTube clip¹ linked elsewhere in this thread earlier today. After doing so, I cancelled my Disney+ subscription, giving “cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel” as the reason and won’t be in any hurry to re-join (though I heard the new Alien TV show is worth watching).
I hate cancel culture whether it’s coming from the conservative right (we’ve had that in Ireland for most of the 20th century) or the liberal left (more recently) and I believe that comedy should be able to transgress social norms and push up against boundaries but what I saw of Kimmel was wholly innocuous.
Not that I or anyone has done it, but there is theoretically there is a way to enjoy these TV shows for free from companies one doesn't want to fund. sailing or something...
That's why you can blame them, because billions of private dollars should not outweigh maintaining a stable democracy and civil society for all. "Just following market incentives to maximize shareholder value" is 2025's "just following orders".
An Australian reporter recently asked Trump how much money he has made since returning to office and if it is ethical for a person in his position. His org got locked out of a press conference in retaliation and we get the mafia boss threats about it not being good for our country to ask those sorts of questions.
Anyone living in the USA should by now have made a decision where their line in the sand lies. Without a free press or opposition things can move quickly so decide now. If I was a member of a minority likely to be a target I would want to know I had an exit strategy.
Trump also said he's gonna tell Australia's prime minister about the reporter, which is kinda nuts (and hilarious?)
Old track, but just hard to imagine what would have happened if Biden was asked about his corruption and answered like that. But it's hypothetical anyway, since no previous president would ever be rug-pulling crypto scams or selling watches and bibles.
I just can't believe how weekly, or sometimes daily, I share these wild stories and videos with some friends and they keep behaving like anything about this is normal. There are so many things that would make me go WTF even without the context of the constant grift it all comes with.
The naked emperor was already a pissy chad over Jimmy; this grudge-holding isn't new at all. Trump, back in July:
> The word is, and it's a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It's really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!
Nexstar owns outright a bunch of broadcast zones in America, with zero conpetition in those broadcast areas. So them folding and everyone else following suit isn't much of a surprise. It's pathetic that media ownership has degraded to such a sorry lame ass state, that there's many markets where almost all broadcast media is via one company. The decayed anti-health of media continues to plague this nation, allow the worst poxes to spread.
Yeah, that argument too. I didn't mention the first amendment though. For example it is also a requirement for basic science within the framework of enlightenment.
I get the xkcd and it certainly has a valid context. This is not it though. This retort just underlines a perspective that is characterized by severe lack of foresight, simple as that.
I don't even get the point you are trying to make. The issue is removing people due to their political opinions. This might have happened to Kimmel now.
You are still free to associate with anyone freely, but there is an expectation that you behave like an adult and can withstand different opinions. Otherwise no sensible dialogue is possible. Obviously that was not the case for the murderer of Kirk and the general sentiment is that some political factions have had difficulties here as well.
> The issue is removing people due to their political opinions.
No. The issue is who is doing that action. Illegal speech is not the same as rude speech. My boss can’t declare my opinions illegal. They can fire me.
> You are still free to associate with anyone freely, but there is an expectation that you behave like an adult and can withstand different opinions.
Nah. I can throw a tantrum, publicly decry you as an asshole and go no-contact with you. That’s legal, and part of my freedom of expression and association.
The government can’t confiscate my license over the tantrum.
I wholeheartedly disagree. If you are excluded in research for your opinion, we could just as well install the church again. The vanity is the same.
This time it is Trump directly. Sure, that is also a problem. Previously it was the handlers of government, so it didn't need to intervene directly. NGOs or just companies getting government grants, didn't matter.
> I can throw a tantrum, publicly decry you as an asshole and go no-contact with you. That’s legal, and part of my freedom of expression and association.
Of course and I welcome you to do so.
We are not talking about instances where people were rude to their bosses. We are talking about instances where people had the wrong political opinion and some faculties are in dire need of reform because of the structures they formed by excluding everyone not in line. That is a problem, obviously. A problem best described as a violation of freedom of expression. You can look up the definition on wikipedia. In the first sentence there is something about repercussions. Easy concept, you would think...
> Wiki: Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction
After very clear threats of official action from the FCC chair up to and including revocation of their broadcasting licenses. For protected speech. That is a very, very clear First Amendment violation.
"FCC chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to take action against ABC after Jimmy Kimmel said in a monologue that 'the MAGA gang' was attempting to portray Charlie Kirk‘s assassin as 'anything other than one of them.' 'We can do this the easy way or the hard way,' Carr said. 'These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.'... 'You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this,' Carr said."
Mel Brooks had the right of it. Fascism and Authoritarianism is defeated by satire and mockery. The ideology is too outrageous to survive any such scrutiny.
Why else would the administration be so afraid of a few jokes?
But they generally either do not get it or pretend not to get it. The tactic only works on people who have shame. Politicians used to resign for consensual sex.
TBF I don't think Trump supporters get the ridiculousness. If they could get it so easily from another politician repeating it, they wouldn't be supporting Trump in the first place.
What Gavin Newsom is doing is, I think, a bit more subtle. He's signaling to Democratic supporters "Here's a guy willing to mock and ridicule Trump," because the established Democrats were too afraid to even do that - which explains why in this age of Trump, Democrats' poll numbers are still in the gutter.
Surprised the French get the "lives" in this, given that the soviet union lost about 40 people for every french person while having a population only about 4.5x larger.
The quote is a little messed up because many of those 'soviet tanks' were Lend-Lease tanks produced by allies. Iirc it goes "WW2 was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood"
Indeed, USSR casualties (including civilians) were off the charts. USSR, then China, then Germany and then Indonesia. [0] 'Russian blood' part is something of an understatement.
The lend lease part is not correct. Lend lease went mostly to UK (Google AI says about 60% of lend lease went to UK & the rest of lend lease was split between USSR & China. Take that with a grain of salt)
Not to be taken with a grant of salt, according to wikipedia: "Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production. " [1]
Also per wikipedia, USSR produced about 30k light tanks, 65k medium tanks (eg: t-34), and 13k heavy tanks. [2]
>The lend lease part is not correct. Lend lease went mostly to UK (Google AI says about 60% of lend lease went to UK
UK sent stuff to USSR, too, including probably some of the stuff they got from the US, and they delivered it to Murmansk (rather than requiring the Soviets to come get it) during which their convoys and sailors took losses from the German navy.
I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies. The US sent advisors, too, e.g., in how to build factories.
Of course, a few years later the US was sending stuff to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, one of the purposes of which was to build up Germany so it could resist future Soviet aggression.
Yes, but that wasn't part of the "lend lease" program.
The quantity of materials sent from the UK to the USSR was significant. Just it was not part of the lend lease program. (Arguably this is something better, just direct aid without strings attached).
The quantities of what the UK gave to the USSR was a sacrifice of blood and treasure: "food and raw materials, roughly £30 billion in today’s money. This included 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft, while public charitable donations provided approximately £5.3 million (roughly £490 million in today’s money) in medical stores...."
"Some of these supplies were purchased in the United States (US) by the UK for delivery directly to the USSR. Most British supplies were carried by sea to Northern Russia, docking at Archangel or Murmansk, by a series of Arctic convoys, which were subject to sustained German attacks from three dimensions from powerful German forces based in Northern Norway" [1]
> I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies
Sounds plausible (I would hesitate to repeat it without seeing the data behind the numbers). I'm curious how the number breaks down as a relative amount.
> Fascism and Authoritarianism is defeated by satire and mockery.
Napoleon shut down all the newspapers that criticized him. He was only undone by Waterloo (actually mostly by his own folly of trying to invade Russia ...)
I don't think there's any record of Authoritarianism being defeated by satire, if for no other reason than the authoritarians shut the satire down.
Looks like it's time for an American _Solidarność_
The last criticism of Nazism was a very milquetoast 1934 speech by a Nazi, Franz von Papen, who though supporting Adolf Hitler detracted in some (seemingly) lesser ways—decrying the fanaticism of Hitler's personality cult. He was severely punished for it.
"They will bear them and follow the Führer with unwavering loyalty, if they are allowed to have their part in the planning and in the work, if every word of criticism is not taken for ill will, and if despairing patriots are not branded as enemies of the state."
The last high level public criticism within Germany. Nazis of course still got criticism and satire elsewhere. Hitler Has Only Got One Ball and the like leading up to their defeat and Hitler shooting himself in a bunker.
I have read that the Joe Rogan school of comedy, that has grown popular in the past decade, did so on the grounds on fighting liberal "cancel culture". Back then they were rebelling against what was painted as a predominant culture, now that they have overachieved, one wonders if they would also fight cancle culture when it is coming from thr political right. I am not very optimistic about that.
But maybe we get new generations of comedians that will.
Their mediocre humor relies on punching down and bashing "cancel culture". That's their only trick and what their audience wants to hear. Without it their "comedy" has no edge, and picking on trans people is a lot less funny when the president is already doing it on national news.
It's my totally uneducated perception that you need to start out as explicitly unaffiliated in order to execute on a shift like that (e.g. South Park). If you start fighting in one direction, I imagine it's near impossible to start punching backwards (once your audience is established) without alienating a substantial portion of your base.
They were fighting "cancel culture" and complaining about not being able to say anything anymore on Netflix specials and sponsored podcasts. These guys are all fucking grifters with fried brains and no values beyond that of their bank accounts.
Joe Rogan, the Fear Factor host turned Right Wing podcaster? Is he know for comedy? I thought his brief failed stint of stand up comedy is why he switched to podcasting.
Per "https://www.joerogan.com/" - Joe Rogan is "A standup comedian for over 30 years, Rogan’s seventh hour long comedy special Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats premiered live on Netflix on August 3, 2024. Rogan’s previous comedy specials include..."
Joe Rogan owns a comedy club in Austin as well. [1]
Joe Rogan is a pretty busy guy.. I would imagine his professional network amongst comedians was pretty large before he blew up as a podcaster. This is not only to say that Joe Rogan has multiple comedies, but is also very likely to be very influential amongst as well.
Joe Rogan was a stand up comedian in the 80s/90s, appeared on the MTV comedy show Half-Hour Comedy Hour and was performing at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. Not that I find him funny, but that in my book at least would make him someone with a professional comedy background if he spent nearly 3 decades there..
But I was refering to was the specific idea of what has been labeled the "Rogansphere" by his critics. This refers to a loose media/comedy ecosystem orbiting Joe Rogan, his podcast, Austin (comedy) clubs, and a web of frequent guests and adjacent podcasters/comedians who cross-promote each other on YouTube and podcasts. This network rose to prominence in a push to normalize "anti-woke" and right-leaning narratives under a free-speech banner. This was a pretty popular niche to serve as the term "cancel culture" gained more traction. At the time even many otherwise (american-)left-leaning people would express frustration with liberal attempts to police language etc.
This popular niche was especially present in comedy with a discourse about what and who you could joke about and since Joe Rogan played a big role into giving that topic traction I cynically called it "Joe Rogan school of comedy". I am no alone in thinking that way, comedian Marc Maron puts it better than I could in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N4W05eyto&t=307s
The “neutral” is part of his act. He platforms people with dangerous ideas under the guise of “just hearing what they have to say”, but he doesn’t really push back _ever_. I’ve heard people say downright factually incorrect or defamatory things on his show and his response is, largely, “oh really” or “that’s interesting”, etc.
One of many examples. Joe is outraged because he thinks Joe Biden talked about airports during the revolutionary war. He goes on to state that someone who makes such comments shouldn't have a job. When it's revealed that it's a Trump statement he pivots to "oh he just made a mistake when speaking". It's so blatantly obvious and happens constantly.
Well, fairly neutral is in the eye of the beholder. Saying Biden seemed a bit gaga was being said by most democrats at the time, and Rogan seemed to acknowledge his error when it turned out Trump talked about airports rather than Biden. "so he fucked up" was the wording.
But he considered it disqualifying out of Biden's mouth…
> December 22, 2023: "Pull him," Rogan said. "If you had any other job, and you were talking like that, they would go, 'Hey, you're done.'"
but mysteriously not when it turns out to be Trump:
> November 5, 2024: Popular podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump on the eve of the election, a move Trump’s team swiftly touted as a major win in the final hours of their campaign. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/joe-rogan-trump-endo...)
Makes sense - Rogan is friends with Alex Jones, who is pretty much as far up Trump’s rump as Jones himself once said Trump was “up ISIS’s dirty **hole” - we almost had a world where jones was so mad at trump that he was going to bail, but I’m pretty sure Roger Stone and their other trump-linked associate (name escapes me, “psyops” guy) reigned him in - maybe with some push from the kremlin too.
I guess my point is: these people are all interconnected and it’s almost like when you hear about how actors all know each other and hang out, or congresspeople play golf together, but for fascism.
If "fairly neutral" includes drastically different categories for viability depending on the political party then the term means absolutely nothing at all. If the statement is disqualifying for Biden, but just a gaff by Trump, it's absolutely 100% not "fairly neutral" or "fairly" anything. It's a very clear and demonstrated bias.
> Peter Cook, [...] talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.
> ABC said it was pulling the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show off the air “indefinitely” after controversial comments by its host about the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
but the article says the following, which is entirely different:
> “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,” Kimmel said.
>
> “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving,” he added.
The 2nd part is the quote from Jimmy Kimmel that he said on air that caused the "controversy", that resulted in the FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr to go on a podcast and threaten ABC/Disney with retaliatory action if they refused to take Kimmel off the air.
CNN doesn't show a clip, but explains what was said & the events that caused this.
This isn’t a free-speech issue. Kimmel was free to say what he said, and I personally don’t find his comments egregiously offensive. However, clearly some people did. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. In this case, his employer responded to partner backlash over his remarks.
> However, clearly some people did. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. In this case, his employer responded to partner backlash over his remarks.
Government officials also threatened to pull the government provided broadcasting licenses that the corporation has. That’s free speech related.
>During a Wednesday podcast appearance, FCC head Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of any stations that continued to air Kimmel’s content.
>“It’s time for them to step and say this garbage…isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” he said.
>Carr’s threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing “the power of censorship” or interfering “with the right of free speech.” There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for “news distortion,” in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.
>Hours after Carr’s Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel’s comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.
He wasn’t claiming that he is. He was pointing out that people were scrambling to label him as being from “the other side”. The reality isn’t so binary.
I agree it could have been worded better but I think it’s clear if you watch it in context.
That’s understandable. In this 24 hour news cycle of manufactured outrage, who has the time to fully understand an issue before making a proclamation of what is and isn’t true. Facts are old news.
The same licenses restrict badwords. You can't even say fuck on the same airwaves. That spectrum is public property licensed with restrictions. That's not a First Amendment issue at all, it is a contractual issue.
You're seemingly equating "obscenity" with "political criticism". I'll note that "political criticism" is offensive when you don't agree with it. The first amendment is exactly for that kind of offensive language.
Well, First Amendment protects your rights to obscene speech too, so you just affirmed here the license terms are controlling, not First Amendment. I am not litigating this exact incident (which in all likelihood had most to do with business decisions as WSJ reports,) nor suggesting that I think what was said was overly offensive, just pointing out that the airwaves in question are much more restricted than general speech in the United States and debates over what is allowed would not automatically escalate to a constitutional concern.
> Well, First Amendment protects your rights to obscene speech too, so you just affirmed here the license terms are controlling, not First Amendment
Nonsense. Feel free to point out how my comments about just the first amendment is related to you equating that to licensing terms.
> which in all likelihood had most to do with business decisions as WSJ reports
I am not convinced. Please provide the WSJ report. Seems the FCC chair saying "easy way or hard way" was more salient.
To boot, Kimmel is back on the air. If there were substance to the abrupt firing for business reasons, or regulatory, Kimmel would not have been reinstated.
> just pointing out that the airwaves in question are much more restricted than general speech in the United States
I do agree. The restrictions are for obscene speech generally. It is significant when that is extended to political speech.
> United States and debates over what is allowed would not automatically escalate to a constitutional concern.
Indeed. Except in this case we have selective enforcement at the behest of the government for what the government does not like. It is exactly First Amendment territory.
This is how the Islamic regime in Iran thinks. They argue that "you are free to say whatever you want and we are free to put you in jail and in some cases hang you".
> his employer responded to partner backlash over his remarks
No. His employer responded to threats from the Republican federal government to prevent them from broadcasting by pulling their FCC license or prevent their merger.
I think everybody is (reasonably) confused by the use of the words "anything other than". It's usually used in phrases that express the speaker's opinion to the opposite ("as if this is anything other than performative" means "this is performative"). Based on the clip, it sounds like Kimmel unfortunately used it literally: "trying to portray [him] as anything other than...", as in, "they're jumping the gun on his portrayal and blame placement", and not, "I know which team he's on." I could be wrong, but that's what it sounds like in context (and would make more sense too).
This by the way is an example of construction that confuses is non English natives.
Another one is "he was all but dead" which can be understood as "he was really in a bad shape, almost dead", or "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say"
There are a few more like these (especially in short titles, where I have to analyze word by word the sentence to make sure I got it right)
Yeah, English is very confusing (or at least I get the impression that it is more confusing than other languages - it's the only one I speak).
Even in your example, I think you misunderstand. "He was all but dead" is never used to mean "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say". That would be "he was anything but dead".
However, there is a caveat, since even native speakers increasingly over the years speak English "wrongly". Of course, when they do it enough, it's no longer wrong. So maybe you did hear a native speaker use the phrase "he was all but dead" with the latter meaning, but I would put that usage in the "wrong" camp as of 2025.
> Even in your example, I think you misunderstand. "He was all but dead" is never used to mean "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say". That would be "he was anything but dead".
ah, sorry I was not clear - what I meant with the "or" is that there are 2 ways to understand this sentence, one of them being incorrect :)
I am a native English speaker and I don't actually know what he was trying to say, but it just seemed like he was talking about the MAGAs trying to quickly pin blame on not-MAGA. This is why I'm not a monologue writer.
This is a good insight. I don't think Kimmel should be pulled for either meaning, but it does help explain why some people might be talking past each other.
To be fair, even if I'm right, I don't think I'm going to convince anybody who wants to interpret it the other way. The difference is large semantically, but subtle linguistically.
Thing is, even if the "trying to portray [him] as anything other than..." reading was intended and the correct reading, the statement is still closer to the opposite of the truth.
Granted, it is not reasonable to expect everyone to have been terminally online for this issue, but even before this statement was made, it was clear if you visited places with right-wing bias (e.g. 4chan) that almost no one was concerned this guy might be MAGA. And if you looked at more grey tribe places (e.g. ACX open-thread comments / discussion), it was also already clear the preponderance of evidence and reason in fact definitely point to it being far more likely the guy was left than right (or at minimum some idiosyncratic, but definitely not "groyper" or "MAGA" rightist). Heck, this was even clear if you read through enough Reddit comments sorting by "controversial".
Also, it was abundantly clear the sentiments were: Blue tribe social media desperately looking for evidence against obvious left/progressive connections, Red tribe media gleefully pointing out left/progressive connections, and gray tribe places generally having the usual mix + typical frustration at the over-certainty of everyone else.
I.e., the reality is that the "desperation" was almost entirely on the left (understandably) trying to disown the shooter. What there was on the MAGA right was maniacal glee about all the potential (and prima facie more reasonable) left-wing connections. I doubt noting these overall patterns instead would have saved Kimmel, but choosing to frame the whole thing as "desperate MAGA" was just an insinuation that really ran directly opposite to the facts and reason.
>almost no one was concerned this guy might be MAGA.
But that's not what he's saying. He was saying "they were quick to paint him as blue tribe before knowing his tribe." It is just constructed like a sentence that ambiguously also means "desperately constructing that he was not red tribe."
>Red tribe media gleefully pointing out left/progressive connections
Which is synonymous with what JK said. That the reaction was "he was a them, not us, therefore justifying our prejudices."
He literally said "with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". Interpretation hinges on the "desperately" here, but your reading of this as him saying "they were quick to paint him as blue tribe before knowing his tribe" is far too distant from the literal words. The right were not "desperate" to distance him from MAGA or red tribe, because that was never a strong position given reason and the evidence, which pointed, if anywhere, towards blue tribe. The "desperation", if anywhere, was on the left linking him to MAGA, because it was very clear, even then, to anyone who read beyond Reddit "best" comments, that the links to the left were far stronger and more reasonable. Kimmel's phrasing not just implied, but directly stated that the desperation was in the opposite place to where it was in actuality, and so strongly implied a preponderance of evidence in a direction opposite to the general direction dictated by reason and evidence already known at that time. So no, there is not the synonymity you claim.
