Jimmy Is Back!

Humor is free speech, along with all of it

This afternoon, ABC and Disney decided to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel Live. They had spent the last few days in discussions with Kimmel and agreed to put his show back on air. According to The NY Times , they had suspended his show out of concern for the monologue he intended to deliver the night after he spoke about Kirk’s alleged killer (Kimmel was not disrepectful of Kirk). ABC had worried at the time that any further comments from Jimmy would be incendiary.

Yesterday, extreme right conservatives, MAGA, along with key players in Trump’s administration, gathered at a memorial for slain right wing conservative activist and provocateur Kirk. Full disclosure, I did not watch it, but read it was a who’s who of of radical Christian conservatives and a made-for-tv demonstration of those far right values.

Trump seeks to solidify his base, and then some, in order to consolidate power before the midterms next year. It is a race against the clock to build this mass of support before Americans really realize how bad Trump’s policies and economic decisions are. Trump is basically a figure-head, being used out the architects of Project 2025 to read scripts and display his “charm” to keep his followers engaged.

John Chait of the Atlantic writes that Trump claims that the media is an extension of the Democratic left, and hence “unfair” in his estimation. In fact, Fox News has been a very obvious extension of the Republican Party, and the MAGA administration, for years.

This past week of scrambling about free speech makes it clear how delusional Trump is and how little he seems to understand that free speech means ALL speech is free, even if it is negative towards him or negative towards the left. Even hate speech is free. Humor is free, even if you hate the joke(s). Trump ran his presidential campaign in part on “bringing back” free speech (it hadn’t gone anywhere), claiming he himself had been a victim of censorship. Which was of course not true.

But the organization that Kirk founded, Turning Point USA, and which his widow now heads up, is about censoring voices the radical right doesn’t agree with. Turning Point USA maintains a list of professors they think share ideas they don’t like, and their list is on their website. This has led to followers harassing and sending death threats to many of those individuals. Kirk, who was known for making statements that were often criticized as racist, antisemitic and sexist, said he was a proponent of free speech because he held the now well know interactive “conversations” in public with college students. From the NY Times:

“The American Association of University Professors, an organization founded to defend academic freedom, said it was aware of retaliation against about 60 professors and teachers in connection with critical comments they made about Mr. Kirk or people mourning him. Faculty First Responders, an organization that works with the association to advise educators who are the victim of doxxing and harassment campaigns, has reached out to 35 academic workers in the past week, most of them professors, whose comments about Mr. Kirk have been spread in right-wing media, according to Heather Steffen, the group’s director.“

The strategy has the endorsement of the Trump Administration. Vance said recently on Fox News that while the First Amendment protects “very ugly speech,” he added, “If you are a university professor who benefits from American tax dollars, you should not be celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and if you are, maybe you should lose your job or your university should face a loss of funding.”

@jamellebouiewhen you understand that what a lot of "free speech warriors" want is actually deferential speech — plus the right to say slurs — then their indifference to this administration's active assault on speech makes total sense.

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I wanted to share some things that Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday:

“Trump wants to use the power of the government to punish those he considers his enemies. As Joyce White Vance puts it: “[L]et’s be clear about what Trump wants. He wants to turn us into a banana republic where the ability to prosecute people becomes a political tool in the hands of the president. That means he wants to exercise the ultimate power to put down any opposition to his rule.”

I am very glad that Jimmy Kimmel is back, I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

Hope you all are well, enjoying the start of your week. Hang in there! We are in this together, keep the faith. I am so happy that you are here.