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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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)
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ...?"
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.
>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 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.
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™.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
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.
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"?
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.
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.
'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....'
> 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.
Kimmel didn’t just ‘hardly say anything.’ In his monologue he framed the ‘MAGA gang’ as trying to ‘characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,’ and he mocked MAGA supporters while implying the shooter’s politics aligned with the right. That’s an asserted narrative, not a verified fact. ABC/Nexstar are within their editorial rights to pull segments that present speculation as fact, and none of that turns on whether his tone was mild.
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?
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.
What does free speech have to do with a private broadcaster like Nexstar Media Group determining what it considers appropriate on its ABC-affiliate broadcasts? Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks aired on ABC; Nexstar’s ABC stations are now choosing to preempt his show because they don’t want political polarization or misinformation on their air. Kimmel is free to speak on other platforms. There is no First Amendment issue here. Your claim commits a state-action category error by conflating private editorial discretion with government censorship.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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?
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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:
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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".
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."
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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 ?
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
The problem is that America is now ruled by a de facto king, who uses the power of the state to submit corporations and people to do his bidding.
The problem is that he gave Trump a fig leaf of an excuse to go after him, and that's all they needed.
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.
> I can't see the problem.
lese majesty /s
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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?
There was loads of pre-WW2 mockery of Hitler. It did not matter a lot in the end.
So: As much as I admire Mel Brooks, this is just wishful thinking.
Yeah, how did satire fare when Hitler was in power?
Let's perhaps say that if satire doesn't directly prevent authoritarianism, it works as a very effective canary in the mine.
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.
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.
So, hear me out, books are pretty great!
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.
AND: you don't have to finish a book. you can skip ahead. you can roll the dice on a better one.
i'm saying: reading is like gambling, it's a lot of fun!
Caves of steel by Asimov my favorite recently. Super easy and enjoyable read.
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
Reading Hyperion rn, which is wild, but planning to finish the caves after!
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.
Cory Doctorow’s “Picks and shovels” got me out of my reading slump. Strong “Halt and catch fire” vibe!
Wow… sounds like you’ve been reading my diary!
If I pick something up and it sucks, I feel bad stopping and force myself to finish it (which will take 8 months because I hate it).
And that stops any reading progress.
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.
Also be sure to get them sooner rather than later, before the government decides they need to start burning books again.
Thank you, I love this reply! I will do this!!
Red Rising caused me a lot of anxiety to help ease me off the media anxiety machine.
First they came for the TV shows… I jest, they came for the books first
Buy a PBS Passport streaming subscription to support your local station.
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000692392-w...
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.
The summary at the top of the page says
> 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.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/business/video/abc-jimmy-kimm...
Never believe those who claim to be in favor of free speech, but then use threats of legal intervention against those who practice it.
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So right wing extremists?
The irony of your comment on this of all posts is not lost on me.
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)
I guess he didn't see the info that the police released?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/16/us/text-message-tyler-robinso...
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)
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/9/15/charlie-kirk-ki...
> “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 no such implication there.
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I'm not seeing much evidence of his political leaning (other than his choice of target, of course). Can you share some of this evidence?
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.
It's certainly not conclusive.
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.
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.
He was allegedly chronically online and all the engraved messages were memes / related to his gaming:
https://gizmodo.com/charlie-kirks-alleged-killer-wrote-meme-...
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 thought South Park had their Charlie Kirk episode pulled?
Only on cable, iirc.
Watched it last night so we’ll see.
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".
Personally i cancelled my disney+ subscription for this (paid for via verizon) and made sure to explicitly say why. I encourage others to do the same.
I don't care about Jimmey Kimmel's jokes nor do I watch his show with any regularity -- but I sure as hell care about his right to make jokes.
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.
https://www.nexstar.tv/nexstar-media-group-inc-enters-into-d...
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.
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_i...
> 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?
The chair of the FCC went live on Fox News, of all channels, to argue that ABC is alienating his audience. [1]
You can't make this stuff up.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/fcc-chair-brendan-carr-defends...
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.
> The FCC does have the strange task of regulating "false information"
https://progressive.org/op-eds/weve-always-known-fox-news-is...
I guess Fox is next then. After all, the FCC is definitely not going to be found anything less than even handed.
> feels like an overreach, maybe
How can it not be an overreach ?
“Maybe?”
Regulating “false information?”
There was no false information and the substance of the clip is just video of a person responding to a question.
If regulating false information is actually a part of the FCCs job, Fox "News" should have been shut down long ago.
It feels like an overreach because it is.
that "maybe" could power a medium sized city
Why the heck is this 600+ comment thread not on the front page?
it's on the real frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Probably penalized due to political themes being discouraged on HN.
Which is IMO a bad decision. You can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you.