As others have pointed out, this kind of insinuation is very hard to see as anything other than deliberate, given basic media literacy and how modern media operates (https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-t...). To save you a click:
> 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.
> “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,” Kimmel said.
Off topic, but has there been convincing evidence that the suspect is right wing/MAGA, as Kimmel implied? I've seen some posts on reddit to this effect, but they're far from convincing.
There is, despite the fact that a strict reading would turn up no such implication. However taking into account the phrasing and the general zeitgeist on reddit (and similar left-leaning circles), it's pretty obvious what he was trying to do. Imagine you read a passage that said:
>The sugar industry desperately trying to characterize the obesity crisis as being caused by anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
what would your conclusion be? That sugar isn't a contributing factor to obesity?
There is little evidence for right or left ideological adherence, but there is for independent accelerationist blackpill from the memetic dog whistles. Accelerationists are essentially terrorists who want credit for mass destruction, collapse, omnicide, and suicide.
Only thing I've seen is that he was dating a trans M-T-F person, and that person was very cooperative with police. Although it makes you wonder about his gay comment engraved on the bullet.
No, it's quite common and less confusing than "Trans Woman" because some people not well versed in these topics will be confused by only describing the final gender.
I dunno, I said it's used a lot by bigots, then a bigot shows up and agrees with me (now flagged). If that isn't a sign a term isn't great, I don't know what is?
Judging yourself by how unscrupulous people react to you is a common pitfall - it poisons your perception of others and blinds you to yourself.
Tangentially: I was confused by the usage of the ambiguous word, "weird", as shorthand for "bigoted". I thought you were literally asking what "mtf" meant.
> Robinson: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out.
Besides everyone around him testifying that he'd been left-wing ever since dropping out of college, his admission that he found Charlie's relatively moderate speech "hateful" strongly suggests the murderer was quite far to the left.
Yet, out of the small fraction of people who had heard of Mr. Kirk, it was Mr. Robinson, who was raised by republicans, in a MAGA household who resorted to violence.
What is your honest belief. All of the things below are in the news, you can copy and paste any of these quotes to back that up.
> "Robinson's mother explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented," the court documents say.
> "She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders. This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views.
> Robinson: since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga.
> Rounds in the rifle were allegedly etched with messages like "Hey Fascist! Catch!" and lyrics of the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist Italian folk song Bella Ciao.
"Left wing" kids are not brought up being taught violence is an acceptable solution to life's problems, or for the rage they may feel against others. That could be why there is an order of magnitude fewer deaths from "left wing" extremism compared to "right wing" extremism according to the DOJ [0].
"Left wing" kids are not given as easy access to, or training with, firearms. Conservatives, especially rural, are [1].
And please do not pretend that knowing, loving, or being a trans person prohibits one from holding conservative view points, that's rather hateful [2].
What is your honest belief. All of the things below are in the news, you can copy and paste any of these quotes to back that up.
> "Robinson's mother explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented," the court documents say.
> "She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders. This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views.
> Robinson: since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga.
> Rounds in the rifle were allegedly etched with messages like "Hey Fascist! Catch!" and lyrics of the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist Italian folk song Bella Ciao.
Ah yes, a relatively moderate white supremacist who believes gay people should be executed and children should be forced to watch public executions. Just about as moderate as the Taliban
What is your honest belief. All of the things below are in the news, you can copy and paste any of these quotes to back that up.
> "Robinson's mother explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented," the court documents say.
> "She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders. This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views.
> Robinson: since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga.
> Rounds in the rifle were allegedly etched with messages like "Hey Fascist! Catch!" and lyrics of the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist Italian folk song Bella Ciao.
I commented on Kirk's stance, not the shooter's. I don't endorse political violence.
I just take umbrage with the framing of Charlie Kirk as a moderate. He was a white supremacist. He believed that women shouldn't have the right to vote. He endorsed the state-sponsored execution of LGBTQ+ individuals.
These aren't moderate positions in the modern day, they're the positions of a religious extremist.
These are wild mischaracterizations of Kirk. You have a video of him saying any of that? Most of you lefty people are getting clips from Destiny that are clipped to show a wildly unfair characterization.
I'd feel a lot more inclined to engage with you on this if your first response wasn't a complete non sequitur that leads me to believe you've been engaging in bad faith from the jump.
What is your honest belief. All of the things below are in the news, you can copy and paste any of these quotes to back that up.
> "Robinson's mother explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented," the court documents say.
> "She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders. This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views.
> Robinson: since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga.
> Rounds in the rifle were allegedly etched with messages like "Hey Fascist! Catch!" and lyrics of the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist Italian folk song Bella Ciao.
Family is staunchly republican, tho the perp himself went indy in the last few elections. Being gay doesn't say anything, Thiel's gay bf killed himself for what seems like political issues too (& might have been Indy like perp-- or, say sama)
I haven't seen any by unhinged leftists, however I have seen countless normal people tired of hate, authoritarianism, racism, anti-women, anti-science, and anti-infrastructure, and narcissistic tendencies by their parents, who are often MAGA or QAnoners.
You only get one mom and dad, and estranging yourselves from them over political disagreements (common on reddit) seems fairly unhinged to me. And I was just trying to illustrate the absurdity of the
> HIS FAMILY IS MAGA
cope, which leftists latched onto immediately, even on reddit, where the counterexamples abound.
I’m at a loss of what to watch as far as television goes in the US, between the government threatening to intervene in content, corporations that own television networks with little regard for journalistic integrity, and PBS downsizing. I’m pretty much exclusively watching NHK from Japan through a Roku app.
Lots of people say things like "I know I should read, but it's this whole thing..." and then you find out they've been stuck on page 3 of Wuthering Heights for forty years, because someone convinced them they ought to be reading that, and it's haunted them from their night-stand ever since.
Don't let anyone tell you what to read, pick up something that sounds fun to you, and read it. Choosing to read something is always and in every circumstance better than sitting in front of a screen and passively yielding to whatever evening the advertisers have planned out for you.
I'd like to strongly recommend the "Dungeon Crawler Carl" series as an alternative to television. If you like dark humor and don't hate the idea of a litrpg.
Ironically, I plan on reading Wuthering Heights this October.
Do not stop here! Keep going the trilogy there is great and all of it within the foundation universe, incredible stuff. I wish I had more people to discuss it with
I had a copy of Hyperion but didn't read it for years because the scary knife robot on the cover seemed intimidating. I finally read it, and all the sequels, and they were great books, and hell YEAH that was an intimidating knife robot! Sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
It is so true. Pick up any well-regarded book even quick short ones and the depth of information, insight, and connection you get put most online things to shame. Like it’s not even close compared to good blogs, podcasts, and videos…books run circles around them.
You don't need dinosaur US mainstream media PBS, CNN or MSNBCNow. There's: Last Week Tonight, Thom Hartmann, Democracy Now, Keith Olbermann, and many more.
I like LWT with John Oliver but isn't HBO kinda MSM-y? Like it's a premium network but it's still bound by the whims of Time Warner Discovery or whoever happens to own HBO at the time.
The era of TV-talk shows is already ending, so it's easy for companies to agree to censorship. These moves just quicken the end of the talk-show era. More profitable and successful shows seem to be immune for now, and South Park goes harder than ever.
I'm somewhat convinced that (at least among the younger generation) the role that these talkshow hosts held has already been replaced by live streamers and podcasters. Even Conan has transitioned into primarily focusing on podcasts while others refused to adapt and stuck to the networks.
10 years ago I'm fairly certain these moves would have been met with a strong reaction from the public, but now nobody cares...
It seems like there is, and will be, a strong reaction from the public (I may, of course, be hoping for something I'd like to see).
This thread is certainly active with those critical of the administration.
Note, the public at large did not know what Kimmel said until now. The Streisand effect is coming into play, because it was so uncontroversial.
The podcast part, I agree, although it's sad in someways, as it demolishes the national conversation, and makes easier to appeal to "your group" rather than "all groups".
Maybe I'm a dinosaur but I like late night TV. I don't have cable so I just caught Colbert and The Daily Show on YouTube the next day but for some reason podcasts just don't jive with me. I can't exactly say why. There are some podcasts I'll tune into sometimes (like Ramit Seth's money for couples, or Strike Force Five which had the Jimmy's and Colbert) but other than that, nada. Rather listen to an audio book.
There was a strong reaction from the public. Unfortunately that’s why this happened.. affiliate networks refusing to air his show probably had a much bigger impact than the FCC
FCC threatened Nexstar and all the others that run affiliate networks. Nexstar is trying to merge with Tegna. It's pretty clear how this was a very easy threat for the FCC to make. Without the affiliates ABC has no real audience outside of streaming, and late night shows have already been lagging with ratings. I hate it but really what other option did they have? Disney has never been a company to really fight back unless it was about their bottom line.
> I hate it but really what other option did they have? Disney has never been a company to really fight back unless it was about their bottom line.
How about sue the government just the like numerous other times they have?
But that wouldn’t work in today’s world where the justice department is practically another appendage of the President himself.
Yep, I was thinking how convenient for Sinclair to "loose" Jimmy right now. I'll bet they are going along with it because his show was already really unpopular (at least for the ratings that I could find) and this is a perfect excuse to drop him while saving face.
Everybody "wins"... The right get to gloat, the left get to have talking points and Sinclair get's to freshen up their line up while we all fight it out in the comments.
I'll bet there was a cigar smoke filled back room chat when the discission was made $$$.
This feels like an overreach, maybe. The FCC does have the strange task of regulating "false information" [1], but in practice I don't think that gets invoked very often (I'm sure morning DJs would be fired en masse if they were actually held to the standard of proven, objective truth!)
I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.
> I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.
I’ve been hearing a variation of this for at least 9 months. Can’t help but see Americans as frogs in the boiling water. Surely it can’t get hotter than this, can it?
It’s absolutely an overreach and there’s no chance this is the high water mark. Things are going to get much, much worse before there’s any hope of things calming down.
Almost sounds like a canned reaction to, say, threatening a network over covering leaked Epstein details. Other late night hosts better watch themselves or the FCC might accuse them of “alienating their audience”.
> The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a crime or a catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial “public harm” if aired.
> FCC rules specifically say that the “public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties.”
> Broadcasters may air disclaimers that clearly characterize programming as fiction to avoid violating
FCC rules about public harm.
It’s very obvious that Kimmel didn’t cause, and couldn’t have caused, any public harm.
FCC doesn't regulate cable stations. Local municipalities do have contracts with cable companies for enforcing community standards. Would be funny if blue cities just started forcing Faux News to be dropped as a matter of preventing dissemination of harmful lies and distortions.
As much as I dislike Faux News (I dislike CNN too, and I lean left), I feel like silencing "fake news" is a slippery slope because for one reason or another, the US population doesn't understand what "facts" are, so red cities would probably just drop CNN on the pretense of it being "fake news," and then everyone just gets forced into their little bubbles and everyone loses.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the FCC didn't actually do anything here. The FCC chairman made, at worst, a threat. ABC immediately pulled the show, and news article's link this to license approvals and such.
But if the FCC actually strong armed the media due to political reasons, would it stand up in the courts? Disney has more than enough money to fight it. One possibility is that they're using this as an opportunity to cut the show, which maybe they were leaning towards anyway. It effectively redirects blame to the FCC instead of the company that actually made the decision.
How often is there not some upcoming deal with some media company that has political content? It's not unusual at all, yet ABC is completely absolved of any responsibility in this case apparently.
That is unironically what happened here. The comments Kimmel made here did not disparage Kirk, but rather the administration's reaction to his shooting.
“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,” Kimmel said.
Right, which part of that, especially if you are a republican, is disparaging to Kirk? What part of that is ethically or morally objectionable let alone warranting the FCC to intervene?
You forgot the rest of the quote:
“In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
That, however, is criticism of the administration.
What is incorrect about that statement? The shooter grew up in a MAGA/Republican household. There are lots of examples over the last week of the Trump admin and MAGA personalities using Charlie Kirks death for political gain. In fact I would say them using Charlie Kirk's death to cancel Jimmy Kimmel is literally them using his death for political gain.
We're apolitical when it: A) doesn't matter, or B) it serves the interest of the tech bro hustle culture.
We're political when: it serves the tech bro hustle culture
Sensitive much? Not really the emotional intelligence and maturity one wants from an establishment running a country of 300 million people and all the problems that encapsulates.
The US is in all kinds of trouble and, unfortunately, the rest of the world is going to get some of it on them.
I am largely neutral on this particular assassination, as I knew almost nothing about Mr. Kirk prior to his departure (just name recognition & basic political associations).
But I do think, after decades of reflection, that comedians are correct when they point out that stereotypical humor shouldn't be off limits to any performer (of any background/color), but is... e.g. Owen Benjamin, Chappelle, Seinfeld.
Assassination is stupid and counterproductive, even if the subject was a shameless, ethnonationalist supremacist who said mass shootings were the "price to pay" for 2a, because all that blackpill bozo did was turn him into an "innocent" victim, lionized martyr. Offended by everything, ashamed of nothing.
More than that, though, this assassination was particularly counterproductive because it basically played to the worst stereotypes about "the left" not willing to listen to anything they disagree with.
I may disagree with the vast majority of Charlie Kirk's opinions, but he was at a university, inviting others who strongly disagreed with him to debate him, face-to-face. I may not be a particular fan of this style of interaction (I find it to be more about shock value/talking points/getting clips of particular stupid things people will say than actual clarification or education), it was still an open forum that shouldn't be feared in a free society that supposedly values free speech.
We had all the info yesterday, kid was a terminally online groyper. If "the left" can do nothing and still be blamed for everything, what exactly is the way forward?
One way forward is to stop all this ridiculous left/right dichotomy. It looks like the fascists have taken over the USA, so there's only Trump-adorers and everyone else. There's actual masked men rounding up people of colour on the streets, so it's not like the fascism can even be denied.
That's the answer, but the question was rhetorical for the person I was replying to. The outgroup is getting larger, yet people are failing to acknowledge that all the accusations at this point are just bad faith, surface level excuses for said fascism.
> I am largely neutral on this particular assassination, as I knew almost nothing about Mr. Kirk prior to his departure (just name recognition & basic political associations).
This seems confusing to me. The default "neutral" position on any murder, most of all when you don't know much about the victim, is that murder is a horrible thing, is it not? Is that what you mean, or do you mean you aren't sure if this was good or bad?
Any human with their head screwed on straight innately assigns a very negative value weight to murder. To get yourself into a situation where you aren't sure about a murder would require you to have pretty strong beliefs about the victim or circumstance, which you claim to not have.
I think a lot of people care about shootings and murders. Almost every shooting that you turn on the tv for entertainment, at some local level, a lot of people are affected and those communities hold vigils, etc...
At least they used to. I've lived through the 80s and 90s as a kid, so when someone was murdered - even someone that no one knew - everyone in the country cried.
These days people's minds are so used to it, we're all warped. We were not meant to handle information at that level, so, effectively, we're broken.
It's why there is Tyler Robinson and Luigi and Decarlos. We used to have a country that this kind of thing was so outrageous that it was rare.
And what's even crazier is in the 80s and 90s is that everyone had guns. Even life-long democrats! There wasn't even a movement to get rid of guns. (Well of course there was but it was basically 3 people)
Political violence was certainly very common in the 60s and 70s. Maybe the 80s and 90s were a bit of a lull in that sense but the murder rate was still much higher in 1990 than it’s now.
There's also Bob Lee. When he died hundreds of people on here eulogized him. I myself attended a talk at Google on that Guice injection library he wrote.
People do care about murder for a lot of different reasons.
The only figures of note that were assassinated that i can think of were more lefty -- or at least non right -- jfk, mlk, harvey milk, bobby kennedy, malcolm x -- were there actually
any prominent american right wing figures assassinated in this "period of escalated political assassinations ...?"
>Any human with their head screwed on straight innately assigns a very negative value weight to murder.
Murderers walk freely among you, and we're not all bad people. A few good people earn their legal kills.
A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution) — yet ours thrives on division, getting people to hate better with bigger hearts.
¢¢
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society..."
> Murderers walk freely among you, and _we're_ not all bad people
what? This is nuts. Are you saying you murder people?
> A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution)
Yes I agree with this. There are a lot of people that do vigils and prayers and eulogies when people die. Then there are people that go: he deserved it and XXX is next. The former does not drive division. The latter does - and that's what needs to stop.
I also have a brother — served four tours as enlisted grunt kicking in combatants' doors — whose tally far exceeds my own (war. is. hell).
It's not that I'm encouraging murder (I'm not); rather, I'm encouraging people to not live in a world where killing is never an acceptible outcome (because it is, sometimes justifiably).
Some actions should literally be paid for with guilty lives ("FAFO"), e.g. child molesters.
I would recon that if you walk around any medium+sized city, you probably see several murder-ers daily. If you buy food for three solid meals, you're almost-certainly interacting with one.
Thanks for your feedback and previous discussion.
----
I know I'm crazy (the fun side) but can be serious when trying to share commonalities / discriminations (against murderers — lol — I get your initial point/comment).
I mean that's one thing, but I wouldn't call that murder - which looking at the definition "unlawfully killing of someone" I guess would depend on who calls it lawful or not.
> that comedians are correct when they point out that stereotypical humor shouldn't be off limits to any performer (of any background/color), but is... e.g. Owen Benjamin, Chappelle, Seinfeld.
You're quoting a Chappelle joke that he made literally from a fucking netflix special. He's definitely been "cancelled" making millions off of trans jokes. Amazing evidence that comedy is illegal now. I honestly don't know how anyone could take this drivel seriously unless they literally only consume media from a very narrow selection of highly biased resources.
>Mel Brooks had the right of it. Fascism and Authoritarianism is defeated by satire and mockery. The ideology is too outrageous to survive any such scrutiny.
I edited my above-comment to better incorporate multiple comedian's POV on off-color humor ("x-isms," to use PG's terminology)
>Where was the joke?
If any comedian's attempt at any "joke," however tactless, led to any two+ people sitting down and having discussion of real-world realities... then I think the jokester has exceled professionally (honestly I haven't seen this Kimmel clip; I always just remember him as black-face-guy from 90s Comedy Central™ — which was as appropriate/funny/accepted as Downey in Tropic Thunder).
So in this particular case, Kimmel continues his professionalism as Jester.
The state doesn't have to censor anything when most people are too afraid to comment publicly (retaliation).
My original argument, above, is that comedians ought to be allowed to "joke" about anything, as long as it generates community discussion. Any discussion will generate better outcomes than 2-party's design of PureHate™.
They were allowed to joke about anything by the state. The state didn't censor them. That's the first amendment. Jimmy Kimmel had the FCC threaten to pull ABC's broadcasting license the day he poured fun at Trump and the right. How is that the same as citizens using their free speech rights to criticize a comedian?
Who paid Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, or Gavrillo Princip? Assassination is a subset of murder, with political motives. It seems very accurate in this situation
As much as I can tell, they're mad because Kimmel pointed out a couple of instances where Trump seemed to care more about his new ballroom at the WH than about the recent murder of Kirk.
I've been reluctant to toss around the f-word, but it doesn't feel like an exaggeration to call this fascism. Kimmel said nothing that should have warranted a suspension.
We hit some new lows over the week end 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. In between the finger pointer, there was uh grieving. On Friday the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can... see how hard the president is taking this.
Reporter
My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?
Trump
I think very good, and by the way right there you see all the trucks. They've just started construction of the new ball room for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for a 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty.
Kimmel
Yes. He's at the fourth stage of grief. Construction.
Demolition. Construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called their friend. This is how a four year old mourns a gold fish, ok? And it didn't just happen once.
In that case, going by the FCC's complaint against Kimmel, I wonder if my pointing out that Trump furthermore skipped Kirk's vigil to go golfing, is similarly "too offensive to be protected by the first amendment"?
It was the FCC opportunistically gaining a precedent that they’ll use on other observational hosts. If it wasn’t this, it would have been leaks on Epstein.
> The ABC late-night host’s remarks constituted “the sickest conduct possible,” FCC chair Brendan Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. Carr suggested his FCC could move to revoke ABC affiliate licenses as a way to force Disney to punish Kimmel.
Regardless of what Kimmel said and if you think it was appropriate or not, we are seeing this administration use this as an opportunity to trample on the free speech rights of everyone they disagree with. If everyone's rights are not protected, then nobody's are.
