Kimmel’s late night show was canceled after he said in his opening monologue this week that Trump supporters in the MAGA movement were “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.”
Not only was the remark untrue, but it also implied that the killer was, in fact, a Trump supporter.
That may not have been the worst thing anyone has said about the Charlie Kirk assassination — but it was still disgusting.
Democrats have almost uniformly condemned the murder, and rejected political violence — which is welcome.
But many have also said deeply offensive things about Kirk, with some implying he was responsible in some way for his own death.
Because Kimmel said it on broadcast television, his remarks reached a wider audience, and were also vulnerable to FCC regulations, which exist due to the limited bandwidth on the electromagnetic spectrum available for broadcast media.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr, normally a passionate advocate of free speech, warned Disney and ABC that they risked losing their broadcast licenses if they did not take action. They soon canceled Kimmel’s show.
Conservatives offered various arguments that attempted to square this cancellation with their previous opposition to cancel culture, generally.
One argument was that broadcast media are subject to unusual restrictions, such as banning profanity and requiring that programming be in the “public interest.” Kimmel and his writers knew the rules, the argument goes, and said something that they know could only have fueled further political division in the country.
Another argument is that Kimmel himself had applauded the cancellation of Tucker Carlson from Fox News in 2023. What goes around, comes around.
These are rationalizations, not arguments.
Moreover, the idea of what is in the “public interest” is rather subjective. One can easily foresee that a Democrat-run FCC will abuse that loophole to drive conservatives of the air.
Liberals have said that conservatives who applaud Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation are hypocrites, especially Carr, who defended the importance of satire just a few years ago.
They are right to point out that conservatives are contradicting themselves. They are wrong to think it matters.
Because the fact is that while two wrongs don’t make a right, they do make a deterrent. Now that liberals understand what cancelation is like, perhaps they will think twice about doing it.
Another example will prove illustrative.
In 2024, radical anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups set up encampments that occupied hundreds of university campuses around the country. One particularly egregious case was UCLA, where the encampment took up a public square in the middle of a public university.
They refused to allow students who were Jewish to pass through, unless they were renounced their Zionism, i.e. their support for the state of Israel. They also excluded, journalists, and other members of the public from the space, violating our own First Amendment rights. (I myself was assaulted by a dozen activists when I attempted to film inside the encampment.)
UCLA is not just a large public university. It is also situated near several large Jewish neighborhoods, and near Beverly Hills, one of the most pro-Israel communities in America.
The Jewish community of west Los Angeles, which had long regarded UCLA as almost a local school, was both frightened and furious.
The encampment also lasted throughout the Passover holiday, adding to the antisemitic nature of the whole event. When videos circulated of young Jewish students being denied access to the center of campus, the community recoiled in horror.
UCLA refused to send in the university police, or to call in outside law enforcement. Instead, shockingly, the university put up a steel barrier around the encampment, as if to protect it.
I told a friend at the time that I was sure there would be violence — because of the particular culture of the Jews who live in the neighborhood.
The Jewish community of Los Angeles is more diverse than many other Jewish communities. In addition to Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jews, who tend to be stereotypically bookish and non-confrontational, the Persian and Israeli Jews of Los Angeles come from a Middle Eastern culture that is more combative.
And it was clear to me that there was no way the people of Beverly Hills – one of the only communities in L.A. that voted for Donald Trump – would tolerate antisemitism on their doorstep.
Sure enough, as soon as Passover ended, a crowd of vigilantes, largely from the Jewish community, entered campus after midnight, armed with sticks and clubs, and smashed the plywood walls of the encampment. They also beat any activists who tried to stop them.
The violence only ended when state and local police stormed the campus. No one died and there were few serious injuries.
Most of the arrests were of the pro-Palestinian activists; very few of the vigilantes were arrested. And within 24 hours, the university finally allowed law enforcement to remove the activists and what was left of their encampment, by force.
Mayor Karen Bass promised that the vigilantes would be identified, found, and prosecuted. But I knew, and I wrote, that there would be few arrests, and even fewer convictions, for the vigilantes, simply because no jury in Los Angeles County would want to punish them for standing up for the civil rights of Jewish students when the university and state and local authorities had declined to do so.
No one in the Jewish community publicly supported the violence, but no one condemned it, either. Behind closed doors, everybody cheered it.
Violence is wrong. But when the anti-Israel activists began with violence, and nonviolent complaints and protests failed to produce a result, and the police – who are supposed to have a monopoly on force – failed to act, there was only one option left. Only the threat of reciprocal violence allowed campus life to return to normal, and for academic freedom to return.
Charlie Kirk believed in nonviolence. He was assassinated while debating.
Instead of contrition, some – not all – Democrats either justified the shooting or tried to contextualize it by citing controversial things Kirk had said in the past. (Never mind that he would have been happy to entertain verbal objections to these very comments, and often had done so.)
Liberals failed to understand that the Kirk assassination was the culmination of years of demonization that affected the professional and often personal lives of many conservatives.
Instead of seeing the assassination – by one of their own – as an opportunity for reflection, reconciliation, or even apology, prominent liberals simply used it to marginalize conservative views even further.
The Kimmel cancellation was not just a punishment for the specific words he said, but a message to the entire left: we’re not taking it anymore. You can’t expect us to play by the rules if you don’t.
And if you persist with cancel culture, you should know what it feels like. We don’t agree with it, but perhaps when it happens to someone on your side, you will understand why it’s wrong.
The aftermath presents an opportunity to step back from the brink and reach out to one another, and agree that we need to reestablish basic ground rules for debate.
Those rules should include that we do not accuse our opponents of being threats to democracy, even if we believe it to be true. Subjectively, it almost never is.
Also: we should attack ideas, not people.
Two wrongs can make a deterrent – as long as the message is received, and both sides can step back from the cycle before it degenerates into a grim tit-for-tat.
Let us hope we are not there yet.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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