Kirk's murder itself made the front page ... so we clearly don't always ignore politically adjacent topics here
Especially with how tech companies and tech billionaires influence politics.
Because it is off topic, as the descent of the US into fascism will not impact the tech sphere in any way whatsoever.
Do I even need the sarcasm mark?
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.
>I am largely neutral on this particular assassination
could you list the assassinations that you are not neutral on? I feel the list could be interesting if not prolly infamous
Harambe, for one.
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.
> 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.
Well thousands and thousands of people are being murdered all the time. You (or anyone) couldn’t care less about almost every single one of them.
So why single out this one? I mean who cares about school shootings? One nutjob murdering another nutjob on the other hand…
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.
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 ...?"
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.
>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.
the person might be saying they fought in a war involving shooting others
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.
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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.
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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™.
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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
> Who paid Lee Harvey Oswald
Who fired the magic bullet? Anyways, the boss was (most likely), James Jesus Angleton.
Which one?
(ducks)
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The Clintons are behind Lee Harvey Oswald?
What, as middle schoolers?
ClintonComplex™ most-definitely killed Mr. Rich, unrelated to the above-conspiracy.
I’ve never seen this interpretation of the word before. Usually that’s a “hit.”
An assassination is a murder if someone notable, often for political reasons.
¿por que no los dos?
In this particular assassination, there's currently nothing more than official allegations & captured footage.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say. This feels like a non sequitur.
It is an assassination, look up the definition.
Assassination has nothing to do with murder-for-hire. Never has.
Coming soon: broadcast is pulled after host’s comments disparage the current administration.
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.
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.
There's a Jimmy Kimmel show end of Sep / start of Oct in Brooklyn https://1iota.com/show/250/kimmel-in-brooklyn . I wonder if that gets cancelled as well.
Wow, Kimmel getting canceled wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card.
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.
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.
"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!"
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/trump-absolutely-love-steph...
Make no mistake, this is a witch hunt. Very soon there will be no one left who publicly speaks out against Trump.
That's what you get when you elect a known felon and rapist to be president.
I believe this is the clip in question? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j3YdxNSzTk
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.
It’s a pretext.
And if you’re against fascism, you’re a terrorist now too.
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"?
https://people.com/donald-trump-misses-charlie-kirk-vigil-11...
I wouldn't go posting about that under your real name unless you want people pressuring your company to fire you on Twitter..
What a time.
By this precedent, it would be!
But mrtesthah has no audience that makes him dangerous to the establishment. He's just a random voice in the wind.
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.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/roseanne-barr-obama-adviser-...
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.
https://x.com/WeAreSinclair/status/1968471160359645658
The first amendment restricts the government.
'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....'
> 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.
Kimmel didn’t just ‘hardly say anything.’ In his monologue he framed the ‘MAGA gang’ as trying to ‘characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,’ and he mocked MAGA supporters while implying the shooter’s politics aligned with the right. That’s an asserted narrative, not a verified fact. ABC/Nexstar are within their editorial rights to pull segments that present speculation as fact, and none of that turns on whether his tone was mild.
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.
Next point, from NYTimes article covering this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/business/media/abc-jimmy-...
"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?
Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
Free speech doesn't mean freedom from government oppression?
What do you think free speech, the right guaranteed by the Constitution, means?
From the government it does. Except for some "unprotected speech" carve outs, it literally does.
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.
What does free speech have to do with a private broadcaster like Nexstar Media Group determining what it considers appropriate on its ABC-affiliate broadcasts? Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks aired on ABC; Nexstar’s ABC stations are now choosing to preempt his show because they don’t want political polarization or misinformation on their air. Kimmel is free to speak on other platforms. There is no First Amendment issue here. Your claim commits a state-action category error by conflating private editorial discretion with government censorship.
Not quite as simple as that. The FCC chief threatened ABC just today:
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-...
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.
The argument would at least be heard by a judge.
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> 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.
It is incredible the mental gymnastics you are going through to try to paint this as something other than government censorship.
>>> 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 the statements from the FCC threatening action, which spooked Nexstar who has business with the FCC.
Maybe you weren't aware of this fact despite it being literally the headline shown on the very page you are commenting on:
> ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair
Can you visualize a Venn diagram that has 'free speech' and 'the First Amendment'?
"Free Speech" does not guarantee your employment; it promises you wont be arrested, usually; any combination of words can be interpreted as a threat.
Pretty sure it's supposed to prevent the FCC commissioner from threatening to pull your license though unless you fire a particular individual though.
The First Amendment protects people against much more than criminal prosecution. Cases I recommend you read include:
Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46
Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of New York State Crime Victims Board, 502 U.S. 105
The New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 84 S.Ct. 710, 11 L.Ed.2d. 686 (1964)
Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 94 S.Ct. 2997, 41 L.Ed.2d. 789 (1974)
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?