You don't have to disregard what Kimmel said, because he hardly even said anything. Relevant portion is the first 8 mins of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j3YdxNSzTk
What, in the clip, could reasonably be referred to as "the sickest conduct possible?" No one with a healthy, functioning mind could possibly use that language to talk about Kimmel's comments in that clip.
MAGA did, in fact, do their best over the weekend to cast the shooter as anything other than one of them. Comments made in poor taste? Maybe? Not really? No poorer taste than the president saying on Fox & Friends that he "couldn't care less" about promoting unity after the Kirk shooting.
"The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Mr. Kimmel’s remarks and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of them."
So yes, ABC/Nexstar are within their editorial rights to make this decision, but that decision came at an awfully conspicuous time. So what, nothing to see here?
>So yes, ABC/Nexstar are within their editorial rights to make this decision, but that decision came at an awfully conspicuous time. So what, nothing to see here?
{Paraphrasing for those who don't get it]
Brendan Carr: That Kimmel guy sure is a pill. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome comic?
Hey ABC, It would be a shame if something bad happened to you guys, wouldn't it? In fact, let's do some investigating to make sure everything is on the up and up, yeah?[0]
ABC: How High?
[0] Right out of the authoritarians' playbook: "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
It was implied, but apparently, not clearly enough.
The issue is emphatically not that "Kimmel dissed our boy. He needs to be raked over the coals!" Nor is it "Kimmel had it just right! Fuck those MAGAts!"
The current controversy, while relevant to the above, is not the problem. What people think and believe and most[0] of what they say is, at least under current law in the US, not punishable by the state.
A government official (Brendan Carr) publicly threatened legal action, using the weight and resources of the Federal Government (don't believe me, listen to him say it yourself) against ABC/Disney[1] in retaliation for the legal (however you may feel about it) speech of Jimmy Kimmel.
Now you might think, "well so what? that jackass is always harassing the President and his most patriotic team. And now he's doing so about our beloved cultural ambassador, gunned down by some tranny loving freak just a few days ago. That sack of crap deserves whatever he gets!"
And you have every right to think that. And to speak it or write it or take out web/TV/print/billboard/etc. ads.
And you think, "Damn straight! I got rights. The First Amendment says the government can't punish me for what I say or think! And it's not a coincidence that it's the First one, is it?" And you're right.
If all that is true, especially the First Amendment[2] bit:
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; [...]
Which, as centuries of jurisprudence have confirmed, aside from a few (none of which apply in this particular context) exceptions[0], the government may not punish folks for what they say.
Which is exactly what Brendan Carr threatened to do with the resources of the FCC if ABC/Disney didn't take action against Kimmel.
Which is facially a violation of the Constitution (of which the First Amendment is an integral part), which is the supreme law of the land.
And so whether you think Kimmel was out of line or not, something we all should be able to get behind is that the government has no place telling us what we can or cannot say.
A right that Charlie Kirk took advantage of and was proud to extol. And good for him -- whether you agree with him or not. And if we (want to) live in a nation of laws, then Jimmy Kimmel (or you or me) should have the same rights and latitude.
It's called entertainment. He's a comedian. You're opposed to free speech and favor government censorship. News and journalists are supposed to do facts, not literal jesters.
If Nexstar was acting in reaction to what Carr said there’s a First Amendment argument to be made. They also require FCC approval for a merger right now, it’s not difficult to see the quid pro quo potential.
> First Amendment ‘coercion’ requires a concrete threat backed by government power and a causal link to the station’s decision.
Yeah. How about this direct quote from Carr?
> I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
>>> The ABC late-night host’s remarks constituted “the sickest conduct possible,” FCC chair Brendan Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. Carr suggested his FCC could move to revoke ABC affiliate licenses as a way to force Disney to punish Kimmel
Last I checked, the FCC is part of the government.
Your post deliberately leaves out statements from Sinclair and Nexstar themselves.
"In a statement posted online, Sinclair praised the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr and called the comic’s remarks “inappropriate and deeply insensitive”."
"Inappropriate and deeply insensitive", but I suppose you, and the others here like you, believe it is appropriate and timely to spread misinformation as long as it fuels your narrative.
What's at issue is whether it's appropriate for officials in the US government to use their office to apply pressure against speech they don't like. Preventing this behavior is why the first amendment exists.
"I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday morning. "I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!"
The pedantic correction is important in this case: "cancellation" is a private action between citizens, this is "censorship", which is done at the behest of the government. The former can be arguably but reasonably understood as a market finding a balance between two opposing arguments, both of which have a first amendment right (i.e. I don't have to repeat others' words if I don't want to, even if I'm doing it out of self interest).
The government has no such right. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
You didn't update your card after Colbert? Of course Jimmy was next to go. Just look at the comments from Trump directly at Kimmel. Nothing happened after Colbert which just emboldened for this move. This move will also go unchallenged which makes me think the next two shows will be right around the corner.
I expected Kimmel to have somehow criticized Kirk, a dubious enough reason to pull the show. But this isn’t even that. Comments quoted in stories assert that the shooter was MAGA - maybe that’s somewhat controversial, but it’s ludicrous to suggest it’s offensive.
That paired with comments criticizing the Dear Leader were enough. This is a new low in corporate cowardice toward Trump bullying.
Stop criticizing large corporations as moral entities. They have no other incentives other than money. Corporations are amoral (not good or bad). Only money matters.
South Park can go on because they make money. Talk-shows are already dying and cutting them is easy choice even under mild pressure.
The value talk they use is PR aimed at stakeholders (customers, employees, government). No company has taken a stance where they willingly accept net negative returns if they have other choice.
>Stop criticizing large corporations as moral entities. They have no other incentives other than money. Corporations are amoral (not good or bad). Only money matters.
Not just corporations, every institution from the church to every silo in your government to big nonprofits. The latter ones just have less measurable goals than profit, but they sociopathically seek their goals all the same. Beyond a certain scale organizations staffed by humans no longer act human.
It's extremely relevant. The person grew up "conservative" and was radicalized to the left in college. The reason this is important is that it's a trend. If the trend isn't acknowledged on the left, then it will just continue.
Well school shootings are a trend too. The guy who was murdered openly and explicitly supported doing absolutely nothing about it (and gun violence in general).
Regardless of this specific case the “right” ignores, supports or even encourages political violence on a much bigger scale than anyone else.
So why is it only a problem in some specific cases but not in general?
Are you seriously suggesting that Utah State University, a school that is often on people's lists of the most conservative colleges in the US, radicalized him to the left? And they managed to do that in the one semester he attended?
Well obviously all colleges radicalize students to the left, which is why they want to get rid of college entirely. Public education as a whole radicalizes people to the left so they want to get rid of that too, so that it's too expensive for most people to send their kids to school.
"College educated voters tend to vote for democrats" and "colleges radicalize students to the left" are two different things. The claim is not that this person was more likely to vote for Harris than Trump. The claim is that university convinced him to murder people.
While nothing I said is contradicted by your reply, it's pretty crazy to imply "radicalizing students to the left" is tantamount to "convincing him to murder people".
The specific (ridiculous) claim is that this person was well adjusted prior to college, then attended college, and through his one semester at college became not just a leftist but a leftist who was willing to murder for his ideology.
Can you be more specific about how a single semester of an online college, as is the case with the acused, hypothetically would "radicalize to the left" a person like the alleged shooter?
I see nothing wrong with people acquiring a left-wing political lens as a result of their own independent thought process (which, by the way, has nothing to do with universities, regardless of what the right-wing talking points you're referencing say; the shooter went to a trade school).
And in any case, a significant majority of political violence is caused by right-wing extremists. Of course the DOJ just deleted that report because it was inconvenient to their narrative.
However, you've possibly read that already since you're 41% number appears to be sourced from that page and is specifically talking about deaths and not events from 9/11/2001 to 2017. That 41% is heavily influenced by the deadliest event which was the Orlando Shooting, and if you look at the overall picture, 73% of events were perpetrated by white supremacists.
Honestly, directly reading the GAO study and the other, more recent, studies is a lot more illuminating and illustrates the growing issue of white supremacy and far-right political violence.
A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative
Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US
between 2008 and 2016.[27] It found:[28]
115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were
foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them
resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.
63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents
were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of
them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.
19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents
were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of
them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as
"plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused
7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[15]
So out of 197 incidents reported between 2008 and 2016, 58% were "Far Right" inspired, 32% were "Islamist" inspired and 10% were "Far left" inspired.
Yeah, the GAO study was purely based on the U.S. Extremist Crime Database and that's clearly a limitation, although less of one than reading through a list of notable attacks on a wiki page. The page itself also is generally about terrorism, so it talks about both international and domestic throughout it which can be confusing. That's why I suggested looking at the actual studies linked to on the page, a lot of them do a better job of pointing out their time period and limitations than the brief overview on the page.
Also, the page only has pretty good resources up until like 2020, where it ends with a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies which reviews data up to May 2020, and DHS which reviews data from 2018-2019. The CSIS one is pretty good because it includes graphs of data over time and really shows the worrying increase across the board but the staggering increase of "right-wing" violence since the mid 2010s.
CSIS has a few more studies more recently it looks like. There's https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terro... from 2022, which shows that 49% of events were committed by far-right and 40% were far-left. However, the far-right were more likely to target people with guns and bombs and the far-left were more likely to target property with melee and incendiary weapons, so 28 of the 30 deaths were from the far-right while the far-left accounted for 1.
However, CSIS likewise uses their own database of attacks, and in between the other studies and the most recent one it appears they changed their methodology of what attacks were included to make it more strictly about an attempt or threat to kill (which would remove a lot of the property based attacks from the previous study), premeditation, and desire to strike fear broadly. I'd be interested in seeing a revisitation of their previous methods with their new datasets, or even to actually be able to see the dataset itself.
> It found 28% of people who identified as liberal supported the murder, compared to 5% of conservatives.
Both the left and the right (which tends to be poorer right now) are massively affected by the cost and non-coverage of insurance. The LEFT WING is violent right now.
Why lie? Just because you have a short memory, and cannot recall:
* A right wing extremist killed the MN speaker of the house, her spouse, and their dog
* A right wing extremist attacked Speaker Pelosi's house in an attempt to kidnap her, and attacked her husband with a hammer (an incident that republicans were happy to crack jokes about)
* January 6th, 2021
* 2022 A right wing extremist shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.
* 2025 A right wing extremist shot up a school in Colorado
* 2018 A right wing extremist sent mail bombs to democrats
Or do you think attacks on matter if the people killed is someone you like?
I expected Kimmel to have somehow criticized Kirk, a dubious enough reason to pull the show. But this isn’t even that. Comments quoted in stories assert that the shooter was MAGA - maybe that’s somewhat controversial, but it’s ludicrous to suggest it’s offensive.
That paired with comments criticizing the Dear Leader were enough. This is a new low in corporate cowardice toward Trump bullying.
Terrible precedent aside, how could Disney think that capitulating here will result in anything other than more attempts to control their programming in the short term?
Why would a broadcaster want to pull a show and need an excuse to do so? Shows get cancelled all the time if the broadcaster decides that they're too expensive etc.
> 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
Kimmel did not assert Mr. Robinson was anything he wasn't. Kimmel noted how some people are doing everything possible to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.
Correct, you did. You omitted the quote. If you choose to add meaning, or put words in Mr. Kimmel's mouth, that is your decision.
In any case, if you think such a statement is objectionable, then you would conclude many statements made by the current president would prevent any network from putting him on air, correct?
Yeah, when the president starts a television network, gets a broadcast license from the FCC (under which he must meet “public interest” requirements), spins up a late night program, and then begins deliberately spreading misinformation to score political points, then yes, threaten to revoke his license.
How many examples are you looking for, and for what time period? I could probably list a few dozen examples scoped to just the last 24 hours. Looking further back this is a pretty well known example https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-t...
AFAIK all information anybody had at the time was that he grew up in a good gun-loving Republican family and he'd written some silly memes on the shell casings.
The discord chats and his relationship with a trans woman were AFAIK not revealed yet, or at least were so new that they maybe hadn't made it to Kimmel's writers room.
That kind of problem gets a demand of a retraction, not a firing.
Contrast that to a Fox News host calling for mass executions of homeless people the other day (and since that day there have been multiple mass killings of homeless people). That guy got off with a thin apology.
It's "Rules for thee but not for me," with these folks.
And it's not like it's a surprise either. As Sartre observed[0] decades ago:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
I'm unsure where we as a society go from here. The left's cancel culture resulted in the firing of private citizens from their jobs, or at least some reprimand. The right's cancel culture is the full weight of the federal government brought down against opposition, in stark violation of the First Amendment; that is, until the Supreme Court can find some new carve-out for why this isn't protected speech.
Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."
There's no comparison here. The left's "cancel culture" doesn't exist and is literally free speech in action. This is the destruction of free speech. I think you have to participate in social media to understand what the left's cancel culture is because it's just a bunch of individuals expressing their opinions. Hence many are out of the loop. I wouldn't refer to authoritarian regimes as "cancel culture".
I'm 100% against what's happening rn with Trump's fascism, but let's not pretend that there was no cancel culture on the left and pressure on companies. Example: Disney itself fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian because of comments she made. There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse -- but there was a fear (valid or otherwise) of blowback/ratings/whatever.
> There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse
That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney.
And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds.
Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.
Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine.
If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of.
By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't.
So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).
We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided.
The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies.
But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.
It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.
All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.
>healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.
Funny you imagine there is consensus with any of that. The right doesn't want government healthcare. They don't want government sponsored childcare. They could care less about higher education. They want no gun laws. And they don't want black people to benefit from infrastructure.
Outside of the 24hr news bubble, I believe the reality is that there is a lot of common ground on these supposed hot button issues, for example on the guns issue alone there is broad support for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban:
But it's hard to make it happen when Fox paints any kind of gun measure as crazy leftist tyranny and then deep-pocketed fringe organizations like the NRA vow to punish any Republican who collaborates on compromise measures.
About the only thing there is consensus on between the parties, vs americans at large, is banning gun sales to the mentally ill. In terms of assault weapons ban there is a substantial divide between republicans and democrats. Your source shows this too.
A small number of extremely wealthy individuals have a vested interest in fomenting that division, because the solutions to those 80% issues happens to conflict with their business interests.
Its not like the US hasn't done big ambitious things before: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Hell didn't they help develop some of the social programs for Post WWII Europe/Japan etc?
Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.
These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal.
Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since.
Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected.
As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize.
Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA.
If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules.
If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do.
This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.
Statistically almost everyone who is a “conservative” supports Trump whatever he does, though? With very little real infighting
The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).
I see we are forgetting the period of time from the end of 2019 to 2022...
Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and laptops. That was not being done to benefit the political rights.
These cases were taken to the courts, and for the covid issue I am aware that the firms were never forced, and were able to ignore government instructions and do their own thing.
I'm not very aware of this subject, but from my understanding "the laptop" is the files that were extracted from a person's laptop by a man who was supposed to repair it. Then the files were released in public and included nude images. I would expect any company to pull those documents down to limit their own liability and for common decency. Again, I'm not very informed on the subject.
So there was that example.
Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
I googled Alex as I didn't know who that was. The government has an interest in public health. 1.2 million Americans (likely many more) died as a result of covid. There were refrigerator trucks filled with bodies in places. It was hell. People who spread misinformation literally kill people and themselves. It seems like the government back then actually worked with companies to craft guidance rather than threatening their licenses, suing, etc. There's no comparison at all to the current time. America was founded to rid ourselves of royalty and the first amendment is proof of that. Now America is gone.
You don't have to tell me it was hell, I was there.
People, the government and scientists were all spreading misinformation depending on what the official messaging was at the time.
Case in point: Early on, the government was saying "Masks are not effective at stopping COVID-19" due to them wanting to control supply. When that happened, there was a large number of studies that came out showing just that. When you looked at the methodology, it was "Mask over mouth, cough into Petri dish" and see if any COVID was detectable in dish. Also "Virus particle size is much smaller than openings on mask"
When the government changed it's stance, all of those were retracted.
It took the WHO 2 YEARS to change their stance and say that COVID-19 was airborne:
>In the spring of 2020, as covid-19 took hold, confusion reigned among scientists, doctors, public health experts, and others. Many insisted the spread of the new virus was through the air, yet the World Health Organization refused to use the terms “airborne” or “aerosol”1 in the context of covid-19 until 2021.2 This had repercussions as the world debated mask wearing (and what types of masks were suitable) and whether indoor spaces were a factor in infection.
>Now, four years later and after two years of deliberation by experts,3 WHO has altered its definition of the “airborne” spread of infectious pathogens in the hope of avoiding the confusion and miscommunication that characterised the first year of the pandemic—and threatened attempts to control the virus’s spread.
There are several top level comments here acting like this is the first time the government has done something like this. It's not.
The previous administration was doing the same thing; Publicly saying that they wanted to change laws, that these companies were killing people etc. At the same time, they were also asking the companies to remove people for their speech. The threat was implicit.
I don't like that the current republican administration is doing it now, I didn't like it when the previous democrat administration was doing it then.
The only way to keep it from happening is for everyone to speak up, for that to happen you also need to recognize when your team is doing the same thing and call them out. Look at the comments saying "I bet we won't hear from the freeze peach crowd", of course you won't see them. Not because they don't care however but because their disagreement of the government action is getting lost in the noise of your crowds.
It's the first time the government in the US has done this. 100%.
I see. You're trying to pretend that intentionally subverting public health measures should be free speech and that the Biden administration did something like what the authoritarians are doing now. I disagree, though I'm not super familiar with the government intervention or lack of during covid. I have no desire to discuss it as it has no relevance to this context.
You're lying by creating a false equivalence and don't deserve replies.
Free speech is free speech, it doesn't come with qualifiers about public health crisis or anything else. The old canard "You can't shout fire in a crowded theater" can from a Supreme Court case in which the government was prosecuting someone for an anti-war speech(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States). That was 1919, so maybe a bit before 2024.
Please don't accuse me of lying, it's rude. Especially if you are also saying you are not familiar with what happened at that time.
It is a shame that you are unable to look at a situation where high level officials from one administration were asking why someone was allowed to express their views and that the administration was looking into how to hold them accountable and see how it is the mirror.
"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts" - White House press secretary Jen Psaki
"Shouldn't they(Facebook and Twitter) be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?" - MSNBC
"Certainly, they should be held accountable, You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem." - White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” - FCC Chair Brendan Carr
You have an extreme point of view. You literally lead with it should be okay to scream fire in a theatre. That's absurd. There was a fire, more than a million folks died, many rules were altered including operation warp speed. There's no real reason to even reply to this insanity. Good job troll.
You're spouting nonsense to conflate the contexts. Here we had the FCC guy directly threaten people, they immediately cancelled the show and I assume hundreds of people's jobs. Why? Because the authoritarian was displeased with how he was characterized. This is precisely why we formed America and the 1st Amendment.
I have no idea what you're referencing honestly. Private companies can make whatever business decisions they want.
You second link is 404 and I have no idea what you're talking about. The subject is what used to be the United States. A concept that no longer exists because we're too shitty.
> "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID
COVID was completely different because the government was essentially mandating certain measures in order to contain a widespread epidemic (which killed a million people by the way), and so calls to disregard those measures were extremely problematic to public health.
Can't believe you're equating it with what happened here.
Society's failure was taking gamergaters seriously. It was the beginning, slippery slope into full on totalitarian censorship but because basic human respect was framed as oppression it served as invitation for tit for tat retaliation. This tactic has been ridiculously successful in turning extremest ideas mainstream, and it was obvious to many people even back then, however because it exploits human nature it's hard to fight. You can find the most ridiculous crazies that present as "other side" and use it to justify whatever you want, and if you keep repeating "this is totally normal" some people just start to believe. If you are interested in finding the peaceful way to oppose this, I invite you to try and come up with the answer to this "totalitarian ratchet" because no one so far figured it out and it is a foundational part of modern authoritarian playbook.
> Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."
As with all authoritarian regimes, their assumption is that this is the end of history and those in power today will be in power forever. You're also right that they believe liberals will never do what they're doing now.
But the old guard is dying. Trump, Bush, Biden, Clinton, Obama are all boomers+ who will be dead sooner rather than later. The younger generation realizes the pendulum is about to swing, power will be ours to take, and you can be damn sure we will not behave like our parents and grandparents did.
