You might never have heard, if you live in the UK, of the American comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. It’s likely that the name of the US ultra-conservative Charlie Kirk was unfamiliar, too, until his assassination last week.
But in the wake of his murder – shot through the neck as he addressed an open-air audience of students at Utah Valley University – political confrontations have erupted that threaten shocking consequences for life not only in the US but in Britain, too.
Kirk’s supporters, in the pro-Trump Maga movement, are seizing the woke Left’s favourite methods for silencing opponents. This week, Kimmel was suspended from his own TV show on the Disney-owned ABC network, and effectively cancelled for making odious statements about Kirk’s killing.
Last Monday, the 57-year-old, who has hosted the Oscars ceremony four times, sneered about the aftermath of the shooting: ‘The Maga Gang is desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.’
He seemed to be saying that, far from being a radical liberal obsessed with trans rights, the alleged murderer Tyler Robinson, 22, was a Trump supporter. It’s a squalid, cynical claim, bizarrely at odds with Kimmel’s initial reaction on social media, when he deplored the killing and sent ‘love’ to Kirk’s bereaved family.
But perhaps his real offence was to mock Donald Trump’s reaction to the death. The President, he said, seemed more interested in discussing an extension being built to the White House.
‘This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,’ mocked the comic.
By Wednesday night, Kimmel was off the air indefinitely, and Trump was gloating on social media: ‘The ratings-challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.’
Jimmy Kimmel mocked the way President Donald Trump mourned Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last week. His show, the Jimmy Kimmel Show, has subsequently been cancelled
I despise Kimmel’s unfounded implication that Kirk’s murderer was a Right-winger. Professional broadcasters ought to respect the facts, not stir up unfounded conspiracy theories.
But it is deeply disturbing to see a popular TV personality silenced for his opposition to the government. That goes to the heart of everything I hold most valuable.
When I was growing up under the Communist regime in Hungary, we spoke two languages – what we believed, and what we were permitted to say.
At home or among close and trusted friends, I could speak honestly, from the heart. In public, where a word out of place could see my family marked down for surveillance by the secret police, or even thrown into jail, I was much more guarded.
My father had strong principles and a big mouth, and he would often go beyond the limits of what could safely be said. That shaped not only my political beliefs but my whole personality. I will fight to my last breath to ensure my family and friends never have to submit to the oppressive rule of twin public and private languages.
But the rise of cancel culture in the West, fuelled by the dogmatic, intolerant Left, spells the end for free speech. I continue to say whatever I believe but, for the past ten years, this has been increasingly regarded as inflammatory.
At dinner parties, my wife will rap my ankle with her foot to send a message. It happened just the other day, when I worked up a head of steam about self-righteous vegans – Ann gave me a poke under the table, to let me know I was in danger of going too far.
I respect her wisdom, but I also believe fervently that we should all be free to ‘go too far’, providing we are not inciting violence. Anything else is fair comment.
Charlie Kirk was fatally shot last week while speaking at Utah Valley University
Sometimes my views are so outspoken that opponents have accused me of the crime of ‘hate speech’. I do not accept that any such crime exists. I do hate many things – political oppression and intellectual dishonesty, for instance – and if that offends other people, I don’t care. Real freedom in the West is, to me, the freedom to say whatever we believe.
The Left disavowed that freedom when they started policing our opinions, jokes and even our thoughts. Academics were hounded out of posts for stating obvious biological facts about the differences between men and women; celebrities dropped from the TV schedules for objecting to Covid vaccines or supporting Brexit.
Cancel culture took such hold on politics that police patrolling a Black Lives Matter demonstration went down on one knee in front of the protesters, rather than risk denunciation.
Until now, we have relied on the Right to defend the basics of free speech. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel marks a dangerous new trend. Cancellation is such a powerful weapon that it appears Trump and his supporters have decided to adopt it.
Kimmel is not the only victim. Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s foremost allies in the Republican party, has called for an Oxford student to be expelled for his comments about Kirk’s assassination.
George Abaraonye, the 21-year-old president-elect of the prestigious Oxford Union, texted, ‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f*****g go!’ – a Gen Z cry of celebration. The fact that Abaraonye had met and debated with Kirk at the university only weeks earlier made an obnoxious sentiment more shocking still.
But if that’s genuinely how he feels, he should have the right to say so.
Personally, I don’t see how he can remain the president of the world’s foremost student debating chamber, a haven of free speech, if he appears to endorse the murder of his political opponents. But he should not be expelled – or ‘sent down’, in Oxford parlance.
The idea that a promising young man should have his education cut short at the behest of a politician thousands of miles away, is far more offensive.
The new eagerness of the Right to indulge in ‘offence archaeology’, another Left-wing invention, is also troubling. This involves trawling through years of throwaway comments on social media and in private messages to find damning evidence against political opponents.
Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former ambassador to the US, is the latest victim – his career ended by ill-judged emails he sent to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein nearly 20 years ago.
Make no mistake, I detest Mandelson, and there are no words strong enough to describe my loathing of that creature Epstein. But when decades-old communications are dredged up to crucify political enemies, I cannot help remembering life under Communism. And I shudder.
Divisions in the culture wars are now so deep that those on both sides are unable to see their opponents as human. Jimmy Kimmel could not have mocked the death of Charlie Kirk, no matter how wide the gulf between them, if he had remembered this was a real human being, whose young widow and fatherless children now mourn him.
Free speech means the right to disparage and satirise the beliefs of our enemies, while never forgetting the fact that we’re all human – all the same, under the skin. Lose that, and we lose everything.
- Professor Frank Furedi is the director of the think-tank MCC Brussels