He didn't even assert that the shooter was MAGA, only that MAGA did their best to distance themselves from him.
Is it possible that they wanted to pull the show and this was just the excuse they were looking for?
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.
Unlikely they’d want to politicize the canceling of their show. Quiet and uncontroversial is better for ABC.
“Comments quoted in stories assert that the shooter was MAGA - maybe that’s somewhat controversial”
It was counter to what was reported by federal investigators the day before the show. He was deliberately spreading misinformation.
> 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.
Lying by omission, phrasing to suggest that he was a part of the MAGA group.
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.
Why are you are ignoring the question? You are creating a hypothetical to ignore it.
Under your view, the networks, as they stand, should never have allowed him on the airwaves to begin with.
How’s the state of Fox’s license look to you? Or have they never ever spread misinformation for political purposes?
Have they ever spread information for political purposes?
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...
You do realize I questioned if Fox ever spread anything else than misinformation.
You do realize that Kimmel‘s show is not a news show?
He can suggest whatever he wants.
Like the president suggests the extreme left is responsible for Kirk‘s murder.
No wait, the president didn’t suggest he claimed it as a fact.
Can’t wait for his cancellation.
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.
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.
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).
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Sorry but people are entitled to pressure other private citizens when they say disagreable things. That is also a part of free speech.
What First Amendment is trying to protect is the government disallowing speech.
In this case, it is the FCC, an arm of the government, that is pressuring ABC to do this rather than other private citizens.
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.
It's unclear that was why he was fired.
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)
Trump had Colbert cancelled and said Kimmel was next on Truth Social back in July: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1148744224685...
The FCC chairmen threatened ABC: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-...
Seems like a clear cut case of jawboning.
It's not unclear.
Oma has had the 1000 yard stare for the last 10 years.
None of this is unclear.
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?
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.
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I mean, yes? You're not violating the 4th. We have plenty of other laws, including laws against trespassing, that might apply here.
Yeah, exactly, human rights exist independently of the bill of rights.
> 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. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/nexstar-tegna-fcc...
Order of events:
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
3. ABC yanks Kimmel
[1] https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/1968392506711613526
The FCC made a direct threat to the affiliate owners that if they kept Jimmy Kimmel on the air, their broadcast licenses would be terminated.
That is absolutely government pressure.
If Carr can’t act unilaterally than it’s not “the FCC”.
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."
Ratings didn’t help Colbert, though..
> Yes but you're not a mind reader…
Is your position that no one can ever infer the intent behind someone’s actions unless you can read their mind?
Seems that way. Hopefully they hold that consistently and not only to excuse terrible behavior by folks they identify with.
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.
He literally threatened the entire country of Australia because of an Australian journalist asking how profitable the presidency has been for him.
The number of people in these comments pretending not to see what happened is flabbergasting.
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...".
Disappoint and disgust them?
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.
https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/here-are-final-late-nig...
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.
> 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
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fcc-chair-threatens-jimm...
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?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fcc-jimmy-kimme...
So yes, seems there was a middle step between Brendan Carr on a podcast, and top level ABC decision making.
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:
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/nexstar-tegna-fcc...
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)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-...
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.
So if Trump does the same, that's not the government saying it, because he also can't act unilaterally for the government, right?
And in fact, no individual politician should be capable of acting unilaterally for the government, so I guess they are all off scott free.
Ok, seems I rubbed the wrong way there; I was not trying to take away from that key point of your post.
> 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.
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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.
>comments criticizing the Dear Leader
Looks like Lèse-majesté is making a comeback
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?
No, he was in a multi-year trade school after a semester of university. He was radicalized on-line...
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?
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.
In his one singular semester in college? Going to need a source for your fact there. Pretty sure no one has all the info yet.
How does a semester of a very conservative college radicalize him? You sound like you are just parroting MAGA talking points.
He was raised in a rightwing household with easy access to firearms.
Hating Kirk is nothing unusual. Maybe something in his conservative upbringing led him to believe violence was an acceptable action based on his hate.
That's not a belief shared by the Democratic Party.
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.
https://people.com/department-of-justice-quietly-deletes-stu...
So earlier I took a look at the wiki list of Domestic Terrorism incidents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Un...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45207030
Over the last 40 years: 8/16 attacks on that list are linked to White Supremacists(Counting OKC) ~50%
In the last 15 years, again about 50% are linked to White Supremacists and ~41% linked to Radical Islam.
Are you analyzing the list of "Notable Domestic Terrorist Attacks" on that page? Which has already been filtered by some criteria of notability?
A more complete list is actually prompted at the top of that section and is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat....
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.
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?
There's a difference between criticism of a politician or his policies and espousing bigotry and racism.
Musk, Ellison, Zuck, Bezos and friends would gladly have you. Not sure if you've been noticing all the ring kissing over the last several months.