So me personally, when I see them take Kimmel off the air for "not serving the public interest", all I hear is permission for the first progressive millennial president to shut down all of right wing AM talk radio on that same basis. And you know who else sees it that way? Right wing AM talk radio hosts, who have been the only ones on the right asking MAGA to pump the brakes on what they're doing (see: Tucker Carlson).
Which is completely different from when leftists go "we're 'cancelling' this through individual boycott" which a lot of people in this comment section seem to be missing or intentionally misrepresenting.
It took 2 seconds after Jimmy and a few others meanwhile the right has been screaming about cancel culture for 10 years and didn't call it a 1st amendment issue. Lol
> Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”
> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
An absolutely unmistakable direct threat from the chairman of the FCC.
As usual, simply reading the quote would quickly show that you're wrong:
> 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
"My side" is Americans who think political violence is disgusting.
This state of things, Kimmel's show being canceled for entirely normal and non-offensive statements, is kind of funny when you try to imagine the steps that had to happen to get here from his start on "The Man Show". The least suprising aspect of this story is that ABC has fascist leanings.
For reference, Sinclair is now demanding that Jimmy Kimmel not only apologize to Charlie Kirk's family but also make a donation to said family as well as a meaningful donation to TPUSA. You could not get more blatantly corrupt than this.
Apart from the principle of the thing - a donation to his family? I’m sure they’re struggling, what with his net worth being estimated at a nearby-impoverished $15-20M…
They're just going pull the "random leftists have individually boycotted people and media they don't agree with" (except they will call it cancel culture) card and do a false equivalency to people being removed for not being in line with the state.
The left wing is the free speech crowd. The right wing has never had a principled belief in free speech. It was always their intention to turn cancel culture back at their enemies when the opportunity arose. I'm still reeling that it was supposed liberals that came up with "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" or "hate speech is not free speech" which are now being used against them. And they have learned absolutely nothing, and fully intend to go back to cancelling people for asinine reasons when they can.
The left has a principled interest in free speech, which they've regularly abandoned. The right has used free speech rhetoric at times, but has no attachment to it as a principle.
Except that Kimmel's job was speech. He had a microphone -- and depended upon that (supposedly God-given) freedom of speech to perform that job. If he lost that job due to something that right didn't guarantee, then I'd understand. His dismissal's cause had nothing to do with a failure on his part. Instead we now have the government, specifically concerned with his criticisms of it, effectuating this block of Kimmel's speech and thereby ending his job. The government is supposed to guarantee your right to criticize it. What happened here?
The FCC chairman threatened to take action against ABC, only then did ABC take Kimmel off the air. So insteresting and convenient you chose to ignore that.
Except all indications are the show was pulled because of pressure from the government. The FCC threatening “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” is not constitutional.
...ABC's move comes just hours after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to “take action” against Disney and ABC over Kimmel's remarks.
...“We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation,” Carr said. “If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in to the FCC.”
Heartily agree, but the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect you from FCC commissioners, and presidents and vice presidents restraining your speech, and that certainly looks like what happened here.
But in this case, the government threatened to yank ABC's broadcast licenses (worth way more than $1m) if they didn't cancel Kimmel for criticizing the regime.
The reasoning for the shooting is pretty clear. He told his transgender lover that “I had enough of his [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
The school shooting that Mr. Kirk lost his life to is not, "left wing violence". Unless you want to submit that most school shootings are "right wing violence" if the shooter hated public education.
> There are multiple statements from his relatives that his family are "MAGA", his parents are Registered Republicans.
To be fair, that doesn't necessarily say anything about his politics. I know plenty of liberals with MAGA parents. I don't think we can draw any conclusions as to his politics at this time.
Exactly, which was the point Kimmel was making. Apparently that suggestion was too much for the current administration, and the official narrative must not be questioned.
> Most leftists despise their parents[sic] politics.
And do you have a source on that? Anecdotally, most "leftists" I know have left leaning parents. But it's up to the person to define if they are or are not "leftist", because it's a rather narrow, small minded world view that has to define things in those terms.
> None of this suggests a rightward leaning of the culprit himself.
Nor does it suggest his leftward leaning. Maybe it suggests why he used violence as a means to enact social change on the world.
Wow. If you haven't met folks who don't fit, or don't consider themselves aligned with the "left/right" spectrum of American politics, you're missing out. The "us vs. them" mentality is juvenile, and it is sad you subscribe to it.
If you cannot comprehend the shades of grey in the world, maybe you need more exposure to it.
It was well known before Kimmel made his comments that the shooter was in a romantic relationship with a trans woman. Having said that, even if he did not know about that relationship it was irresponsible of Kimmel to repeat rumors he could not have known were true that the shooter was maga.
He did not assert they were unknown: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said in his Sept. 15 monologue.
I guess that leaves the question as to why Kimmel did not say: 'We hit some new lows over the weekend when people of all political stripes were trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them'. Because that seems like it gives more information to the viewer because that is what actually happened and acknowledging people from both sides were doing the 'bad thing' should help to bring people together instead of driving people apart.
Mr. Kimmel is making a series of jokes about how members of the party in power are reacting, including a clip of the president not seeming to care when asked about Mr. Kirk's death.
Confused politics isn’t all that unusual; look at Caitlyn Jenner for a concrete example. Add in the usual bad blood between well-armed groups and it certainly happens.
I wish everyone would wait a week for actual reliable info to come out. I wish we weren’t getting a bunch of said info from deeply partisan and untrustworthy fuckwits.
According to the latest iteration, his right-wing family said he was left-wing and even neighbors saw him with his roommate.
Freedom of speech is protected. That people are celebrating a man's death, and worse yet, justifying it, is evil but still protected. But what's not protected is the consequences of these actions. I don't want to live, work, etc... next to someone who thinks that it's ok to commit acts of violence against others just because we don't share the same views.
> But what's not protected is the consequences of these actions.
But this is protected in this case.
I can unfriend you on Facebook for saying “I’m not sad he’s dead”. (And to be clear, Kimmel didn’t even go that far.) I can kick you out of my birthday party. I can complain to your employer. They can fire you. (They can fire you for having tattoos, or red hair!)
But the government cannot do these things. That is the entire point of the First Amendment. The FCC can not threaten the license of a broadcaster for protected speech, but we are here anyways.
The entire point of the 1st Amendment is to protect the citizens from being thrown in jail or being prosecuted for speaking against the government.
Where do you see that here? The FCC chairman just said that
"...broadcasters are entirely different than people that use other forms of communication. They have a license granted by is at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest".
To be fair, the new revanchist right calls actual conservatives "left wing". They call libertarians "left wing". They call the shared American values of the past fifty years "left wing". They call straightforward consensus reality "left wing". They basically call anyone who doesn't subscribe to the extended reactionary cinematic universe "left wing". So the only data point there is that his parents are suffering social media psychosis.
Also, non-normative sexual behavior is more indicative of being a Republican ("I have a wide stance!", etc, etc, etc). Democrats just espouse not beating yourself up over it, whereas Republicans seemingly yearn for the closet.
> next to someone who thinks that it's ok to commit acts of violence against others just because we don't share the same views.
But that still only includes a subset of views?
I mean what you are saying is right. But these people were perfectly fine with ignoring or sometimes outright endorsing political violence until one of their own was the target. That does not seem extremely hypocritical?
My bias in these cases is that the simplest answer, same as any mass shooting, is that the killers motivations are a manifestation of mental illness and nothing more. Not always true but typically so; wasnt the trump would be assassin not left for instance? When i was told that i wasnt surprised, not because i think it was more likely of someone on the right, but because i think its mostly random. Eg we have a gun culture, a toxic culture, and a lack of mental health institutions culture. That will only ever produce (among other things) a consistent stream of random acts of violence.
In this particular case i am a little more curious than usual to find out if that holds up here if only because the narrative was so immediately anti left attacks.
Just look at the guy who shot Trump's ear. He had no discernable motive or explicit political leaning at all. And had supposedly been tracking both Trump and Biden. He just did it for attention.
Are you saying there are no conservatives who are attracted to those who identify as trans? Not too long ago you could say the same thing about being conservative and being attracted to the same sex, yet that isn't something be bat an eye at anymore.
Being trans (or being attracted to a trans person) is one of many aspects of that person. Other political positions may outweigh it, and the taboo nature of it may be an appeal (see also: stepsibling roleplay porn).
Nexstar, who initially threaten to pull Kimmel's show from all (200) of its stations and started this ball rolling, owns ALL THREE OF OUR LOCAL network affiliate stations. All 3 in one market. Remember when this was illegal?
> Nexstar, who initially threaten to pull Kimmel's show from all (200) of its stations
They also have a $6.2 billion bid for even more local stations by acquiring Tegna, a deal which will have to be approved by the guy at the FCC who yesterday was
telling local affiliates to threaten to pull Kimmel's show!
First of all for the FCC to get involved is a shocking level of political interference in media coverage. It's one thing for ABC to do it because it's afraid of ratings or whatever, but the FCC should only get involve if there is some regulatory or legal issue.
Second, look how Trump is pressuring the networks to get rid of other media personalities who are unfavorable to him:
> “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “That leaves Jimmy (Fallon) and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
My comment was slightly too late to get migrated, so apologies for reposting it:
And yet, my mother, who voted for this admin, would stand by the statement that we live in the free'est country in the world.
The truly horrific thing is that it's death by a thousand cuts, rather than the huge tyrannical violation that would cause people to stream out into the streets for change.
Republican Senator Mike Lee when a democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were assassinated:
> This is what happens, when Marxists don’t get their way. [0]
This is objectively much worse than what Kimmel said. Yet, no repercussions.
When Charlie Kirk, an influential figure, is assassinated:
> I have introduced a resolution condemning the assassination of Charlie Kirk, commemorating his outstanding patriotism and achievements.
> I look forward to the Senate uniting to honor Charlie, his family, and his courageous legacy. [1]
Both incidents are obviously horrific, and should be condemned, but our elected officials ought to be held to a better standard than a late night talk host, and we as a society should hold our elected officials accountable to such behavior.
James Woods just tweeted (and Elon Musk retweeted) that Kimmel wasn’t bringing in the viewership numbers, and his network was simply looking for an excuse to drop him.
> The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
I've heard this before, but where did this originate? Did Jimmy just make it up or was he quoting some source? I heard the same thing but from people I interact with that this guy was crazy right wing nazi and killed Kirk because Kirk wasn't hard-line enough. But then the bullets said "Catch, fascist" which is kind of odd. Like, are fascists calling each other "fascists" as a meme, or was the killer signing his name like "catch, <signed by> fascist".
Fair enough, but it's written on a bullet meant to assassinate someone in real life. Had it been in the context of playing video games, I would see it just being a game quote.
Ok, fine, but then "Bella ciao" is an anti-Nazi and anti-fascist Italian folk song (at least according to wikipedia) [1], so, we got a hard right winger, mentioning killing fascists and listening to Bella ciao killing someone like Charlie Kirk. There was "notices bulges" comment which I didn't get. But given just those two clues and having to guess the affiliation of the shooter, not sure how people arrived at "this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them [maga gang]".
The guy was at best confused in his ideological leanings. He held midly leftist ideas on some issues and right wing ideas on others, like on gun ownership. Typical of a young Utah white guy, I'd say.
He was raised in a die-hard Trump Christian family. He allegedly had some LGBT friends too, and got angry at Kirk's rhetoric against them as a group. Which, if you knew Kirk before his murder, framing LGBT people as degenerate and dangerous freaks of natures was kind of his bread and butter. This doesn't justify the killing, but certainly explains it.
I'm sure more will come of it, but I doubt there's much of interest in here. What's more important are the reactions of public figures, and so far, none on the right have called for de-escalation.
> The guy was at best confused in his ideological leanings. He held midly leftist ideas on some issues and right wing ideas on others, like on gun ownership.
I am wondering how did Jimmy know what his leanings where? It didn't seem like a guess. The language was pretty definite.
I guess someone found his gun ownership views online. I mean besides using a gun to shoot Kirk, which I don't think anyone needs to hold any ideological leanings to acquire a weapon in US. For instance, if I hear of shootings in Chicago overnight, I am not thinking "it's those 2nd amendment nuts again".
> Typical of a young Utah white guy, I'd say.
I'd agree but only if it wasn't shooting someone like Kirk. If some unknown John Doe was killed somewhere in Utah I can see making a guess that it's probably some maga trumper person doing it. And it would still be a wild guess. Here it seems there was more than a wild guess. And common sense would dictate the guess should have been the opposite -- it's someone opposed to Kirk and maga and all that stuff not for it. And it should been emphasized it's a just a wild guess until it becomes more obvious.
Republicans are continually outraged by cancel culture, and Republican hypocrisy is (without hyperbole) sociopathic.
News just today--
Republican DoJ censored longitudinal study previously published by DoJ which revealed that far and away the most U.S. political violence is perpetrated by... Republicans! Both internally and internationally.
Utah Republicans put a suicide watch on Kirk-shooting suspect because they want the pleasure of killing him themselves.
Noem is bragging that she shot the family hunting dog because he was "worthless"; all he would do is "massacre chickens" at her hunting lodge, and tried to bite her. She also put down a "disgusting, musky billy goat" that lived around her compound. She said wanted to come clean and show how she can "responsibility". She bragged that the story of shooting her dog got her the top slot at ICE.
"Noem is bragging that she shot the family hunting dog because he was "worthless"; all he would do is "massacre chickens" at her hunting lodge, and tried to bite her. She also put down a "disgusting, musky billy goat" that lived around her compound. She said wanted to come clean and show how she can "responsibility". She bragged that the story of shooting her dog got her the top slot at ICE."
this is so chillingly reminiscent of a serial killers autobiography.
guess what im an off grid bush retreat alaskan, and i hunt and hit and cull, all the time, but i dont brag about it, or posture that willingness to kill contributed to entry to a government organization.
what many people call a useless dog, is actually the case of a useless person, with no skills at all regarding husbandry or behavior management.
gloating, feeling powerful as a result of causing death or discomfort, yes those actually are the making of serial killers.
It is. Until you start bragging about it. That changes the perspective completely. I've never heard a farmer or a vet brag about when they had to put down an animal.
I doubt anyone enjoys putting an animal down and there are those who are psychologically unable to do it. They usually ask a neighbor or family member to do the necessary.
I disagree that she was bragging about it. I think she was illustrating that she can do what needs done, even the unpleasant parts. I believe it resonated well with anyone who's had to do similar tasks.
It was bragging because it's meant to be a story about how she's capable of doing the "hard" things, which is the perspective that reality is tough, and you need to be willing to hurt some people to do "the right" thing.
It's literally Call of Duty's philosophy, that only the "hardest" people, who can do literally cruel and awful things, like illegal torture, because they must be done, and those bleeding heart liberals can't kill a dog if it's the "right" thing.
Glad I don't live in a rural community then. Sounds like a heartless practice, if such a thing is common in communities like that.
In a wooded mountain region I frequent (not sure if it's "rural" by colloquial terms, though the USPS classifies it that way), most people try to avoid dangerous wildlife. Killing them is a last resort, and represents a failure to respect nature.
I don't get the "useless" bit. Why would you kill a "useless" animal? Just let it be.
we dont just kill anything that moves, but if your in the back country you better have a plan that will let you live, or else you roll up in a ball and hope its quick
making your presence well known ahead of time by being noisy can help, but it doesnt always, and thats when you can have a 3/4 ton animal suddenly bolting at you from thick bush in about 2 seconds, because its decided to lay in ambush to kill or wound you rather than give ground.
and really the moose are a lot more likely than bears to go after you.
more qualifiers as well such as with calf or cubs, hunting and predation engagement being interrupted ect.
The chickens are an investment and produce. A dog that kills chickens is a liability and it's nearly impossible to change that behavior once they get a taste for it. It will never be a good work dog.
I'm sure some are able to rehome them but very few.
When you live in a rural area, nobody wants a chicken-killing dog cause most them have chickens - and those that don't - have neighbors that have chickens and you don't want to be that neighbor.
If there are reasonable alternatives, please do avail yourself. When there are none, putting an animal down is best and is common practice.
This is the reaction from the part of the political consciousness that just realized it/its children are not safe anywhere. They're going to continue to use this as a justification for retaliation. You have to realize that the correct answer to this is, "conversions not killings" but the uppity software developer, "middle class" either needs to mobilize itself or the next wave is you getting fired from your dev job because you criticized the nascent regime.
This isn't a drill. It's also not a real fire. Half truths are a grifter's greenbacks.
But it's already like this. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived in tech if people knew I was a conservative. I've always felt like I would be punished if people knew.
There's a huge difference between top down cancellation and bottom up cancellation.
Do you think the CEO would have fired you for being conservative? Or do you think your career wouldn't have advanced because people wouldn't want to associate with someone who's always saying things they find abhorrent?
I think people wouldn't have wanted to work with me or listen to my opinions. I don't think the CEO would care, but down at my level, what the CEO thinks doesn't matter. It's all about peers and adjacent teams.
And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
>I think people wouldn't have wanted to work with me or listen to my opinions.
If I was your co-worker, I wouldn't want to know your non-work related opinions, especially your political opinions. That assumes we're not working on someone's political campaign.
Your opinions that don't relate to your job are irrelevant -- at work. And as such, why would anyone, whether they agree with you or not, want to hear you (or anyone else) pontificate about how you "Like Ike" and that his Vice President would make a much better President than that (gasp!) Catholic, rum-runner/gangster's son from Massachusetts.
Yes, I'm deliberately using examples from 65+ years ago. Because it doesn't matter what the content of those opinions are. Unless you work for the RNCC or the DNC, etc. those opinions have no value or meaning in the workplace.
I'm not afraid to express my opinions, but I choose not to do so while I'm actively on the job. That you do it out of fear is, on the one hand, unfortunate but, on the other hand, a good thing as no one really wants to hear them anyway.
Keep up the good work!
>And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
Good. I'm sure that, regardless of how you think your peers would perceive your opinions, they are much less interested in those opinions than they are about the quality and quantity of your work, your opinions of the work and work environment, and how you interact on a personal level with others.
I was a tech-bro type libertarian dumb ass and my coworkers (even the Pacifica listeners) did not give a fuck. They were all super kind. Celebrated when my kids were born and bought baby clothes. And I was in Santa Cruz with ultra liberal types.
Then I moved to a very red state remote. And none of my co-workers cared until I got a new boss out off Chicago who was excited to have someone on his team that lived in God's country. But for him I wasn't conservative enough (I made a joke about not wanting to use my aerospace degree to make nukes so I switched to software. Guess what he did before software? FML) and I was gone for my wrong think. And I don't think I passed his 'God's country' purity test.
The left wing cancel culture era was stupid, annoying, and wrong, and this upcoming right wing era is bound to be much more stupid, annoying, and wrong.
I, too, remember when Obama has the FCC commissioner threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for the coverage of his tan suit.
This type of both-sides-ism is dumb, especially here when one side is using the power of the federal government to get dissenting voices taken off the air.
I see this "high-ranking elected officials" vs. "A few anonymous nobodies on Reddit and Twitter (now Bluesky I guess)" type of false equivalence all the time.
In the 2019 through at least 2022, Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and stories about laptops.
2. There is an important difference between a bureaucrat calling up someone at Facebook at arguing a position about policy and the chair of the FCC threatening to remove broadcast licenses. Notable, Supreme Court has even weighed in on the former and found it well within the rights of the government to do.
I included the earlier dates to capture the various government agencies comments on Hunter Biden's laptop, which I doubt that you can claim Trump was directing.
As for point 2, I am not aware of any of the government directed censorship going reaching the Supreme Court.
>On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden's efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield's response that Biden would continue to "call it out," Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?
False speech does not have the same Constitutional protections as true speech. That's why, for example, you can be prosecuted for defamation, fraud, or false advertising.
However, the Constitution also sometimes protects intentionally false speech such as parody and comedy.
"Upcoming"? The right has been practicing cancel culture at least since the 1950s with McCarthyism.
And there's a huge difference between someone getting cancelled due to social pressure, vs. getting cancelled because the government is trying to silence your speech.
There was no equivalency. That’s the bogeyman people conjured in their heads. I clarified a couple words to save those people from their anxious imaginations.
Listen, we are allowed to not support businesses or personalities that we find odious. Everyone does it.
This collaboration between corporations and the government to silence political dissent is something else entirely so can we please not “both sides” this ?
"Upcoming right-wing era" like conservatives haven't been "canceling" Starbucks over Christmas, any retailer who shows an ounce of support for the LGBTQ communities, etc., for years?
