There’s an ongoing debate, happening almost exclusively on the far left, about whether or not Jimmy Kimmel even said what everyone else thinks he said. Rolling Stone is leading this charge.
“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 said during his monologue on Monday.
Kimmel’s slightly ambiguous comments came after conservatives spent the weekend blaming the left and transgender people for Kirk’s killing. At the time, the public knew little about the alleged shooter’s motives. Prosecutors disclosed on Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, told his trans roommate and apparent romantic partner, “I had enough of his hatred.”…
While there’s some room for disagreement about what Kimmel meant or was trying to say, he did not actually say on ABC that the alleged killer was a MAGA member, as the right would have you believe.
This is apparently the exact defense that Kimmel himself was planning to use on Wednesday night. It was after learning about his plan to defend his comments as being taken out of context that the suits at Disney decided to pull his show indefinitely.
But most people, even most people on the left, have been more honest about what Kimmel seemed to be saying. Here’s Vox, definitely not a right-wing outlet, description of what got Kimmel in trouble:
Kimmel’s downfall began with some admittedly ill-advised speculation in Monday’s monologue: “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.”
At the time, the evidence suggested the shooter very likely was not a MAGA believer (and evidence released the next day showed that he almost certainly was on the political left).
This is pretty similar to what Brian Stelter said on CNN (see here).
Kimmel was expressing what we’ve heard some other liberals say in recent days that the motives are unclear and that maybe the suspect in this case was a Republican or was some sort of far right fringe figure. Of course, there has been a lot of discussion about that in recent days. There’s a lot of evidence pointing in other directions about the suspect, but Kimmel was on the air talking about this, making a very serious commentary amid his jokes in his monologue Monday night.
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people on the left at least understood what it was people on the right were reacting to. It wasn’t Kimmel’s flat joke about Trump’s stages of grief, it was the suggestion that the killer was right wing.
And for the record, as someone who followed this very closely, that was not a close call as of Monday afternoon when Kimmel recording his remarks. It was already clear from several sources that the shooter had expressed anti-Trump and anti-Kirk commentary. Also it was widely known that he was in a relationship with a trans person and by Sunday Axios was reporting that people close to the investigation believed his views on trans issues might be the key to his motive.
You can argue that it wasn’t as clear Monday as it would become after the charging document was published Tuesday, but if you were paying attention as of Sunday, all of the evidence seemed to be lining up in one direction.
And yet, polling shows that as of last weekend, a plurality of Democrats believed Kirk’s shooter was right-wing. And that raises an interesting question. Where did Jimmy Kimmel in particular get that idea? Nate Silver talked through that today at his site.
Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, appeared to confess to the murder in Discord chats. While Robinson’s motivations seem somewhat confused, as is often the case with assassins, and while we should approach any reporting on this topic with caution, the notion that Robinson was some sort of “Groyper” who killed Kirk because Kirk was too liberal appears to be wrong. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Robinson wrote to his roommate, whom Utah governor Spencer Cox described as “a romantic partner, a male transitioning to female.” (I mention that just because high levels of trans acceptance typically isn’t a MAGA trait.) Kimmel has reportedly been obstinate in refusing to correct the record.
So where was Kimmel getting this from? Well, maybe from Bluesky. Or (gulp) maybe from Substack. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out, Heather Cox Richardson, the author of the #1 U.S. politics newsletter Letters from an American, wrote this weekend that Robinson “appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Richardson presented no evidence for this; it’s wishful thinking at best. But really, it’s just a falsehood; like Fleisher, I’ll be polite and not use the term “lie” just because I don’t know what’s in Richardson’s head.
I’m not looking to pick a fight with Richardson (I know some of you subscribe to her) or Kimmel. But the progressive epistemic bubble is getting really bad. Maybe not worse than the MAGA bubble — but bad, and progressives often rationalize bad behavior by saying whatever the other side is doing is worse. This has already had serious consequences, such as denialism about Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition last year, which they blamed on unfair media coverage. Kimmel is a relatively mainstream figure, so if this sort of misinformation about Robinson is making its way to him — and in scripted remarks, not off-the-cuff comments like Dowd’s — that suggests the bubble is expanding, slowly devouring the reality-based community, and that formerly rational commentators have trouble escaping it once they’re past the event horizon.
That Gabe Fleisher post he mentions is worth looking at.
After quoting Republicans who had blamed the political left for Kirk’s assassination, Richardson writes:
But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.
I’m always hesitant to use the word “lie,” because it’s a word that purports to know what’s in someone’s head (i.e. that they know what they are saying is not true). So, instead, I’ll just say that Richardson’s statement here is extremely, extremely incorrect…
If anything, by the time Richardson hit “publish,” an official, reliable source had already indicated the exact opposite. “It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — a moderate Republican who has been praised by the left and right for his response to Kirk’s shooting — told the Wall Street Journal in an article published early Saturday.
Perhaps strangest of all was her claim that Robinson disliked Kirk for being insufficiently radical. As Fleisher points out, that was pure fantasy.
Richardson goes on to support her statement by saying that he is a “young white man” (which, of course, does not tell us his politics) “from a Republican, gun enthusiast family” (it’s true that his parents were Republicans and had photographed him with guns, but this also tells us nothing about the son’s politics) “who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical” (a statement for which there is zero evidence).
I pointed out some of the people who were spreading this particular fantasy on Bluesky and X here. Keith Olbermann, David Shuster, Jemele Hill and many others were pushing this hard all weekend (I also mentioned Heather Cox Richardson.)
As Nate Silver says, this was exactly the sort of online nonsense that the left routinely labels misinformation, but only when it comes from the right. In this case, Jemele Hill deleted her tweet on Bluesky but Olbermann and Shuster have not and, so far as I know, Heather Cox Richardson also hasn’t issued a correction.
There was never any proof any of this was true but I guess enough people on Bluesky were all agreeing with the same false claims that Jimmy Kimmel thought he was safe repeating it in his monologue.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth because, as mentioned above, Kimmel planned to double down and claim he was taken out of context. So, in his mind, he never said the thing that almost everyone thinks he said.
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