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.
Comedian makes joke on television.
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.
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!
https://apnews.com/article/nexstar-tegna-newsnation-cw-trump...
Sorry, after the Tegna deal they will own all three stations in my market. Essentially, the viewpoints we see will be determined by one man.
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".
> the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."
Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781367
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813762
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:
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
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.
There is no forming consensus with that position.
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:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/07/25/poll-majority--supp...
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...
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.
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.
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).
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Sorry but the fact is a government agency (the FCC) pushed for this. This is a completely different thing than Disney deciding to do it on its own.
This is a 1st amendment issue.
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.
Where did you learn this?
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fcc-chair-levels-threat-agains...
From https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-... :
> 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.
That free speech crowd has been very very quiet the last week
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.
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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?
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That’s not true
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.
The show was pulled before the FCC chairman said anything about it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/disneys-abc-pulls-jim...
Please, don't contribute alt-facts to the conversation.
The notable quote
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.
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.
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So if the government passed a million-dollar fine for criticism of the ruling party, you would find that acceptable?
Any criticism is protected under the 1st Amendment, and that includes what you just posted.
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 comment you replied to said "free speech" which is different from the First Amendment.
This is bad. Watching Jimmy Kimmel was the one thing that kind of kept my spirit up.
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.
> There's nothing new about this, though
Threats from the head of the FCC bandied about on a far-right podcast? Hello?
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?
"Will you even notice when your train has arrived at the Gulag?"? What does that even mean?
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.
Now they'll lose subscribers anyway.
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.
Wouldn't I notice when they put me on the train in the first place?
I guess moogly is baffled that as you apparently haven't noticed that this is where we are heading already - will you?
(Obviously it won't be a literal train given the state of our rail infrastructure but more likely a van in practice :p)
> Wouldn't I notice when they put me on the train in the first place?
Welcome aboard. We left the station a few months ago.
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).
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> Kimmel would have drastically more reach on an indie show online (who would you rather be, just in terms of reach, Kimmel or Hinchcliffe?)
How is this relevant ? Are the Presidency and FCC now giving career advice?
> The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air.
not even corporate air - it’s government air obviously
> 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.
I'm interested in what is happening here; I have other vectors for doing politics that aren't HN.
> almost identical circumstances
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.
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Please don't put words I didn't say in between quotation marks as if I had said them.
Your comment stated "There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances"
People often use quotes like that to paraphrase.
This is an HN idiosyncrasy and if I have to adhere to it so does everybody else. :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(The quote they created is also nowhere close to what I was saying or what I believe, but I'm not interested in litigating that.)
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".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think that instance is more like quoting to indicate an example, not to paraphrase.
like in Haskell-ish terms:
I don’t see why it would matter whether Kimmel has steered into this or not (which seems pretty unlikely to me anyway)
His comments were not a fireable offence. He can’t steer into something if there’s nothing to steer into.
Here's a video of the Maher reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1c672...
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.
> Keep in mind that Kimmel has been hinting about retiring for a couple years now
Keep in mind also that Trump threatened getting Kimmel of the air a couple of months ago
Additionally, the FCC chief also threatened affiliates today
Is it all a coincidence ? Could be.
But absent a statement from Kimmel we can conclude that pressure was applied to ABC or it’s affiliates to censor speech
Kindly, your post reads like a variation of the “Broken window fallacy”
Hey, who needs late night comedy shows any more
You have way too much karma for this
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.
Deeeeeeeefinitely not the political angle. Anything but, really.
Yeah, probably just coincidence. /s
I got downvoted for saying the same thing... go figure.
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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.
Accurately shooting at a distance suggests active practice rather than passive indifference wrt firearms.
It was 200 yards my dude. Any drunk dumbass with a deer rifle can do that.
And yet they frequently cannot. Wind, drop, ammunition, breathing all matter.
If you like I can link to an ULR shooter targeting 24 inch plates at 5,000 yards and yet missing soda cans at 150 through 450 yards.
Practice and experience are evident in a single shot at 200 yards.
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That's kind of what I mean by steering directly into this.
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He didn't say that, though? He said MAGA was trying to pin him on anyone else. He never asserted anything about the shooter himself.
> more than enough info
Source:
the WSJ has faced no repercussions for all their initial reporting either. It’s ridiculous.
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I've seen a large number of comments online saying the shooter was a trump supporter - I don't really understand where that information comes from.
I feel like this is the sort of thing a prediction market might be able sort out.
There are multiple statements from his relatives that his family are "MAGA", his parents are Registered Republicans.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/ty...
It seems he was "raised right", with easy access to firearms and ammunition. Items not nearly as common in left voting urban areas.
However, Mr. Kimmel's comments centered on the fact that his political leanings, and reasoning for the school shooting are not entirely clear.
> 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.