Yeah, they’ve always been tantruming over things that scare them. But I think it’s going to be a considerably more distinct era, particularly as the Americans elected an enabler of it who will wield the executive to help them prosecute their grievances.
Remind us what canceled right wing celebrity figure that is in line with Jimmy Kimmel’s firing. Maybe Scott Baio? No wait, maybe that guy from Hercules?
They bankrupted Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani, paraded Steve Bannon in handcuffs. Kicked people with even moderate right wing opinions off social media.
I fully disagree with cancelling Kimmel due to any governmental pressure (if that's what happened) and I'm absolutely horrified with the firings that are being gloated about at the moment but let's not pretend here. The left was very much out of bounds on the cancelling. Which doesn't make it any better when the right does it.
I really think this needs to stop. It's not the society we want to live in. People need to be able to express controversial or disagreeable opinions and I don't care what ideology they are.
Oh lord. Alex jones was sued into oblivion by the victims he tormented. Rightfully so. Rudy ruined a couple of faultless election workers life’s and was successfully sued for defamation. Rightfully so.
These excuses to go after political opponents leads to a very bad place. I will keep repeating this and hope it soaks in because it's a very important concept in a free society.
Defamation lawsuit, defamation lawsuit, money laundering, and no one specific. I'm not sure how this is in any way due to the left. Are sandy hook parents agents of the left in the reality you believe in? Is money laundering not a crime?
The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. Seems that now they've adopted a "turnaround is fair play" mentality.
One of the defining characteristics of the right is not placing any value on logical consistency. Being a hypocrite will not lose you any support with them.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
Freedom Fries, Satanic Panic, Save our Children, Red Scare. If anything the liberals being able to cancel people is a historical anomaly, and now we're seeing things return to their natural order.
> People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?
You can go a lot further back than that. McCarthyism was a powerful cancel culture and vestiges of that still manifest today. Linguistically, the weird and inexplicable way anything to the left of fascism in America can be described as "communism" if someone is in the mood to be pejorative is a vestige of McCarthy, or something even further back from the First Red Scare, I think.
The right was also calling to cancel people back then. They've just gotten more flagrant now. I'm not sure you can even call it hypocrisy since they don't even pretend to have principles besides whatever Trump wants. The government is blackmailing private companies now. I don't watch Kimmel but looking up stories his comments didn't seem at all offensive, please tell me what I missed.
That saying is absolutely true so long as the consequence isn't imposed by the government which has zero right to become involved in what Americans think, like, or say.
And there is something seriously wrong when large corporations have to worry about kissing the government's ass because they are awaiting government approval for a business venture. Obviously that's always been a worry, but Trump has taken that to a sickening new level.
Which is describing a very different situation: if ABC decided not to renew Kimmel’s contract, that’s their right as a business. Their listeners didn’t ask for this, the government made an illegal threat to force their business to stop allowing their listeners to have a choice.
This is one of those interminable sprawling message board arguments that has a really simple resolution nobody wants to accept, which is that commitment to free expression and "right/left" are mostly orthogonal, and both the right and the left weaponize commitment to free expression when it makes sense for them to.
But there is a massive difference here. The left uses social pressure to silence people they don't like, the right uses government power to silence people they don't like.
This is the exact type of cowardly but comfortable fence-sitting that we were warned against after WW2.
It's devoid of proportionality & it accepts a narrative crafted by the right-wingers themselves through repetition for exactly this purpose. There was never ever any doubt that all the hyperbolic outrage from the right about grassroots "cancel culture" was going to be used by the authors to excuse actual censorship as far as their current power and societal normalization allows them to. Preparing the ground for a "You did it first!" is not exactly innovative, it's fascism 101.
i get what you're saying but "the left" has basically zero political power in the united states. it never has. the closest we ever were was with FDR but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.
we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist".
whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times.
maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait.
> but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.
I consider myself a leftist, but it's a bit naive to think that "this bad, horrible thing" must be associated only with right-leaning ideology. Leftists can do bad, horrible things just as much as right-wing folks can. "Putting people in concentration camps" isn't a right-wing or left-wing thing, it's a totalitarian/anti-human-rights thing. We can argue that, as of late, right-wing people seem to have more of an appetite for that sort of thing, and I'd probably agree, but that doesn't make concentration camps a "right-wing thing".
I would absolutely consider FDR to be one of the most (if not the most) leftist presidents the US has had. His putting people in concentration camps doesn't change that; it just makes him a racist piece of shit, like so many others of his time (not that the time period excuses it).
> During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country.
> During World War II, the camps were referred to both as relocation centers and concentration camps by government officials and in the press. Roosevelt himself referred to the camps as concentration camps on different occasions, including at a press conference held on October 20, 1942.
> In a 1961 interview, Harry S. Truman stated "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
> Not to be confused with Extermination camp. A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.
I mean, they don’t. Just like True Conservatives don’t leverage the government to interfere like this.
People are more contradictory than pure theory. FDR was progressive in some aspects, regressive in others. A leftie, he wasn’t, and there’s more to politics than mere left/right, or we wouldn’t have trans Trump supporters.
Communism is far left, fascism far right. Both often slide into totalitarianism, which commonly includes camps.
FDR’s era, the furthest left the U.S. has been, true to form had this element... showing how concentrated state power, left or right, risks curtailing freedom.
In modern times, we've seen Guantánamo survive multiple admins on both sides.
Well far-right and far-left usually put people in camps due to ideological or related reasons.
In this case I’m not sure if that was inherently related to Roosevelt’s progressive/left policies. A moderate or rightwing government likely would have done something similar at the time.
My argument is that New Deal policies paved the way - culturally, institutionally, legislatively - for the United States to quickly mobilize for war, which also significantly reduced the friction for something like this to occur.
So yes, it could have happened under more centrist regimes entering the war, but the scale and timing would likely have been minimized in comparison.
In the sense that the government had the logistical capacity and capability to do something like this, yes.
Culturally I don’t see it as somehow exceptional. US government regularly employed highly authoritarian policies to suppress or remove people based on racial or ideological grounds since the very beginning.
Even in WW1 German Americans had the benefit of being white and forming a very significant proportion of the population so anything like this was obviously infeasible. But their cultural and linguistic identity was suppressed and they were forced to assimilate under the threat of violence.
When you take the Sedition Act and other similar policies in relation to how much of a threat US faced in WW1 compared to WW2 I’d day what Roosevelt did wasn’t that extreme.
I agree repression has always existed in the U.S, but the difference is scale.
In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - local violence, language bans, mobs.
By WWII the U.S. was far larger, more cohesive, and had a strong federal state; without that scale and central capacity, something like internment would have been much harder to pull off.
I first saw a moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ circa 2013 from The Atlantic and the opinion page of the New York Times. (The first because it’s demo is the naive liberal and pearl clutching parents of college students and the second because folks like Brooks and Blow don’t want to be canceled themselves). It was until 2017 or so that conservatives noticed the phenomenon and started to talk about it in The National Review and such.
Ezra Klein, who I generally respect, said he got more crap over
than anything else he’s written but I think it was unfortunate that he chose the words because Kirk, among other things, promoted Trump’s lies about the 2000 election, bussed people to the Jan 6 riot, and had a hit list of professors he wanted to punish just like David Horowitz, dad of the Andressen-Horowitz Horowitz. That bit about “prove me wrong” was always disingenuous, it would fool the pearl clutching parents who read The Atlantic and the likes of Ezra Klein. Probably the most harmful thing about illiberal campus leftists is that they allowed illiberal rightists to appear to take the high ground.
Cancel culture has been a thing a lot longer than since 2013. McCarthyism, anyone? Funny how cancellation has historically been wielded by the right, but once the left gets a few (comparatively minor) cancel-jabs in, it's a Real Problem.
"Cancel culture" gets piled on by conservatives sometimes because it's such an obvious own goal that used to be a prerogative of the right
I might be off my rocker on this, but!
>prove me wrong
Is such a right-wing to say.
Because it signals that a conservative believes that
*self-improvement is possible*.
(Their actions tend to suggest otherwise-- Thiel and Wolfram are my go-to not even mala (fide) examples. Lack of faith in learning happens in liberals or self-styled moderates, but we'd call that pessimism ("depression" in the empathetic or clinical). With thinking right wingers it's normally narcissism..Ezra is a pessimist but he carelessly assists the own goals)
Calling out cancel culture today: the youngest kid signals that they give up on self-improvement in favor of acting out, so the elder sibling, who used to be punished for a very similar thing, jumps (gleefully) on it . "Mama look at what she just did!" knowing the parents gonna wring their hands
who covers a lot of ground: Shapiro seems rather strong when it comes to articulating that idea of personal responsibility but his satanization of the economic left (e.g. Bernie Sanders) seems forced and unreasonable and Klein sorta "owns" him when it comes to pointing out that many of Trump and Vance's policies and viewpoints are examples of the envy and resentment-based "scavenger" thinking that Shaprio discusses in a dehumanizing way.
Shapiro's attempt to foreclose any difference on economic issues is mirrored, I think, by a certain wish on the left to foreclose difference on cultural issues. One one hand there is an axis that runs through Trotskyites to centrists like Klein who would like to shut down the culture wars because as soon as the culture wars started we started losing [1] [2] but the leftist who enjoys the culture wars is more inclined to satanize the "christofascist" as opposed to the likes of Milton Freedman [3]
There's a tendency on the right to say there is an "objective" reality (the Bible, Ayn Rand's philosophy) whereas Marxism leads you to see there are "two sides" to any issue. It gets the left in no end of trouble thinking about Blacks because if you go talk to Black people you will find they really do see things differently from white people in the aggregate but that they also see things differently from one another.
So like Rhett Butler or Han Solo if I'm asked to take a side on something like "cancel culture" I'm going to say "my side". I'm sure someone got canceled who deserved it and someone got canceled who didn't deserve it. There is no "due process" but there's also a feeling (see Klein) that due process is as much a problem as it is a solution. I sure as hell hate the "debate" over it.
[1] that theory would say that Reagan's economic policies didn't have any appeal to a mass base
[2] to be fair, almost always white male although sometimes gay
[3] and it's a credit to the rise of financialization: when I grew up I learned the financial advice that if I take care of my bank account my credit score will take care of itself; the paradigm for financial advise on both the internet and in magazines has been "(1) stop people from stealing your identity, and (2) use this one weird trick to raise your FICO score" since 2010 -- leftists once might have cared about labor, opportunity, taxes and such, today they care about insurance (e.g. health insurance) and credit (student loans). The idea that you might have your own money to spend on something you want to spend it on is right out of the 1950s like the stay at hom emome.
Ah, here was a great place to substitute your coinage "identarian"-- Ime I can't distinguish the identarians who enjoy the culture wars in terms of left from right (unless we equate right with white, & that's something we have to amicably agree to disagree :) one could forgiveably id the killer of Kirk as a right-identarian, eg, but that still feels less correct than simply "identarian" (normal folks would not resort to moderately planned violence).. you can see by the shell engravings TR sort of took pleasure in the planning vs Luigi..
(Yes, in other words, the economic left, or more precisely the nonpractising left, was too welcoming of identarians in precisely the same way the churchgoing center wasnt- 1970s to mid 1980s)
Now as for "leftist" in [3] I'd assume you mean "what passes for a classic leftist (like Bernie & 2000s Paul) amongst the millennials/gen z". More to say here, insurance over taxes is imho the correct Marxist valuation.. ? After all "from each according to his ability etc etc" is a succinct description of insurance
>due process is as much a problem as it is a solution
Now this is an interesting take, well, I can see Klein saying it in exasperation (in the podcast-to-be-read-- thanks!), but what is your emotional-valence here? (I can guess, but the guess would be more intricate than I can jot down from the hip :)
A mini-shot though.. if one truly enjoys hard work, problems would be as much of a joy as solutions. Centrists (like PG and "functional" Grothendieck) would be careful to tolerate schlep without seeing value in labor-in-itself.. schizos right+epsilon of center, or stoics* left+epsilon a-ways.. however..
*I would substitute "epicureans" here, but "stoics" would do fine for pedantry
I can't approve completely of his appropriate of dynamical systems theory but the idea that Kirk was "killed by memes" appeals to me as does Fred's description of these as "brainrot". People on the right are likely to see some transfurry in there [1] whereas left-leaning women are going to see anything coded young male as right wing. The FBI profile of the postmodern shooter is that he had a copy of The Communist Manifesto but he kept up his neighbors listening to Rush (the Canadian band) and people will make what they want of it.
As for Klein and due process I can say I am very frustrated not least because due process is frustrating but because we're in a dilemma because the alternatives are worse. (I can see how Curtis Yarvin's crypto-degrowth philosophy of "just wait until the dieoff and we can go back to solar-economy feudalism" could appeal to some) Of course that frustration with due process is the subject of his recent book Abundance which I have ambiguous feelings about: part of me wants to believe it, but I think it is a tough sell to many people who see it as warmed over neoliberalism [3] who think rent control is a good idea, like the populism of Matt Stoller, never mind this sort of usually unstated issue
as it is people will complain that somebody else complains about not being safe downtown while they (1) live a hikkiomori lifestyle or (2) live in the suburbs and/or order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
[1] my take though is furries are even-headed, as a committed kemonomimi [2] I always trying to bait them based on their bad taste in art
[3] "but wait... we're not talking liberating the private sector from the government, we're talking about liberating the government from the government!"
[1] Ime transfurries even more so (tho I'm not clued enough in art history to comment on their aesthetic merits)
Thanks for the Klein pointers, I see the sections on rent are precisely what I require to formulate copy for an insurance-market-based ad to thoughtful Marxists :) TODO-- close-read those with a postulate that Klein has read & wrestled with late era Jacobs
Decarlos Brown is someone I'd ID as right-identarian & more specifically that kind of center-right+epsilon schizo I was hinting at (if I put myself in a Martian's shoes)
But reflecting on that with FredDeBoer freshly paged in: the left-identarians (predominantly women plus a smattering of depressive gays who haven't mustered the courage to experiment with hormone replacement therapy)
Just do a better job of publicly suppressing their glee vizavis less emotionally adroit young cis-males, black or white
Hikkikomori culture in the US is only barely an appropriation-- I'm sure the HKs in ah Saitama dont get distracted by young women loitering in the backstreets of Shibuya/Shinjuku: rather it's the superior habits in moral hygiene (outsiders would say it's indoctrination, but why then would the mtgow-equivalent in Tokyo proper not succeed?)
Got to the part where Ezra says he will have his kids read Shapiros neo-Randian fairytale lol.
Yep this is the disingenuity. If i were Ezra I'd have rehearsed with a unrepentant Randian 10x to come up with something more aggressive.
Dems will get that he's weaseling, but Republicans will have it go over their heads.. Mamdani-style listening would be marginally better; to throw Shapiros phrase back at him, it's the "praise" that he pretends not to notice that should be the most concerning
Self-help for Shapiros would not be writing Randian "bronze-age" fairytales (self-help as practiced by "narcissist by nurture" trivially succumbs to Kohutese infernos), but to get as far away from Rand and the Iron Age as sanely possible. (but that'd require some hormonal injections or dissociative research substances ?)
Man, can you at least elaborate? This kind of comment isn’t what I wanna see HN devolve into.
He’s definitely right with that sentence. Do you not think it’s generally true that the right has been on the defensive with regards to cancel culture, and thus is constantly preaching about how cancelling is wrong?
The few times they’ve gotten to go on the offensive, they play the same game, cancelling whoever it is they’re upset about. It’s horseshoe theory all over again.
I don’t think they need to. I think they just need to shake hands and say it’s okay to have a different opinion.
There have been a number of studies around the world, plus some real world examples (Utah gubernatorial 2020) where showing your opponents in a sympathetic light can make a big difference in reductions in political polarization.
Edit: I hear plenty of stories of people abandoning family members over a difference of political opinion. My MIL won’t talk to a niece of hers after the niece made the same decision. I won’t go so far as to say that’s never warranted, but it seems these days that it’s happening a lot more.
To me, this implies we’re losing acceptability of political “others”.
Counterpoint: dehumanizing trans people, black people, other minorities, women, is not acceptable. It's not "a different opinion". When Republican politicians or prominent conservative talking heads talk about replacement theory, other conservatives shoot up synagogues or super markets in a minority neighborhood. I don't want to talk to you if this is what you support, unless what you're saying is you've had a change of heart.
> this implies we’re losing acceptability of political “others”.
I think this is being seriously accelerated by Trump. Why should I treat those I disagree with with dignity and respect when the President (who theoretically is a leader for all Americans, not just the people who voted for him) says things like this?
"And when you look at the agitator, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that’s the left. That’s not the right."
When Trump and Vance start setting a positive example for others to follow, maybe I'll rethink my position, but leadership and accountability start at the top.
It's rough when very basic premises, "political violence, no matter who causes it, is abhorrent," are up for debate. The minority people who support, defend, ignore, or rationalize actions which have no place in this country is a major part of the issue.
Turn on the largest mainstream media "news" channel, and you'll hear nothing but mindless hate for 20 hours a day, without consideration for what actual news is occurring.
So up until this point it was perfectly acceptable? Or is this only an issue when the wrong side does it in a fairly moderate way (since the other side regularly and openly embraces and encourages political violence).
For rational people, it has never been acceptable, it will never be acceptable.
However, some people support and vote for, a president who has told his supporters to perform acts of violence against those whose speech he disagrees with, clearly a portion of the population doesn't mind.
Prisoners' dilemma at scale. I don't think a truce is doable unless reporting someone for having what you believe to be unsavory opinions becomes a major social faux pas
Who do you imagine represents the "sides" in negotiations? Do they have names and group bodies which they represent? Are they able to sign and enforce diplomatic agreements?
I think the problem is it’s not the moderate 80% of each party that’s doing it, so all of the people who might be inclined to a truce are already at the table waiting.
The left 'cancelling' a product or a public figure is literally just exercising consumer choice. People get fired because they are bleeding ad dollars over lack of views. I'm not sure how you can prevent that without being even more authoritarian.
Someone was just murdered for his opinions so no, that doesn’t seem likely. I think that’s one cancelation too far, and I don’t think there’s going to be any meaningful coming back from it.
Just a guess, but in that case, very few people really knew who those lawmakers were, and there wasn't camera footage of the murder in that case to be spread virally on social media.
What truce? Sometimes cancelation is good, sometimes it's not. It depends on the why. Also Republican principles these days are just to blindly follow whatever Trump wants including complaining about cancelation and renaming bases to confederate generals and blackmailing companies into firing people
I know time flies by.. but 2016 was almost 10 years ago.
Also, lets ignore the fact that there is a difference between consumers boycotting something and a government agency outright threatening a private company.
The right has consistently tried to cancel people, has tried to censor people, has complained/played the refs about moderation saying their rights to say racist stuff was being infringed even when it was a moderation decision by a private company not the government
And then under Trump it's only gotten worse/more divorced from any principles
I'm not denying what you've observed there, but how does this square up with cancel culture is bad, as we've heard at length from any number of moralizers, including many HN posters and the NYT editorial board. Was I to understand those moralizers as having said that cancelling conservatives was bad, but cancelling the more liberal is at least ok?
Because "their" rights and "our" rights (whoever "us" and "them" happen to be) are one and the same. You wouldn't be defending or attacking "their" rights, you'd be defending or attacking rights in general, and that includes yours.
Bill Maher rather famously lost his job on ABC 20+ years ago related to his comments about the 9/11 hijackers. I don't think conservatives cancelling people in the media for speech they don't like is anything new within the last 5 years.
> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation.
If you are going to morally judge the actions behind cancellation attempts, "I don't find Dave Chappelle's jokes funny" is not morally equivalent to "I don't think people should celebrate the murder of those they disagree with."
As an amateur HNologist, it's been my observation that controversial topics DO tend to fall off the first page quickly, much more quickly than tech topics. I suspect that there's some part of the algorithm that detects when there are a lot of downvotes on comments, and it counts against the thread itself.
I never said otherwise? I think you might have misread something. Edit: It was supposed to say "that HN" not the
This post had about 60 upvotes where the one that the comments go moved from was at something like 175. So it basically kills a posts ability to gain traction.
hacker news moderation does not like political stories. it's explicitly in the guidelines of what not to post: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
it is of course in the interests of billionaire-owned companies like YC to keep the community all about "hacking" and "getting VC money" and away from rightfully discussing the most alarming period in the US' history since the Civil War. because hackers need to be at their screens spinning more gold for them and not getting disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of society into an authoritarian dystopia.
I spent half the day yesterday explaining and defending why HN does allow certain political stories (or stories with political overlap). If you missed that, I understand—no one sees everything that gets posted here, including us. I just mention it because it's odd, if familiar, to be answering opposing criticisms at more or less the same time.
Point taken ! I'm sure you know my opinion here is partially from your criticism of my posts being "inflammatory" some time ago. Real things happening all day long right now are unfortunately inflammatory. We have a president literally making decisions based on how much pain and terror they will cause to his chosen Boogeyman, "the libs".
I hear you - the problem is that HN can't have a frontpage thread about all of these developments without turning into a current affairs site, which is not its mandate. So we end up taking a fairly small sample of the topics that arise. Many stories that HN doesn't cover are far more important than nearly everything on the front page. We know that and don't imply otherwise.
Every user has their own list of which stories ought to clear the bar for frontpage representation, and it's impossible to include them all. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that HN has (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). As a result, there's no HN reader who gets the frontpage they want, including us. This is baked into the fundamentals of how the site is designed, unless and until we start customizing the frontpage per user preferences.
There's another important aspect that I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 and still haven't explained very well. In that post it's called "the temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories"—a clumsy phrase—but if you follow the argument, the conclusion it's impossible to prioritize political stories by importance on HN, even if everyone were to agree about what the important stories actually are.
>There's another important aspect that I wrote about... and still haven't explained very well. In that post it's called "the temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories"—a clumsy phrase....
I think your immediately following phrase captures the idea well: "Curiosity withers under repetition," and that's compounded by topical subjects inherently being ephemeral.
Because discussions that go political are quite boring. There are a million sites you can go on to find such “discussions” so HN doesn’t feel like it’s the type of content that aligns well with its ethos.
At least change the name to VibeCodingBroNews then and stop appropriating "hacker." The founders of the computing industry were activists, I don't know any real hacker that would flag down posts about government censorship.
Sick of people racing to chirp that we're nowhere to be found. I'm too detached to doomscroll. Just saw the news now.
Honestly, I'm tired of all of the snide remarks from both teams acting like you’re not equally guilty of opportunistically showing up for free speech.
And you have the balls to make comments like this as I'm already dealing with the fact Jimmy Kimmel should have been canceled years ago for literally any other reason. At least when I'm defending detestable speech the number of people pretending it's meritorious is tiny. But now I have to hear his comedy praised? Fuck my life.
>Honestly, I'm tired of all of the snide remarks from both teams acting like you’re not equally guilty of opportunistically showing up for free speech.
Yeah, a trans person asking you use their desired pronouns presents the same threat to free speech as the FCC threatening people over jokes. The reason for the "snide remarks" is that people like you are still drawing false equivalencies between "both teams".
People have been fired from their jobs for refusing to refer to trans-identifying males as if they are women. Some have even been taken to court over it. This is quite clearly a threat to free speech.
This is a good point because a business choosing not to employ somebody is the exact same thing as the government mandating that a private company not employ somebody. Similarly, gummy bears and grizzly bears are the same thing: bears
I agree! The definition of an attack on free speech is anything that happens that I don’t like. For example Netflix raising their prices is an attack on free speech. People that have loud conversations on speakerphone in public are attacking free speech. When I’m at a picnic and a wasp lands on my sandwich? That’s not just an attack on free speech, that’s cancel culture. The wasp (government) is literally cancelling me exercising (eating) free speech (my sandwich)
I don’t appreciate this attack on my freedom of expression. “Freedom of speech” means saying whatever I want and I am free from anybody forming any negative opinions about me or what I said. Any even perceived undesired consequence for how I express myself is an assault on my first amendment rights
I’m having trouble understanding your reaction here. Free speech dictates that everyone has to like me in the same way that free speech means everybody has to agree with you and tell you that your opinions about pronouns are good and correct.
It seems like we’re in full agreement here. Like the only way I could imagine that we’re at odds is if you just decided unprompted to share your opinions about gender in the Jimmy Kimmel thread and used “free speech”, again completely unprompted, as a shorthand to express your irritation at the fact that there exists some people that don’t agree with you.
That would be pretty silly though. Obviously you were sharing a single example that’s part of a larger and logically consistent definition of free speech (which we agree about), because it would be pretty bad faith to assume that you saw the Jimmy Kimmel thread and thought “Nobody is even discussing my take on pronouns on this page. I’d better get on fixing that”
Do those people ever get tired of all of that pearl-clutching? Being a modern conservative seems exhausting, what with all the faux outrage and constantly shifting fundamental beliefs.
I don’t think people get tired of being rewarded or reassured that they are good and right. I would imagine folks only get tired of pearl clutching these days when they’re just sort of bad at it and go for it without making sure the environment they’re posting in will guarantee a win. That being said, the topic of this thread largely relates to a forcible change in the environment in the US to uniformly guarantee a win and a pat on the head for pearl clutching as a matter of policy.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it's probably fatigue over this general topic, a belief that it doesn't fit within the guidelines for on-topic content, and an expectation that it will lead to another flamewar.
All those concerns are valid but we've turned off the flags now.
As much as I'd also appreciate a discussion on something like this, it's heavily political and HN isn't really the place for that unless it's directly related to tech.
Sure but if that is a reasonable solution, why even bother with distinct forums like HN? Just subsume every UGC site into something like a single global Usenet like group called “general” with the expectation that every user is responsible for fine tuning their own personal filters to their liking.
Having different sites focussed on different topics is very useful to people, and I don’t think the world would be better if we got rid of it.
What's the end game of these right-wing legacy media? The median age of TV viewers is like 65. How do they expect to maintain any viewership once all the elderly people die off? The only thing people watch anymore are live sports and local news, and even those are showing signs of declining.
YouTube recently introduced an AI-driven policy that automatically places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode, which blocks access to political and news content. This happens because lots of people are sharing accounts with their kids and despite Youtubers attempts to change this there are large amount of viewers who actually dont subscribe to channels. This change has already caused independent creators to lose 25–33% of their views, since many users get flagged and no longer see political videos recommended. This has happened once before during the 2017–2018 "Adpocalypse": when all political channels lost ad revenue after advertisers pulled out due to seeing their content on a few extremist channels. The motivation now seems to be brand safety and political sensitivity, but the effect is the same: fewer viewers, less revenue, and potential long-term harm to independent media. Its the first step towards pushing out independent creators. Yeah there is substack and patreon but many avenues of independent media are in danger and this is a step in the wrong direction.
>YouTube recently introduced an AI-driven policy that automatically places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode
This is blatantly false. This was a single youtube channel's mistaken belief
It was incorrect. Restricted Mode is completely unrelated to the issue, and plenty of the videos that are doing just fine are not available if you have restricted mode on.
There's still no definitive answer IMO, but it might be that an analytics endpoint was blocked by ad blockers.
Note that the people affected by this problem say they are getting the same revenue, just view counts changed. That means their videos are getting the same number of not-adblocked views.
Why would you expect Substack and Patreon to be any better ?
They are platforms too, and US-based too, and IIRC Patreon has already been caught at least twice engaging in censorship : against some right-wingers, and some porn.
(They are at least less able to manipulate speech through recommendations I guess...)
Now that the legacy media has been used to install fascists by lulling old people into thinking they're voting for the same "conservative" American-power-structure Republican party they had been their whole lives (as opposed to the reality of radical revanchist reactionaries supported by our adversaries), it doesn't really matter. It has served its use.
There was an article recently that basically said lots of moves on the right aren’t strategic they’re ideological. So yeah, I think the right really wants to control media, and isn’t worried about the inevitable backlash.
But I do keep thinking about the fact that the move to the right among young men, will probably pretty quickly reverse itself, if they keep going after media/video games/porn, etc.
Are you just going to ignore stuff like, I don't know, January 6th? When has the left done ANYTHING approaching what Trump and his followers did there?
> We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
And yet you're going to say that violating the Constitution (the 1st freaking amendment) is a deradicalization effort by this administration?
Donald Trump also openly mocked Nancy Pelosi and her husband after the attack on them, which was done by a Trump supporter who believed Pelosi was trying to steal votes from Trump (which, for the record, was a FAILED assassination attempt). He did nothing to condemn this violence:
Perhaps the morons running the US need to first look at their first amendment, before moving to the second. Extremely disappointed that even Rand Paul is for such moves.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don’t know if the means matter much - the outcomes are the same. One side could rely on their activist group networks to pressure decision makers and the other side is using their corporate connections to do the same.
The government isn’t doing anything directly in either case. End of day the network made this choice.
> The government isn’t doing anything directly in either case. End of day the network made this choice.
The kindest read here is that you are unaware of the FCC’s comments on the matter.
Unfortunately, the government actually did do something - they put their thumb on the scale and implied severe consequences if the network did not follow through.
This is a massive difference. It is extremely chilling.
And I’ll say if it is overreach, which it well could be, it too will be punished in due time. Previous regimes largess is currently being punished. Endless cycle.
In death, Mr. Kirk has become more useful than he was in life. There’s so much more coverage of him compared to, say, routine Russian drone incursions over NATO states. And I haven’t heard anyone actually quote him; not a word of his supposed wisdom. But, this occasion gets to be scribbled into the blank for “________ takes down that Jimmy Kimmel”.
Colbert was almost certainly on track to be cancelled anyways. The program was tremendously expensive and was losing boatloads of money. I don't know if Trump accelerated the cancellation or not, but the writing was on the wall.
Indeed, it was just a smart move by Viacom/whatever to curry some favor with Trump by doing it now instead of waiting for another time, figuring that favor would be more valuable than the bad PR they earned. Probably a good bet since with the mergers (including the one they themselves were supposedly trying to push across the finish line) it's impractical to hold grudges for long. With only a few oligarchic firms in each industry you can't practically boycott more than maybe one at a time, and they all do shady stuff.
Turns out Ajit Pai was actually a visionary who saw the political writing on the wall. He attempted to dismantle the agency to a point where it couldn't do anything and by not being able to do anything it couldn't be used for evil and wasn't worth corrupting. It was a long con to get the FCC to survive the 2020s. If only we had listened to him. (This is satire)
Sure it is. But he was elected with everyone fully knowing that's what he does. Including the popular vote, remember that. Including improving his margins with Hispanic voters and Black voters compared to 2016. [1]
I don't like Trump and I think 80% of his policies seem like those of an immature child. But also, this is what the public wanted when presented with the two choices of this, and Harris, who was the weakest major-party candidate in history. The DNC couldn't literally couldn't beat this guy.
Anyone complaining that Trump should be impeached or should never have been elected should, in my opinion, admit to not believing in democracy. (Which IMHO is fine, but I don't think people are admitting that to themselves.)
You're saying that believing in democracy means believing in electoral dictatorship: whoever is elected president can do whatever they want. But that isn't supposed to be the U.S. form of government. In fact such a form of government would obviously be self-defeating: the first dictator elected would use his unlimited power to prevent anyone else from being elected.
And this one is infinitely worse than a bunch of internet commenters disagreeing with his comments or private advertisers pulling out. Trump and the FCC directly threatened to pull ABC's license unless they regulated his speech, and ABC caved. The first amendment is dead and people are celebrating on the streets because their favorite political party was the one to kill it.
My word! With all due respect that seems like a legitimate 1st Amendment violation! I assume those freedom of speech absolutists, like the NYT Editorial Board, are all over this one!
The government, via the FFC, used their expansive power to force a private company to censor speech.
I'm not familiar with what you are quoting specifically, but that refrain is typically understood to mean "the first amendment doesn’t protect against consequences ... except from the government".
I mean the FCC has rules around the content that can be put on public airwaves. It has been held up in court.
Whether the FCC’s actions are also legal here I don’t know.
But it goes to show the insanity of US politics that one can make an argument yesterday then argue against the same point the next.
But then again, I get the sense it’s all one circus with everyone well aware of what’s going on. It’s basically a performance where the audience knows the performer doesn’t believe it themselves.
It's an insincere argument that government censorship is equivalent to public shaming or canceling (or however you want to describe the "left"'s actions here). When the government does it, it's authoritarian. When a group of people do it, it's freedom of expression. There's a discussion to be had about how it may go too far or be extrajudicial (people being fired for non criminal activity), but it's markedly different from the force of the government.
This isn't some even handed application of the FCC's policies against hate speech (if that's how one cares to describe Kimmel's comments) or misinformation (is there even such a policy?).
You don't have to look far to see this is politically motivated: just this week a Fox host suggested that the homeless should just be exterminated. I don't believe the FCC has threatened Fox's broadcast license in an attempt to influence Fox to fire him
Like most arguments online it’s a bunch of people with little to know knowledge of the actual facts filling in whatever details they want with their own opinions then getting hysterical over the hypothetical implications.
When I say "them" it is in reference to the statements made in the wake of political violence. You hear a lot of mentions of "them" from pundits and politicians. It's a cowardly way to let the viewer fill in whatever they want for "them", "the left", "maga", "antifa", "globalists", etc.
What were the killer's motivations? I haven't been paying close attention.
> When I say "them" it is in reference to the statements made in the wake of political violence.
To the extent that this person is slandering someone I condemn it. To the extent that this person is referring to the bad actors responsible I support it.
Seems rather simple to me but let me know what you don't understand.
> What were the killer's motivations? I haven't been paying close attention.
I'm not trying to be combative but you're speaking from a place of willful ignorance. This is adding very little to the conversation.
> It's a cowardly way to let the viewer fill in whatever they want for "them", "the left", "maga", "antifa", "globalists", etc.
It's not a specific "them" but rather a placeholder for anyone in opposition to the person speaking. Just look at tweets from prominent figures immediately after the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. "They did this." "We need to protect ourselves from them."
You reframe the use of "them" as an accusation about a person who can claim slander. It's not that. It's a cowardly way to avoid facing reprecussions by slandering a vague group.
> you're speaking from a place of willful ignorance
Except the conversation is about being consistent in condemning people who use "them" reactively. It doesn't matter if Kimmel is right or wrong in claiming the shooter is maga, which - for me - is the more important conversation.
rate limited when i replied to you so my response below:
>We had 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 with everything they can to score political points from it.”
Not sure what the original text was, but FoxNews keeps trying to play up a tenuous trans angle, which they keep back tracking on. It is weird, creepy, and I really should stop looking at the FoxNews homepage to figure out what the other side is thinking.
Very indirect and circumstantial. “Hey his roommate was trans this must be why!” You can tell that even FoxNews doesn’t believe it since they keep pulling it off the page. Edit, oh they are back at it again: “ Relative reveals why roommate of Kirk's alleged assassin was kicked out of parents’ home”. At least they aren’t mentioning trans anymore but come on, but the comments are still really toxic. See https://www.foxnews.com/us/charlie-kirk-alleged-assassins-ro...
I only sample the FoxNews homepage, they often have a trash top story even when much more important things are going on. It would be interesting to do an actual study by writing some code to scrape and keep track of their top-story (the one that takes the most space on their homepage).
Please don't call people names or attack people for comments in historical threads. The guidelines apply, no matter how right you are or think you are, and no matter how heated the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm sorry, I didn't know that this was a rule and I apologize for breaking it. I do occasionally overstep my bounds but I generally try to go with the flow of traffic around here.
In my defense, I linked to a very recent exchange that I had with that exact same person about nearly the same topic. In a normal conversation or debate that would be considered totally appropriate, and I imagine I was caught by an automated rule, since I was immediately throttled.
But I understand the reason for the rule and I will attempt not to break it again. Sorry to give you more work and thanks for the site.
How is it possibly out of bounds to suggest that someone might be of a certain politics? Kirk has said horrific things. Many have horrific things about Kirk. What Kimmel said was so incredibly bland.
Read the comic again, your right to free speech has nothing to do with your privilege of using the public airwaves.
The FCC chairs' threat to ABC is about the later, not about arresting executives or Kimmel like one would expect if you read the comic then your comment.
The comic is incomplete, the first amendment also protects content based discrimination in government interactions outside of certain exceptions. It does not require arrest.
For example in the granting of permits for marches.
Supposing ABC hadn't fired Kimmel, then what would Kimmel sue the government for? ABC did Kimmel and the rest of us a favor, by making sure Kimmel was actually negatively impacted by the government talking shit about him and thereby giving us a chance of this actually causing a legal mess.
I am heartbroken to see the way Jimmy Kimmel has been treated. I believe he is, in his heart of hearts, a good and decent fellow, devoid of malice and hate.
Just kidding! He's a humorless scold who thought he could lie about Kirk's murder with impunity : it was viewer disgust and an advertiser revolt that drove the decision at ABC. It's FAFO time, Jimbo.
What I had believed, as an outsider to the US, was that US Federal politicians directly leveraging business decisions over a speech issue was explicitly unconstitutional.
What I've come to realise is that few are prepared to bell the cat and prosecute unconstitutional behaviour.
It's a tough one, even without the Supreme Court issues, Kimmel alone is circumstantial at best; sure, the current POTUS is on record saying that Kimmel would be next to get the chop, but that proves nothing- any actual action taken would, I assume, be just pressure with no paper trail - classic intimidation leverage made famous by Scorsese.
The FCC Chairman specifically threatened to pull ABC broadcasting licenses if they didn't punish Kimmel. That isn't circumstantial at all. That's a smoking gun.
The FCC chair, in the unlikely circumstance that that charges for violating the constitution are bought and a conviction occurs, can be readily replaced with another of the same ilk. Changing nothing about the circumstances that find the US with an administration blatantly willing and prepared to go beyond the constitution.
The FCC chair isn't the cat that needs to be belled.
Why did anyone have to ask him? He spoke in his capacity as a government official, and he has the power to do what he threatened. That's sufficient to say "the government is suppressing free speech".
> Kimmel was straight up spreading misinformation about the shooter.
There's been an absolute ton of that going around. Who else has been pulled from the air?
What Kimmel said was
> “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,” Kimmel said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”[1]
If that's "misinformation", and I'd love to hear how any part of that beside being "one of them" could even be considered so; regardless, it's pretty mild compared to some of the crazy shit we've been hearing lately.
Is that the level now? "Misinformation" from a late night comedian is an offense requiring FTC intervention? I can't wait to see what standards news agencies are held to!
> Kimmel was straight up spreading misinformation about the shooter.
... which is free speech, regardless of whether or not we agree with it.
But sure, I guess this sort of misinformation is fine when the president says it in support of his own ideology, but not ok when someone like Kimmel does it (and read a sibling poster's quote of what Kimmel said... that wasn't misinformation, or even false).
You're correct that defamatory speech isn't protected, but the remedy for that is a civil suit, not threats from a FCC commissioner.
This is absolutely government censorship.
And not to play the whataboutism card, but if Kimmel should be taken off the air for misinformation, then all of Fox "News" should have been taken off the air years ago.
It's fairly absolute. There are exceptions but they are usually narrower then most people think. Proving defamation especially against a public figure is difficult on purpose.
As for spreading misinformation if that was illegal the whole Trump administration and fox would be in deep trouble
Firing someone for making a political statement is business. You never want to alienate half your consumer base.
COVID is still fresh enough that people should remember. If you were pro or anti anything 5 years ago it probably hurt you since sentiment swung both ways and both positions look silly in hindsight.
> Firing someone for making a political statement is business.
Except that he was fired right after the FCC chair threatened ABC. That feels more like government censorship than business.
Unless now "business" encompasses "it's better for business to not criticize the government". Which I suppose it does, under Trump. But that's not something we should accept or allow in a free society, under the constitution we have.
Nobody has provided any evidence that I've seen that the murderer was motivated by a right-wing anything, and frankly as the least logical conclusion it needs sources. I read that the person who turned him in (or an acquaintance) said that he was the only leftist in a family of hard right people. [Apologies for the lack of source; I read it as news was breaking and don't have the link]
It's a nonsensical argument that the attack was random. It's farfetched that it was for some unrelated-to-politics reason given that these men as far as we know had no connection to each other, and it's nonsensical to believe that someone beloved by most people in the right wing would be targeted by a fellow right-winger.
If someone like AOC or Bernie Sanders was viciously attacked at an event, you can't tell me that you would accept an unsourced assertion that "it was actually a marxist that harmed them."