> There are multiple statements from his relatives that his family are "MAGA", his parents are Registered Republicans.
Most leftists despise their parents politics. None of this suggests a rightward leaning of the culprit himself.
> 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.
edit:spelling
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.”
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26098852-tyler-robin...
No, that's the reason to hate Kirk, not a reason to shoot him.
What in his upbringing led him to believe the way to handle the situation was with violence is unclear.
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Certainly not more creative compared to painting someone who openly supports school shootings as some sort of a martyr.
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.
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.
Except your premise is incorrect.
Kimmel did not repeat rumors, he asserted that the political affiliations were unknown.
edit: He asserted the "MAGA gang" trying to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson, which is true. It does not mean Kimmel views Robinson as "MAGA".
Exactly, it wasn't even a joke; it's a fact.
MAGA is trying to distance themselves from the killer, and so is the left. No one wants to be associated with that guy, and for good reason.
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.
Correct! He never asserted what Mr. Robinson's affiliations were to begin with.
I added an edit after re-reading the comments.
Caitlyn Jenner is a trump supporter fwiw. Trans is not incompatible with conservatism despite the cognitive dissonance required to take such a stance.
You don’t think trans people or their friends can be republican / conservative?
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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.
Neither end result would shock me.
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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".
> 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.
"[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association_of_...
The FCC s/can/should/ not threaten the license of a broadcaster for protected speech, but we are here anyways.
They absolutely can do it as they've just shown. It's not like they are unable to do it. It's that they shouldn't do it. There's a big difference.
There is no First Amendment right to an FCC broadcast license.
There is a right not to have it taken away for speech reasons.
> 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?
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.
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.
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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.
Ahhh yes, whose entire family is maga and lives in the most conservative state in America
My point isn't really about what is correct or incorrect in this case.
My point is about making it so that you have to actively risk money to push the truth needle in the wrong direction.
Or the right direction, depending on your point of view.
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…
"You could not get more blatantly corrupt than this."
Oh I'm sure they'll figure it out.
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.
Republicans:
- Bullying - Bigotry - Censorship - Election interference - Gerrymandering - Blackballing - Targeting for death - Persecuting - Trafficking - Inciting & agitating - Grifting
The beat goes on.
As W used to say "You're either with us..."
"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.
Have you ever lived in a rural community?
Putting useless or malicious animals down is merciful and common place and definitely not the making of serial killers.
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.
> Putting useless or malicious animals down is merciful and common place
Maybe that's part of the problem? You kill what you consider "useless" or "malicious". Noem killed a puppy.
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
Usually there are quite a few "Hey bear"'s before you resort to blowing its brains out.
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.
Killing a dog for acting like a dog is merciful?
For those who are still indifferent about stuff like this, a short reminder of a historical timeline:
- Month 0 (Jan 1933): Hitler appointed Chancellor
- Month 1 (Feb 1933): Reichstag fire; Reichstag Fire Decree suspends key civil liberties
- Month 2 (Mar 1933): Reichstag elections; Enabling Act passed; Dachau concentration camp opened
- Month 3 (Apr 1933): nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses; Civil Service Law purges Jews and political opponents from state jobs
- Month 4 (May 1933): independent trade unions seized and dissolved; replaced by the German Labour Front (DAF)
- Month 5 (Jun 1933): Social Democratic Party banned nationally
- Month 6 (Jul 1933): Law Against the Formation of New Parties makes Germany a one-party state
- Month 8 (Sep 1933): Reich Chamber of Culture law brings arts and press under Propaganda Ministry control
- Month 9 (Oct 1933): Editors’ Law (Schriftleitergesetz) excludes Jews from journalism and subjects editors to regime oversight
- Month 10 (Nov 1933): one-list Reichstag “election” and referendum held with opposition already illegal
- Month 12 (Jan 1934): Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich abolishes state parliaments and centralizes power
- Months 17–18 (Jun–Jul 1934): Night of the Long Knives purge eliminates SA leadership and other rivals
- Month 19 (Aug 1934): law merging President and Chancellor signed; Hindenburg dies; army swears personal oath to Hitler, Hitler becomes Führer
- Month 32 (Sep 1935): Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship and outlaw marriages/relations with “Aryans”
I’ve seen a lot of right wingers celebrating this.
What happened to freedom of speech?
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.
The right is simply good at PR. People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?
> The right is simply good at PR
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
They protect their own above all else. Is their own a POS? Oh well.
Not always. See what they said about the old guard such as mccain.
The right (and by that I specifically mean fascists) will use words in whatever way maximizes their power over others.
Hypocrisy is a show of power.
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No it doesn't, and I'm so tired of these garbage false equivalencies.
Sorry, I thought you were going to end your line with "McCarthyism".
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.
I had totally forgotten about that!
> 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.