> it's nonsensical to believe that someone beloved by most people in the right wing would be targeted by a fellow right-winger
Look up groypers and Nick Fuentes - he's a right winger who was NOT a fan of Charlie Kirk and amassed a following about it. There is _some_ very mild evidence to believe that it's possible (I personally don't think that's the case FWIW)
Or Laura Loomer. She's deleted a bunch of her Tweets that here highly critical of Kirk over the last few months, but the one mentioned in this article seems to still be there [1]. In case that one gets deleted, here is its full text [2].
While searching for more information on this I found an interesting link to something Grok wrote, answering the question of whether the shooter followed Loomer. It was quite interesting. No idea if any of it is true but given Musk's well known efforts to get Grok to favor the right it is sure amusing it would say this:
> Yes, based on reports and social media discussions following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, the shooter, identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson from a "good Christian gun-loving MAGA family," followed Laura Loomer on X (formerly Twitter). Robinson was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and appeared to have been influenced by far-right online rhetoric, including potential inspiration from Loomer's recent criticisms of Kirk as a "traitor" and "charlatan" who betrayed Trump. This detail emerged as investigators reviewed Robinson's social media activity after his capture on September 12, 2025. Loomer, a prominent far-right influencer, had posted multiple times in July 2025 attacking Kirk for hosting guests critical of Trump and engaging in "dialog with Democrats," which some speculate may have radicalized followers like Robinson. While the exact motive remains under investigation, the follow relationship aligns with broader patterns of intra-conservative online feuds escalating into real-world violence.
[2] > I don’t ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.
> Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.
> TPUSA was only able to thrive thanks to the generosity of President Trump.
> On the one year anniversary of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Charlie hosted @ComicDaveSmith at @TPUSA ’s SAS conference where Dave Smith was able to speak to a bunch of conservative youth at an organization that claims to be Pro-Trump.
> 3 weeks ago, Dave Smith called for President Trump to be IMPEACHED and REMOVED from office over his decision to blow up Iran’s nuclear facilities.
> Charlie played both sides of the Iran issue on his show as we all saw, because he wants to play to both sides of the aisle.
> The honorable thing to do is to have a position and actually defend it to the death instead of flip flopping.
> Smith said all of MAGA “should turn on Trump” and abandon him. He said this 3 weeks ago.
> See the clip below.
> TPUSA is definitely not pro-Trump. If they were, they certainly aren’t anymore.
> Out of all of the incredible pro-Trump voices out there who support the President, Charlie decided to host Dave Smith?
> It really is shameful. And I am honestly just disgusted by the nonstop flip flopping on the right.
That linked article says nothing of the sort, which is why it almost immediately switches to talking about stuff from half a century ago. The evidence so for doesn’t show them taking a strong political stance in general–note their Discord history mentioning neither Trump not Biden except as a passing news reference once each–and their friends have expressed disbelief about them being that political. Not every shooting has a philosophy beyond not liking the victim.
>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
Mr. Kimmel does not assert Mr. Robinson was "MAGA". Simply that the, "MAGA gang" is trying to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.
Where in the quote does he assert Mr. Robinson is MAGA? Everyone is attempting to distance themselves from him. The "MAGA gang" are simply doing on the most popular main stream "news" outlet in the United States.
If you _decide_ to read it that way, you can. But you'd have to be looking for something to be offended about.
Given Mr. Robinson's upbringing being very similar to many MAGA, it would make sense for them to attempt to distance themselves from him, no?
The same way non-maga would distance themselves by asserting how unusual his access to firearms and firearms training is compared to the general public?
Maybe English is not your first language? Critical reading skills are important.
I have 60+ years of English as a first language, a library of several floor to ceiling bookcases and no, it definitely does not say that the killer is MAGA.
It's a classic deliberate line skate but it clearly states what the "MAGA Gang" is asserted to have done without actually claiming the killer to be be part of that "Gang".
It wouldn't pass muster in an English libel Court and it's a milquetoast sentence in the US first amendment free speech world.
Further it is a bald matter of demonstrable fact that multiple voices that could be characterised as "MAGA" were indeed making numerous assertions about the killer and their motives before any facts other than the shooting itself were known.
This makes the Kimmel statement little more than a dull piece of observational social commentary.
My guess is these progressives are so used to eating their own and purity spiraling, that they just assume it must come as naturally to conservatives as it does to them. How they reconcile that with conservatives having clearly been able to set aside their differences to win enough elections to lock up the Supreme Court for probably of the rest of these same progressives' natural lifetimes, I don't know.
> If someone like AOC or Bernie Sanders was viciously attacked at an event, you can't tell me that you would accept an unsourced assertion that "it was actually a marxist that harmed them."
So, first, both of those two (AOC in particular) have been the subject of extreme criticism from the tankie/accelerationist bits of the leftophere. It's 100% not out of the realm of possibility to imagine them being the target of an individual loon motivated by the right combinations of freakouts.
But also, it's not "unsourced" to say that Robinson comes from a conservative background, that he was a church-going-enough Mormon to be recognizable to his pastor, that he's informed by and involved in right-leaning edgelord/groyperist meme culture (that halloween costume was a pretty smoky gun), that he executed the murder with a family weapon to which he had easy access and apparently solid familiarity, etc...
I mean, his background looks extremely Trumpy. He's also apparently a closeted gay man with a hatred of Kirk in particular. And that doesn't make a lot of sense in total. But then that's the way it is with murderers. It's not a philosophy for the consistently rational.
And the inability to reason from evidence is a big part of the disconnect here.
That article doesn't substantiate your statement. The single quote in the charging document it's talking about is that he had become "more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented", which is obviously not the same thing. Otherwise Thiel and Jenner would be "left wing" in your world view.
Real people's views are complicated, especially those of an insane murderer.
So if the killer (who we also found out had a transitioning girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever) killed Kirk because he thought Kirk wasn't "accepting" enough of trans people, it still seems pretty nuts to attribute the killing to "MAGA" doesn't it? Especially given the "fascist" bullet casing as well.
Although in the end, the most chilling thing isn't the killer, it's the thousands of progressives who have been openly celebrating the murder[1], just based on the fact that he disagreed with their beliefs.
[1] if you think I'm exaggerating, just watch the supercut of them in Sh0eonhead's latest video. It goes on for a long time.
Should Fox, Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones, Tucker, Bannon, the deputy director the the FBI (in a prior gig, to be fair), the president of the United States (current & prior gigs), members of congress, MAGA influencers like Tim Pool, the company paying Tim Pool, the people paying the company that pays Tim Pool, etc, etc, etc, and etc, be allowed to?
We really need to stop the cancelling of people for saying controversial, disagreeable and even deeply offensive things. I don't agree with what Kimmel said and I wouldn't have said it myself but it also wasn't outside the bounds of opinions which should be able to be expressed.
If you're nodding along in agreement, then you should also know my long-term commitment to consistency in tolerating factually wrong, distasteful, divisive and even hateful speech has also left me in the uncomfortable position of defending (at least in part) the right of Charlie Kirk, JK Rowling and many others I don't agree with to be heard without anyone calling for silencing them. I'm 100% supportive of disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking ideas we don't agree with but I draw a hard line at shouting down, deplatforming or canceling them. If you just stopped nodding along, and instead started coming up with reasons why Kimmel should be heard but Charlie Kirk shouldn't, then you might be part of the problem. IMHO, the only truly defensible ethical high-ground on this requires consistency regardless of the person, politics or offense their speech might cause.
What did he say, though? In the video he says that the killer is one of "them" (I'm not familiar enough to know who "them" are), and makes fun of Trump for apparently not caring at all.
What was the offensive or disagreeable part? Seems like standard satire to me.
People can cancel and boycott all they want, that’s not what this is. This is government censorship of an individual they want to punish which is not okay.
I’m not sure you’re ever going to get the smoking gun you’re looking for to make a conclusive statement here.
In lending, there’s a legal concept of disparate impact, which means even if your policy didn’t explicitly intend to harm this group of people, you implicitly / indirectly impacted them, and that also counts as a bad thing just like explicit impact.
Basically, you don’t have to prove intent, you only have to prove outcome.
…It was a roundabout analogy, but I think the same thing applies here. I don’t need the administration to say, “we did that because we don’t like him.” There is enough impact for me to conclude culpability, regardless of whether I can prove intent.
(Edit: maybe a better concept here is circumstantial evidence)
As a matter of consistency, did you also feel this way about the US and many foreign governments censoring (either directly or indirectly through social/media companies) those who spoke out against either the COVID response or the vaccines?
> Sorry but people are entitled to pressure other private citizens when they say disagreable things.
I said
> I'm 100% supportive of disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking ideas we don't agree with but I draw a hard line at shouting down, deplatforming or canceling them.
So we agree. What's there to be "Sorry" about?
> What First Amendment is trying to protect
My post doesn't mention the First Amendment or the troubling matter of the FCC chair comments about individual speech. I chose not to post about those because I wanted to focus on the other kind of free speech which doesn't involve the government or the First Amendment and isn't even a matter of law. It's about the morality and ethics of how consistently we as private citizens actively support fellow citizens we disagree with in being heard - even when they're offensive, hateful and wrong. It's about whether we should support or oppose private citizens canceling other citizens.
Frankly, I can't tell if we agree or not. I suspect it depends on exactly what you mean by the word "pressure". If "pressure" is limited to "disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking" then we are in total agreement. If "pressure" includes "shouting down, deplatforming or canceling" then you're a canceler and we disagree. If it includes wiggle room which might lead to silencing viewpoints you oppose, you're a closet canceler - in which case the vagueness of the term "pressure" and being "sorry" make more sense. On the other hand, if "pressure" includes opposing even those you agree with most the moment they want to silence those you disagree with (instead of debating and countering their bad, wrong ideas) - then we're soulmates.
> I chose not to post about those because I wanted to focus on the other kind of free speech which doesn't involve the government or the First Amendment and isn't even a matter of law. It's about the morality and ethics of how consistently we as private citizens...
That is what the GP took issue with and I do as well. The protection of free speech from government reprisal is a right in this country, and it has a certain meaning. Trying to equivocate it with your vision of civility and politeness only serves to muddy the waters when it comes to discourse about these issues. If the right wing has had its free speech (your definition) impinged by rational people before Trump took office again, then why wouldn't they be able to take away free speech (the constitutional definition) now?
I care deeply about protecting first amendment free speech and I'm troubled by the government's expanding encroachment on the first amendment, a concern which goes back at least six administrations. I've posted about it frequently. And I'm also concerned by the increasing weaponization of government and partisan lawfare. It's always been a regrettable part of politics but over the last 50 years the entrenchment of the two party duopoly has now led to escalating abuse by both parties.
Frankly, I'm fed up with so many on the right and the left selectively abusing both constitutional free speech rights and civil free speech culture when it's to their advantage and then suddenly caring about them again when either is turned against them. In the 1960s the left elevated the ideal of civil free speech culture by eloquently articulating why it's so important: the rights enshrined in our constitution are safest when also enshrined in our culture. And yet in the last 20 years many on the left rationalized selectively abandoning their decades-long commitment to both F1A rights and free speech culture. And as cancel culture became an epidemic of self-destructive purity spirals, the right suddenly decided they care passionately about free speech culture. Then when political partisans weaponized stringent enforcement of document marking and classification regulations against Trump, he cried "Lawfare" and bleated about the abuse of government power - only to then turn around and pioneer all-new tactics in retaliation. And yet almost no one on either side has shown any self-awareness of how their own side has abandoned any pretense of standing by a principle, if doing so would get in the way of retaliating or, conversely, playing the injured party. What a shit-show all around.
The reason I didn't focus on F1A is because this latest transgression isn't even a good F1A case. It's almost certainly not even enforceable. The FCC guy will just argue being interviewed on a podcast isn't an official act. IMHO, Kimmel was "canceled" off the air by right wing-leaning network affiliate owners because FCC guy's vague threat gave them a fig leaf of justification AND it's within their legal rights. I think it sucks they did that - just as much as it sucked when many on the left canceled right wing viewpoints - even though it was equally within their legal rights.
To me, this whole episode is just more tit-for-tat tactical partisan political point-scoring. The only part of this that's really worth focusing on is it was easier for Disney/ABC's management to cave to those right-leaning affiliate concerns (despite not being right-leaning themselves), in part, because our culture no longer values civil free speech as a moral/ethical standard. Nowadays, as long as it's arguably within your legal rights, canceling someone for saying things you don't like is no longer even considered "a shitty thing to do." Why? Because BOTH sides have now done it when it suited them and then rationalized their behavior. So yeah, it's instructive how many responses to my original post are from those who only want to focus on the F1A rights aspect of this regrettable shit show (despite it not even being a prosecutable transgression). And, wow... the euphemistic vagaries and rationalizations deployed to justify the moral ethics of censorious cancellation are inventive. So much dancing around the clear, bright-line distinction between passively "not having to listen to" disagreeable speech, and actively suppressing that speech (or cheering on those who suppress it). I actually take it as a good sign some still feel a bit uncomfortable just outright admitting they would actively ban even the possibility of other viewpoints ever being heard (presumably under the naive assumption such social, cultural or legal power would only ever be in the hands of
those they agree with). It's terribly sad that majorities on both sides seem to have abandoned civil free speech culture as even a principle worth selectively paying insincere lip-service to. It appears, as a society, we're actually choosing a Thunderdome brawl of discourse where it's acceptable for your "good side" to fight dirty, hit below the belt and even entirely silence their "bad side" by any means available: social, cultural, political, economic or legal - as long as you can technically skirt F1A prosecution. A very low bar indeed.
The head of the FCC isn't people. The recent Paramount merger was preceded by Paramount conceding multiple times to unreasonable demands by Trump personally. This is definitely abuse of power and official censorship.
> In this case, it is the FCC, an arm of the government, that is pressuring ABC to do this rather than other private citizens.
Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.
You can certainly speculate that the these affiliates had an ulterior motive in their actions to curry favor with the Trump administration, but it’s not unreasonable nor unheard of for station affiliates to make decisions about content and programming to avoid alienating or offending a large portion of the markets they serve or the advertisers that pay their bills.
In the end this is about eyeballs and advertising dollars and it’s no more nefarious than that.
> Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.
This is highly misleading: those affiliates were responding to government pressure. The FCC is currently making key decisions for at least one of them[1], following recent decisions by the same government to attack other media organizations, install government political officers at other companies, or forced other companies to provide money or ownership. There’s absolutely no way those decisions were not made without factoring the current environment in.
1. FCC Chairman Carr threatens licensed broadcasters (i.e. affiliates that have a license with the FCC) telling them they should stop running Kimmel and tell Disney they're doing it because the FCC may pull their license[1]
2. Nexstar, an affiliate broadcaster, issues a statement in response to Carr’s comments saying they're not going to broadcast Kimmel
> Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.
Brah.
Brendan Carr, the current head of the FCC publicly threatened to go after ABC for his speech, then ABC pulled the show.[1] Walks, talks, and acts likes government pressure being used for censorship against views they don’t agree with
Something called Nexstar, which owns a subset of ABC whatevers was maybe first? I stopped trying to understand it after a while; notably, the yahoo article which (I skimmed/searched before I came to HN) doesn't mention this I guess?
The key thing is that Nexstar’s owners are hoping to make a lot of money from a merger which the FCC is currently ruling on. That makes threats from the FCC considerably more real:
In fact, the affiliates are exactly who Brendan Carr threatened:
> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
> Carr suggested that the FCC could pursue news distortion allegations against local licensees.
> “Frankly I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say ’We are going to preempt — we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,’” he said. “It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage — to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future — isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”
(for those that don't know, ABC doesn't have an FCC license, broadcasting stations (affiliates) do, so that's exactly who he's using his unconstitutional leverage over)
Cool, so did the FCC apply pressure using government power in the attempt to achieve this situation?
Yes or no?
You don’t need to answer as that’s rhetorical. It’s obvious the answer is yes. Democratic governments try to avoid making public statements like that because the general public cannot tell if it was because of the government or a happy coincidence that the party being pressured just happened to comply. Because it can’t be discerned even the appearance of using government power like that degrades the rule of law
Carr is not “the FCC”. He’s the chairman, but he can’t act unilaterally to remove an affiliate broadcast license.
So “the FCC” did not apply pressure, the chairman did. He has a lot of influence and can set the agenda for the commission but he needs a majority of the commissioners to revoke a broadcast license. That is a super rare occurrence and would be unlikely.
Trump is different. He is the executive branch. He has the ability to EO change without anyone else having to agree before the fact. The FCC operates as a commission. The chairman might set the agenda, but the commission has to agree by majority. You could argue that he has great influence within the FCC, but he is not the FCC.
When you make the leap from Carr to “the FCC” it’s roughly like if Sen. John Thune said something and you attributed his words to “the senate”.
Court cases have established that you don't need actual action for a free speech violation to have occurred. The act of using your government position to pressure, coerce, or threaten people who are using speech you don't like is a violation of the Constitution, flat out.
Otherwise the protection of free speech means nothing, because politicians can merely threaten you all day but never pull the trigger on an obviously disallowed act while implying that you'll make trouble for involved actors which has a degree of separation, enough to avoid it being a direct cause and effect. And in this case Carr did exactly that by threatening to make trouble for affiliates like Nexstar -- as long as your threat has a material impact (like causing a company to adhere to the desired action to avoid further red tape in their acquisition approvals), it would be enough to quell constitutionally protected speech.
Yes the individual agents of any organization aren’t the entire organization themselves. However to argue that the agent of an organization acting under the color of their role in said organization doesn’t represent said organization, is some sort of “the card says moops” level of sophistry
It’s the FCC as long as he makes important decisions there. There is no way you can honestly say that he wouldn’t influence others there, and the businesses who are currently facing FCC approval would have to take that influence into consideration or ask whether the level of corruption on display isn’t unique to him.
Think about it this way: if a police officer came by your business and suggested that a donation to their annual ball might lead to faster response if you called 911, would you immediately conclude that the rest of the force would strongly condemn that appearance of corruption or would the mere fact that they were comfortable saying it make you worry that the sentiment was shared by other officers?
Part of what the current administration has been doing is normalizing levels of politicization and corruption which would previously have been unthinkable in modern America. Actions like this are considered in light of the broader context where the President is openly shaking down businesses and the AG has made it clear that they’re his personal lawyer first and the nation’s top law enforcement official only to the extent that it serves his goals.
Yes but you're not a mind reader and you don't know how much of his firing was due to government pressure vs a decision he was alienating half the country irreparably - and I'm curious to know why you didn't mention his ratings had been slipping. Surely that has some place in the discussion?
That’s probably why they didn’t put up a fight but it doesn’t cancel out the illegality of the threat. If the local mob boss shows up and says “nice business, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” that’s still extortion even if you decide it was losing money and walk away.
No. "If he were more profitable, his company would have spent money on a legal defense instead" is not a valid counterargument to "It is bad that the government threatened a company into cancelling a show because they criticized a friend of the regime."
It's completely unreasonable to believe that ABC's decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! was an independent one, especially given that Trump has publicly criticized Jimmy Kimmel on Truth Social and has a history of threatening people and organizations he dislikes with lawsuits and legal penalties. It's much more likely that ABC canceled him because they feared retaliation from Trump.
The threat against Australia was fascinating.. I guess Trump figured out "tariffs" is a big appendage like the one he never has, but now can swing around, and "you better be nice, or I'm going to do to your country what I did to the numerous amounts of women in my life...".
What’s not unreasonable is for a company look at the overall political climate of the country annd the markets they need and realize that it’s just not in favor for controversial lefty oriented late night content at this moment. The public outrage at the shooting. Watching poll numbers nose dive for the Democratic Party. Seeing some core political positions that your company embraced become anathematic to the general public. Then couple all that with a comedian with a late night show and an axe to grind with the president whose show was underperforming already…even worse than Colbert.
ABC may have feared retaliation from Trump, but I guarantee they fear retaliation from their viewers and advertisers even more. This was a good excuse to get rid of a loose cannon whose useful shelf life was already up and try to gain some goodwill among a large group of people who are ready to write you off.
That does makes sense considering the profile of the average person who still watches broadcast tv these. There is simply no demand for non-garbage content there.
> You can certainly speculate that the these affiliates had an ulterior motive in their actions to curry favor with the Trump administration, ...
I don't know what "ulterior motive" would mean. Businesses have no choice but to deal with real threats, that isn't a hidden agenda. And I wouldn't refer to bending to demands, as a means of damage control under duress, as "currying favor".
I would consider "favor curriers" to be those that align themselves with administration excesses, in hope of favors, without duress being a factor.
This is now a business reality: a US administration that loudly broadcasts its successful use of corrupted leverage against law firms, media companies, universities, tech companies, and others it wishes to bow the knee.
Even if we conjecture the same decisions might have been made in healthier times, for whatever reasons, the unlawful pressure still shades the decisions made in this reality.
Just because someone is allowed to freely express themselves doesn’t mean I have to support a platform for them to do it on. They can have their platform with their supporters, it doesn’t mean that the hateful rhetoric have to be constantly shoved in my face at a public level. And that the public has to constantly debate it. That is what cancelling is. No one wants to hear the hate.
No one has died from being cancelled so spare everyone the pity story.
If you want to spend your time defending JK Rowling, that’s on you. It doesn’t make you a hero for making sure people fully understand precisely what kind of a bigot JK Rowling is.
What is deplatforming if not a group of people choosing to ignore that person? It is not fair that you get to decide at what level ignoring another is okay. Deplatforming and cancelling are just methods of taking away easy access to a platform for hateful bad faith arguments. Those affected by it can still can go build their own platform to host that rhetoric (Trump has done this with Truth social).
You disagree with what Kimmel said? Don't we usually read the articles on this site?
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," Kimmel said. "In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving."
That's not only not offensive, it's just flat true. Tyler Robinson is a far right extremist, which is also what many members of MAGA are, and yet we still see Republicans such as Utah's governor claiming that he's a leftist.
Furthermore, this is the FCC demanding a show be removed from the air because a comedian was commenting on what politicians are doing. Even if what Kimmel said were flatly not factual and flatly offensive, the FCC should still not be doing that. Jumping straight to "remove from the air" is an absurd and indefensible overreach.
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There's nothing in the clip, that the YouTuber didn't up and spin it all right around, replacing the use of Kimmel's term "Maga Gang" with "the Left" instead.
Lol, yes. I don't want one thing, therefore I must want the complete opposite. Can you imagine for a second that I just want for the things people say to actually be consistent, rational, and defensible? No, I hate far-left talking heads just as much as I hate people like Steven Crowder. I hate them because they don't advance the conversation and their entire livelihood depends on misrepresentation and attention seeking.
There is no defensible argument that Jimmy Kimmel should have his TV show suspended based on the comments he made in that monologue.
Its 10 times easier to find the clip immediately from the right-aligned youtube channels. The left will not even get the clip out.
Since you brought up something about Crowder being hated by a huge percentage of the population, which was a quip that had no relevance - I decided to give you a quip that had no relevance.
But the basic reason that he should be cancelled is the following:
If Congresswoman Omar was assassinated and it turns out to be a far-right maniac, then the right, far right and moderates will all tell you - he was a far right maniac and it has to stop.
The left is basically saying I hate Charlie Kirk he deserved to die, and by the way it was your own guy.
I get that Kimmel did not say the first thing, but he repeated an extremely dis-proven concept that the shooter was right wing.
He was dating a trans person, the bullets had markings bella ciao (that was also sung in disrespect at CK vigils by the way) and his dad and other family members have confirmed he was radicalized left.
If top-level people on the left refuse to acknowledge this, it's pure lies and fake news and needs to be cancelled.
> Crowder being hated by a huge percentage of the population, which was a quip that had no relevance
The man makes a living by antagonizing people who don't hold his views, and that's not relevant to how effective he will be at making a reasonable argument?
> The left is basically saying I hate Charlie Kirk he deserved to die, and by the way it was your own guy.
No, the "left" is not saying this. You're assuming it. For any such over-the-top comment you find on Xitter, or wherever, one can easily find an equally over-the-top right-leaning comment. What does this say? That maybe social media isn't the best way to discover what the average person actually thinks.
> He was dating a trans person, the bullets had markings bella ciao (that was also sung in disrespect at CK vigils by the way) and his dad and other family members have confirmed he was radicalized left.
All relevant details that make it hard to pin this entirely on the far-right. But he was also raised in a MAGA, gun-toting family. That makes it hard to pin this entirely on the far-left. Did his personal background make it easier for him to resort to gun violence to make his point? Could it be that his conservative family are disgusted by his relationship with a transgender person, and might choose to cast his views as being "radical left" so as to avoid any embarrassment to themselves? Yes, all these things could be. And we may know more in the days to come. For now, nobody knows. And it's very hard for liberal-minded people to feel like emphasizing the shooter's left-leaning political views isn't a veiled call to retaliatory violence from political leaders that thrive off of conflict.
> The left is basically saying I hate Charlie Kirk he deserved to die
While I'm sure you can dredge up quotes to support that world-view of "the left", the people I've talked to are actually more annoyed that he's dead because his methods in debating 20 year old college students with no experience in debate was starting to unravel, but as he's dead, we won't know how that would have played out, and now he's a martyr. The real question is, where are the Epstein files?
He's a comedian talking shit to power. Power shouldn't be able to cancel his show. That whole first amendment thing? Not the letter of the law, but the spirit of it. We can design an inordinately complex set of rules on what people are allowed to say in the wake of defining moments, and we can even believe that we're being logical and reasonable, but at the end of the day, the first amendment is dead.
No, they requested a first-hand source. i.e. just the clip of Kimmel.
Might be shocking to some but it’s quite possible for a source to be neither terminally online far right nor terminally online far left. Incredible, I know.
His show was cancelled 8 months after that remark, after viewership and ad sales declined. It was not requested by the Bush administration. It doesn't seem too similar to me.
There are parallels. Most Americans were united after 9/11 so they might not have noticed but there was an incredible chilling effect on free speech after 9/11.
I am no fan of Jimmy's show but this seems out of line. My tinfoil hat thinks this might be a way for Sinclair to "justly" remove a show that has been loosing ratings by riding the popular wave and saving some face.
That data appears to be nonsense based on "online audience engagement," not viewership. According to that very source, Jimmy Kimmel is the #6 tv show as of today!
Wow, I will have to check out his comments. All around me everyone is becoming more anonymous on social media, if not deleting it. It is fascinating to see the cultural reverberations of this motivated killing!
FCC aside, how is it any different from ABC canceling Rosanne Barr because of something she said? They may cancel whomever and whatever they want, which in the past has been due to pressure from the outside, justified or not.
> FCC aside, how is it any different from ABC canceling Rosanne Barr because of something she said? They may cancel whomever and whatever they want, which in the past has been due to pressure from the outside, justified or not.
You are trying to draw a conclusion from the information available, and then you ask: What if I ignore the central piece of evidence?
Excuse me? "pressure from the outside" in this case is a government regulator. Furthermore, ABC wants pending mergers approved by this administration. We don't notice the huge, gaping difference?
The first amendment of our Constitution explicitly protects against the government as the censor. The head of the FCC going on Fox to call for it, is an overreach. You do realize the FCC is part of the executive branch, right?
But it’s not just the government even assuming your comment about the first amendment is correct. Sinclair + Nexstar are about 80% of the stations and they both refused to carry it, so there’s a financial component. I believe their affiliates were the first to cancel even before the FCC comments. Why should ABC lose 80% of their income.
There is no real engagement with your core point. What you are going to see is an evolutionary approach to finding which message is the most able to defuse umbrage, and further right leaning interests.
If it’s useful to argue for free speech in one breath, then for censorship in the next, followed by “its just words” - it will be argued in that order.
The utility function is politics, not reason or logic. Getting people to engage, and get tied up in the logic, is a feature not a bug. It wastes energy and creates the impression that this is an issue resolved with words and understanding.
The first amendment protects speech from government repercussion. So aside from the threat of government repercussion, yeah, I also totally don't see how this is a first amendment issue.
'Other than the government pressure, from the head of the agency that has direct oversight and is currently deciding on a huge FCC exemption request and who stated we can do this the hard way or the easy way when it came to punishing Jimmy Kimmel....'
ABC was certainly complicit in what Jimmy Kimmel was doing. But they are now throwing Jimmy under the bus.
Jimmy was wrong to say what he said. At best it was a bad-faith assertion, at worst it was propaganda. It wasn’t even true, or likely to be true given what we knew.
The fact is that someone is dead. That is the strongest form of censorship. That is the strongest attack on “free speech”.
Jimmy pulled indefinitely? In my opinion it’s unfair. ABC is not innocent here.
But at least Jimmy didn’t have a bullet put into his neck.
> 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
Which is factual. It does not make assertions about Mr. Robinson. It represents a factual observation that many of the "MAGA gang" are attempting to distance themselves.
Ah but you see theres the rub. It’s not factual. It’s almost all supposition. I don’t think he should be pulled from the air by the way. Let’s go line by line.
> We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately -snip-
Pretty loaded statement. Desperately? On what basis?
The “fact” is that MAGA didn’t have the slightest fear the shooter was one of them. They all assumed he wasn’t bc it made the most sense given context and available evidence.
Anger? Sure. Desperation? No lol.
> trying to characterize this kid
That shooter is 22. That’s a full blown adult. Calling him a kid is not only false but also gross in this context. It’s an attempt to evoke sympathy for a murderer.
> as anything other than one of them
Another false supposition. They are actually trying to characterize him as a far left nutjob. Not just “anything”, but “Liberal”. The thing about propaganda is certain words aren’t allowed in certain contexts.
Second, it implies the shooter was likely one of them which was highly improbable to all concerned — most especially to MAGA.
> and doing everything they can to score political points for it
What political points Jimmy? It’s more likely they are just upset that a good friend got shot and killed in broad daylight for speaking his views. Charlie Kirk was a huge ally of MAGA and a friend to many of them. So they want justice.
Of course Jimmy can’t say that (propaganda has rules), so here he is acting saying it’s about vague political points (sounds convincing) and not genuine grief/outrage.
> Pretty loaded statement. Desperately? On what basis?
If you have watched any of the coverage, desperately is correct. Anecdotally, many conservatives on social media practically celebrated when the bullet cases were found with memes that could suggest the shooter was "left wing". How much coverage and how fast did that news spread?
> The “fact” is that MAGA didn’t have the slightest fear the shooter was one of them
MAGA is not a hive mind. You should not pretend that they are a unified entity. Many individuals did, because there has been more extremist right wing violence against moderate right wingers. Given the shooter was experienced with firearms, it certainly made things foggy.
> That shooter is 22. That’s a full blown adult.
Depends on who you ask. Car rental companies would disagree with you.
> Second, it implies the shooter was likely one of them which was highly improbable to all concerned
You clearly have not heard of Nick Fuentes.
> What political points Jimmy?
Now you're just making bad faith arguments. "We are under attack" is the political points they want to score. You don't have to be that clever to figure it out.
I'm of two minds on this, I think all comedians should be able to make fun of anything, but at the same time, just because you have the right to free speech doesn't mean you get to avoid the consequences of what you say. Whether I agree with the outcome or not, if ABC don't like what Jimmy Kimmel said, they are free to pull his show off the air and fire him all they want, Kimmel is not entitled or owed TV time nor is ABC required to broadcast his show. But, by the same token, ABC must then be willing to accept the consequences of doing that and any bad PR that comes from it.
That all being said, what I don't like is that even if ABC execs decided that they found what Kimmel said distasteful or offensive, this still looks an awful lot like acting out of fear of a president who famously is very spiteful to anyone who says anything bad about him.
It was the CEO of Disney and it happened after threats from the head of the FCC.
Edit: to clarify, the CEO of Disney caved to pressure from affiliates owned by a Nexstar who are actively petitioning the FCC to relax media ownership rules so they can buy more affiliates than the law allows.
Not even just that, the FCC chair directly threatened ABC's broadcast license if they didn't do something about Kimmel.
If that's not infringing on first amendment rights, I don't know what is. The right will of course support this; they tend to treat the constitution and laws as flexible whenever their ideology requires it.
Keep in mind that Kimmel has been hinting about retiring for a couple years now, his contract was up in the air, the "late night television show" category is evaporating (if there's still even a Tonight Show in 10 years, it'll be purely for nostalgia), and this sends Kimmel out in a blaze of glory.
I think it's too easy to sort of anthropomorphize these kinds of conflicts --- Kimmel's show has a large staff, and he's responsible for their livelihoods --- but it wouldn't be totally out of the question that Kimmel steered right into this.
There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances. Maher wound up at HBO. Kimmel will wind up on a podcast, and, like Conan, probably gain in relevance.
Moments later
I think some people here might be too young to immediately get the Maher reference, but the point there was: he was forced off the air for political reasons as well.
I don't know that the FCC is what is scaring anyone so much as the FTC/DOJ; Nexstar, the largest local affiliate operator in the country, is working on a huge merger, and pulled Kimmel independently. I'm sure they're all getting galactic-scale complaints about this.
I get why this is all activating and like I guess I agree, it's obviously bad, but it's also really stupid. These are programs written for middle-aged suburban professionals that air primarily to elderly customers who still watch linear television. Kimmel would have drastically more reach on an indie show online (who would you rather be, just in terms of reach, Kimmel or Hinchcliffe?).
The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air. Late-night hosts getting fucked over for crossing the interests of their corporate owners is a very old story; one of the great sitcoms of all time is based entirely off the premise (in fact, two of the great sitcoms of all time are).
Kimmel's got a good writing team. He's talented. He should have gotten off this dead time slot a long time ago.
This isn't at all about Kimmel though. This is about giving the administration a free win and a continual slide into more censorship (voluntary or not) and authoritarianism. This will egg them on even more.
Who cares about Kimmel.
You think they will stop at television? They'll deplatform people on the alternate media next, YouTube, Twitch, Kick, etc. They've already started to look at Twitch this very week.
Will you even notice when your train has arrived at the Gulag?
I think it is a reference to your very noticeable habit of downplaying, "yes, but"-ting, "well, actually"-ing and generally minimizing the country's rapid descent into fascism. There are numerous examples of this, but even in just this thread, you draw a false analogy between Maher's cancellation (months after his remarks, following an advertiser boycott) and Kimmel's (immediately following a direct order from a government official).
I didn't think that was particularly abstruse, but sure, I thought your reply was missing the forest for the trees and you seemed oblivious or blasé at the rather obvious slippery slope ahead, if you can even call it that by now.
You acknowledged it was bad (sorta, kinda), but the rest is IMO completely irrelevant. "Galactic-scale complaints" or not (we don't know), the head of the FCC appearing on Benny Johnson's podcast threatening to pull their broadcast licence (he probably could not) is unprecedented. And one can wonder how many of the aforementioned complaints his comments incited.
I just want to understand the writing. What's the supposed scenario where my "train" pulls up at the "gulag" and what is it I'm supposed to be noticing or not? Did you make this up or is this an idiom somewhere? I couldn't find it on Google.
Gulag, the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union? It's a metaphor (I hope) of the plunge into authoritarianism and you seeming to downplay it, and if you're not paying attention now, you might find yourself there and wondering how the hell you got there.
I think I was pretty clear that I understood the gist of what they were saying ("you're not taking this as seriously as I think you should"), but that I was curious about what the actual writing meant. The writing, at least, was interesting.
> I don't know that the FCC is what is scaring anyone so much as the FTC/DOJ
Sure, but shouldn't we continue to call out the fact that this administration is wielding power to censor? I do agree with you that late-night talk shows are a dying format, and maybe Kimmel would have been out (for whatever reasons, perhaps his own) in the next year or so, but to me, that's besides the point.
That is a stretch, "similar" is a better characterization. The Wikipedia article says he made the comments days after 9/11, and advertisers withdrew and the show suffered as a result, but the show wasn't cancelled until the following June.
> There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances
Leaving aside "similar things have happened before, therefore we shouldn't care about things" nihilist take, this doesn't even appear to be true.
I don't remember the firing that well, but looking it up now, ABC didn't renew his contract, which meant he was kept on the air for another 9 months after he made his comments just 6 days after 9/11. This was also several months after the Sinclair Broadcast Group stopped showing the show on their affiliates.
So not at all similar to the "snap to attention" apparently here.
The actual guideline is “there is a convention on HN of asking users not to use quotation marks to make it look like they're quoting someone when they're actually not.” That clearly didn’t happen here because the commenter indicated what you literally said with ‘>’ and then put their paraphrase underneath it in quotation marks. No-one would have mistaken it for a literal quote.
If you think your position was misunderstood then that’s that’s the real issue, not punctuation usage. IMO it would be better addressed by engaging with the substance of the post (including the salient point that the Maher case is not comparable) rather finding some technical violation of HN common law to pick at. I’m sure there’s also a guideline against derailing substantive discussions into irrelevant picking over minor guidelines.
I don't really understand the problem since you can read the comment and see it's not a quote, but I agree that you've proven it's a policy. Written English might benefit from a special syntax to denote something not intended to be a literal quote, but I guess writing "(paraphrased)" (not quoting you here) would suffice.
Edit: Funnily enough, I can't actually find this policy in the guideline. I see now that dang said it's actually not a guideline but telling people not to do it anyway is apparently a thing, which I find really fucking weird. Also funny that the same 'quote as framing' device (which I'm now avoiding) is used to paraphrase a position in the guidelines!
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I guess I'm pointing out that there are blessed uses of quotes aside from direct quotations and I don't understand why this particular thing has carve outs as being bad.
I wonder if, from a staffing perspective, it's actually easier to cancel a show under these circumstances than through a more traditional cancellation process.
While the reasons you list reduce the cost to ABC for cancelling Kimmel, it is no less outrageous and alarming that the current administration forced Kimmel out because of his criticism of the government.
Maher, like the Dixie Chicks and Garofalo, criticized a deeply popular war (regardless of what you think of it) and were ostensibly cancelled pre-cancellation era. The government didn't issue a statement through a right-wing podcast stating that the network better toe the line or get it's affiliate license revoked.
You are right, this has happened before. This is far more like the purges of the red scare. People were just (perhaps naively) hoping society had progressed from where we were ~70 years ago.
All that's probably true, but the average person thinks Trump single-handedly accomplished this. Annoying because he certainly contributed, but he's not the sole reason.
so far it seems the kid is friendly to trans, and loves guns, which fits neither lefty or maga labels. rushing to conclusion seems peak american idiocracy
Not sure we can confidently state how the shooter feels about firearms one way or the other at this time. As of right now, we know the rifle used in the murder was an x/years_old family heirloom that was given to the suspect as a gift but the police have not shared anything substantive beyond those details.
We are likely to hear more about the shooters position on firearms at a more granular scale at trial as prosecutors build a profile of Robinson that will be presented to the jury.
Violent crimes are generally impulsive - the accessibility of the firearm absolutely lent itself to the murder occurring but being in possession of a rifle, in general, doesn't offer much genuine insight beyond speculation.
The desire to not catch a (arguably deserved in some individual cases) bullet is an incredibly unifying sentiment on both sides of the isle and between the elected officials, the permanent bureaucracy and those aspiring to be either.
It just baffles me that people think they can say things that "turn up the heat" or "endorse the furtherance of current trends" and not expect some part of system (including big companies that more or less operate at the pleasure of regulators/government) to turn right back around and attack them.
I'm not saying I expect everyone to be as jaded as me, but know where your pay comes from.
Edit: Looks like Kimmel didn't say anything specific endorsing it and my last sentence was accurate more than I wanted it to be.
Call me old fashioned, but I do expect for things like this not to happen in an open, democratic society whose founding document explicitly declares free speech to be sacrosanct.
Update: "things like this" is meant to refer to the act of suspending Kimmel's show in response to the specific, rather innocuous, comments he made in his monologue
Kimmel didn't endorse the shooting. At "worst", he sorta-but-not-directly suggested that the shooter was a member of the MAGA crowd. Which he might have been; it's still quite unclear what his politics were. (And plenty of right-wing personalities on the internet had criticized Kirk in the past, so it's not like Kirk was universally beloved on the right.)
Kimmel didn’t even criticise Kirk. He’s a mainstream TV comedian and nothing he said “turned up the heat”.
The reality is very simple: Nexstar wants federal approval for a merger. They know engaging in this censorship increases the likelihood of their merger being approved. So you’re exactly as jaded as you should be, just with the wrong target.
Nah, reality is even simpler than your conspiracy. These late night guys are money losers and they are looking for a reason to drop them. The fact that they nightly insult 80 million potential viewers with their arrogant and unneeded leftist opinions is bad for business. It doesn’t matter how Jimmy and his leftist writer feel, that’s their business they should keep out of the job. They need to maximize shareholder value by putting on the best show possible.
ABC, who pays Kimmel, would be financially very, dis-served to have the FCC or IRS or any other big bit of government up their ass, even if it does ultimately come to nothing.
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.