Video games all through the 90s as well.
Satanic Panic before that.
Turns out they're not all that big on "free speech" in general! Who knew.
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That remains true!
But the First Amendment very clearly says it can’t be the government doing the consequencing.
The FCC chairman threatened to pull ABC's broadcast license over Kimmel's comments. That's pretty much a direct 1st amendment violation.
Which is why we're all shocked that the order came from the FCC chair and not the business owner.
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.
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.
And they also shared this: https://xkcd.com/1357/
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.
The FCC Chairman threatened ABC over Kimmel's comments. This is not applicable.
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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.
These are not even close to the same.
The horseshoe is a bit like a boomerang in that regard, both in form and function!
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).
> wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch
Well.. if you exclude all the very successful political movements which considered themselves “leftist”.
Bit of a no true Scotsman thing.
...but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.
And that's my cue to take yet another hit to my HN karma by asking, incredulously, "WTF are they teaching kids in school these days?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
> 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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
> 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.
Very good, you've addressed half of the proposition. Now do the other half, specifically the part about how True Leftists don't do things like that.
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.
How about Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Were they lefties?
By U.S.A. standards, authoritarian leaders who use violence as a means of political gain does not align with the Democratic Party of today.
During Jim Crow, at the State level in the south, it would be applicable, but that doesn't mean much in today's terms.
Hi Bob, we’re talking about American politicians.
'Sup, 'brows. Tell me, what's special about American politicians as opposed to those in the rest of the world, in your view?
Education?
Religious values?
Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon genelines?
A more-enlightened electorate?
Nothing but your own empty prejudices and comforting assumptions?
It can happen here, and it can happen to your party, too. It just didn't this time.
Same shit as Trump - the self-proclaimed label and the actions are wildly disparate.
They - and Hitler - are notable for their totalitarianism. I bear no illusions that folks like Stalin wanted anything more than power.
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.
They also tend to put the 'other' in them.
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.
IMO, being able to cry louder for persecution complex does not equal a moral high ground.
> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation.
Have you been in a coma for that decade?
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
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assa...
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.
The important distinction is that the left cancels by utilizing consumer choice vs the government.
Government the Father, consumer choice the Mother.
To push a domestic metaphor
(Or are the gender roles switched)
"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
(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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_kneeling_...
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“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.“
Is there some way the two sides could reliably arrive at a truce on the issue of cancellation?
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.
It’s especially effective when signaled by the “elite”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00323217241300...
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.
> support, defend, ignore, or rationalize actions
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
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.
Why is this the turning point and not, say, the attempts (and successful assassination of one) on Minnesota lawmakers a few months ago?
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.
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.
Couldn't agree more with this. The majority of Americans think that the "leftest and rightest" people they know are absolute wackos.
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?
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
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Pronouns? Or do you mean something else?
Are things like racism and sexism being bad exclusive to the left?
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.
I believe they changed when the government put pressure on social media during COVID. I think that caused a huge attitude shift among the right.
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.
Wasn't a lot of that pressure coming from a right wing government? COVID's initial year and a bit was under the first Trump admin.
> 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."
Jimmy Kimmel didn't celebrate a murder. He criticized the cynical exploitation of a murder.
What utter garbage. It’s not the left canceling Starbucks at Christmas time, or any company that dares sport a rainbow in any marketing whatsoever.
They have not in any sense taken any high ground
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?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_body_count_conspiracy_... dates back at least to the mid 90s.
You're making my point.
Why would we defend the rights of someone that refuses to defend ours?
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.
All Star
"...is the most iconic and timeless silhouette."
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.
Yeah nobody is going out into the streets over this, but I suspect the one that does is anytime from tomorrow to 1 year from now.
Rebels on television all the time! Billionaires control the networks.
“I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here.”
I was expecting something offensive. He's just telling us how he sees the world, and it looks the same as how I've seen this thing. Crazy
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.
Sounds like it's time for Jimmy to retire... there's no point in fighting this anymore and I'm sure his family is ready for him to quit anyway.
We've sure come a long way from The Man Show.
god, that's a blast from the past...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
It’s not the company behind this. The federal government forced them to do this. All media is being taken over by the state.
“All media” is a huge stretch.. legacy hyper regulated media maybe
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.
> places suspected under-18 accounts into Restricted Mode, which blocks access to political and news content
Debates about the quality of this sort of content aside, wow, that's just what we need, a generation of new adults who have no idea what's going on...
>What's the end game of these right-wing legacy media?
Probably to wring a few bucks out as they circle the drain in the same fashion as every other old formerly prestigious brand name.
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.
Well, you have Larry Ellison and Elon doing their best to corner social media - so I think the right wing has it's bases covered.
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.
What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?
I saw another newer post that was probably made because the poster didn't see this post, and a comment made in there linked to this discussion.
> What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?
Supposedly posts with very high comments/upvote ratio are automatically classified as toxic and downranked.
That combined with random users flagging it, presumably.
In any case, seems more algorithmic than editorial (which is not to say that the latter never occurs around here in general)
Actually fascinating to really think of it as the inverse of what most social media platforms do these days, which is the opposite.
HNs is a fairly typical "lock threads that degrade to flamewars" strategy that i first encountered more than 20 years ago.
an elegant weapon from an older, less civilized time.
They get flagged. Eventually flagging removes a post entirely but even a couple of flags cause it to slide down the rankings pretty quickly.
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.
It's kind of weird the HN transfers comments on dupes but not upvotes
dupes split the discussion up all over the board.
they get merged to a single discussion.
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.
> What causes very active discussions like this to drop off the front page so quickly?
One answer might be the same cowardice seen at ABC. But that's just one of the possibilities.
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.
> HN can't have a frontpage thread about all of these developments without turning into a current affairs site, which is not its mandate.
The times are such that I don't think that policy is tenable.
And I hope we can return soon enough to a time when that policy will be tenable.
I would argue the opposite.
That in dark times there is a tendency for all open discussion venues to descend into the same pits.
And there is value in avoiding that.
The fact that this discussion is still here strikes me as moderation in moderation. A nice balance.
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.
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Why has this been flagged?
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.
Censorship affects everyone.
Like, literally, your ability to understand the world around you.
If that's not "tech," then I think folks need to broaden their perspective.
I agree, but I'm basing this on HackerNews' own guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My explanation was a little bit narrow by mentioning tech though, that just happens to be the general thing shared most of the time.
There are plenty places that aren’t HN to discuss politics.
Since everything is connected to everything else, by your logic, every discussion forum must discuss everything.
If you prefer more open-ended discussions about everything, I would suggest trying Twitter or Bluesky .
You could choose to just skip the topic?
A good read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267159
It won't really spur the curious discussion this forum is known and loved for.
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"Freedom" apparently.
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.
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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...
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> The overall message of the democrats has been "we didn't do it, but he had it coming".
Please give examples of this.
You're saying the left is more radicalized than the right?
The stats don't pan out: https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
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?
Trump himself has made COUNTLESS violent remarks himself: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-v...
For example:
> 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:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/trump-mocks-pelosi-...
Which left wing politician in recent memory has said anything even REMOTELY as violence endorsing as this?
I'll be waiting for ANY sources besides just calling what I'm saying "misinformation"
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The right doesn't get to elect an incompetent reality show host and then not be the laughingstock of late night. Pick one or the other.
Neoliberal entertainment is less about repeating what the government wants to say, and more about repeating what other people want to hear.
Both have their issues. You're just yelling into the wind if you think this will keep politics off late-night TV.
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You were the one arguing “the first amendment doesn’t protect again consequences”.
What changed?
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.
I for one choose not to participate.
You right-thinking guys convinced me: cancel culture is bad.
What I don't understand is why it's ok if the FCC commissioner pushed for it. That does seem like a first amendment deal.
The government enforcing laws on the books isn’t cancel culture?
I mean if laws weren’t broken, and it was pressure alone because of personal views, then yeah that’s wrong.
It's only cancel culture when the left does it.
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!
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He also sued The Des Moines Register because they released a poll that he did not like [1]. It is sad that people defend this.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/politics/trump-sues-de...
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.
It's exactly the problem that currying favor with the President is a smart move for businesses.
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)
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Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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This is not cancel culture. What Jimmy Kimmel did was always out of bounds.
Are you willing to equally apply this to people who called the killing "leftist violence" and said he is one of "them"?
What did he do? Quotations and direct sources please.
what did he do here?
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.”
Where is the lie?
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.
The kid wasn't 'MAGA' though.
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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.
That said…?
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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.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Except the FCC literally threatened ABC over this
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.
What was wrong with what Kimmel said?
Is it against the public good to question the motives of the president of the United States?
Is it misuse of public airwaves to point out the lack of evidence on hand to divine the political affiliations of this school shooter?
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.
Believe it or not, alienating politics isn't great for business. Neither is peddling conspiracy theories.
It worked pretty well for the Murdochs.
Yes, I agree. So let it be business then instead of explicitly making it ideological?
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.
Alienate half your audience? That doesn't compute. Kimmel was not watched by that half already.
True, I would have fired him years ago.
> 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.
The FCC threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license. That is government censorship, a direct attack on free speech.
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> 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.
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/abc-yanks-jimmy-kimmels...
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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.
'FOX NEWS' told the court they were innocent because they don't report news, they give opinion, and opinion doesn't have to be true.
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
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.
We’re trying but the lower courts keep getting overruled by a corrupt Supreme Court.
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.
A smoking gun is literally circumstantial .. until the ballistics come in.
Did anyone ask the FCC chair to do this? Is it on record? Do you imagine the FCC chair to be cat that needs to be belled?
I don't get your point. FCC chair can violate the first amendment too.
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.
So we shouldn't hold anyone accountable unless they are the person at the top? That's absurd.
> until the ballistics come in
Ballistics is a pseudoscience.
> Did anyone ask the FCC chair to do this?
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".
Neither of those things occurred, here. Kimmel's remarks were extraordinarily mild, and they also happen to be entirely true.
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."
>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.
> Mr. Kimmel does not assert Mr. Robinson was "MAGA".
He absolutely did insinuate just that.
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.
Kimmel said this: "The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
Dunno if English is your second language or what but that definitely insinuates the killer is MAGA and is the quote people have an issue with.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmation_and_negation
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/laura-loomer...
[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.
> 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.
The killer's family literally said he became very left wing...
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/charlie-kirk-assassination-w...
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.
About a dozen times in this very thread alone, so far in my scrolling.
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.
"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.
re: your edit - perhaps people just think you're wrong because you're drawing false equivalences?
No, no, it's everyone else that is wrong =)
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 ?
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.
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So was Kimmel engaged in defamation?
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.
Who was defamed? I don't see a case here.
> So was Kimmel engaged in defamation?
Not anymore than you are now? There is a reasonably clear precedent established on what is defamation and what is not.
> it's a very important concept in a free society.
That repeating something all the time regardless of whether it makes sense or not somehow makes it true? Well.. you are free to hold that opinion.
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?
"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.
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We are in so much trouble as a society.
The real danger here is that ABC did it before the White House ordered or told them too.
Fascists rise in power the more scared we are to speak.
The FCC head did threaten ABC's broadcast license.
And they folded instead of fighting. Their cowardice is helping to destroy freedom and democracy in the US.
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 see cancel culture is still alive and well...
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Actually not relevant, the pulling came after threats from the FCC: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fcc-jimmy-kimme...
This effort is being lead by the FCC commissioner threatening to pull licenses so you just need the first panel.
Idk should he be allowed to peddle unhelpful, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories?
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?
Good question. Same answer to both. Glad we agree!
In your view, is that answer yes, or no?
I'd say yes, they all should be. The first amendment demands it.
Holy doublestandards, Batman!
Saying the shooter was "one of them" has been the most common commentary from both sides. It's inaccurate to call either conclusion a conspiracy.
Shouldn't most of Fox News be off the air then? And most podcasts, left or right?
Fox news was rightfully sued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...
And what's changed because of it? Nothing?
Reminds me of the Bill Maher cancellation after he made a 9/11 remark
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 saw the clip - that was pretty insane.
That was one of the mildest satire ever.
What clip and what was insane?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxqLXndjvQY
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.
Post to a channel where people are calling for the removal of American citizens doesn't really support your argument.
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So you want a far-left source that is broadly hated by a significant chunk of the population?
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.
> needs to be cancelled
> 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.
Now can we make the trains run on time?
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.
Did we learn nothing from when ABC fired Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect 24 years ago? Clearly, we did not.
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!
before attributing all to one event, consider the straw that broke the camels back.
When a liberal is attacked or killed, the right blames the left. When a conservative is attacked or killed, the right blames the left.
This is just the exploitation of a tragedy in order to consolidate more power and win more political points.
Nope. They’re just not letting a tragedy go to waste. The environment is ripe for them to continue their authoritarian project.
All these late-night shows are terrible anyways. Cancel all of them and make room for actual shows.
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.
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.
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.
I guess I really nailed it with that last sentence then.
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.
It’s not about “Jimmy”, it’s about his audience.
then what you do, is just not re-up the contract or buy it out. That could have been done at any time.
If that were true they’d just shelve the show. It’s entirely within their power to do so and always has been. They don’t need an excuse.
Out of the two, “company wants to win favor with Trump for a merger” is actually the simpler theory.
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
Which "this" are you referring to, the shooting, the endorsement of it or the firing over the endorsement of it?
All of them are bad but the ones on the left end of the sentence are more bad than the ones on the right.
Edit: The endorsements and firings broadly speaking, not regards to anything specific to Kimmel or ABC
How did Kimmel endorse the shooting? Make an argument. Show me where and how he endorsed the shooting.
Kimmel in no way endorsed the shooting
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.)
> It just baffles me that people think they can say things that "turn up the heat"
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of his statements, even if what he did say was factually inaccurate.
The FCC doesn’t pay Kimmel.
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.
Are you saying that the government might seriously harass and damage a media company for speech they don't like? And this is normal?
Maybe ABC could stand up for freedom of speech instead of caving to a wannabe dictator?
What a refreshingly novel idea. I wonder if it will get any uptake.
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.