Disney was getting some pretty funny international ridicule over canceling Kimmel. The best I've seen was this video [1] produced by a late-night show in the Netherlands of Disney announcing a new direction to better serve today's audiences.
>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.
>In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
I wonder if US citizens are too far ensconced in team politics to get the real words said.
Breaking apart the above, 'MAGA' as a start. Not republican. Not right wing. MAGA. There is a difference, MAGA being a wide range of people mostly on the right. And when someone references MAGA as a specific group, they're not saying "the right" necessarily, but "people who identify as MAGA".
Both the democrats and republicans in the US have a myriad of groupings of individuals who are forced under one banner or the other.
For example there are christians which believe that their local democrats won't represent them, so they're forced to join the republican camp.
And beyond this, a democrat running in California will espouse entirely different beliefs than one running in Ohio. Or Texas.
So if there is some undesirable characteristic specific to MAGA but not necessarily the right or all republicans, this could apply here. And therefore, "One of them" doesn't necessarily mean 'left' or 'right', because somethings are about individual actions of specific people, not about pointing at an entire team.
Outside of eliminating campaign funding, having more than two political parties in the US would be key, I think, to fixing some of this.
That kind of denialism doesn't help, it just empowers the "eye for an eye" faction even more because they see that the left is incapable of self reflection.
The killer is far left. There is plenty of evidence and it's all fully consistent on that matter, even beyond the obvious nature of the act itself. It has been consistent since the first moments.
The right are upset about this! And they're even more upset about the mass celebrations on the left at the successful assassination. It comes on the heels of multiple attempts on Trump, Antifa trying to mass murder ICE agents and many other horrific events that show a sustained pattern of behavior.
When Kimmel claimed the "MAGA gang" (a deliberately insulting term) had "hit new lows", he was making the insane claim that being upset about political assassination is a "low" and "point scoring". And then he went on to deceive his audience. Instead of admitting that the "MAGA gang" were correct from the start, he claims they were "desperately trying" to "characterize" the assassin as on the left.
This phrasing tells the listener that the reason the right had to "desperately try" is because what they were saying was "a new low", weak or untrue, which is why it was a mere "characterization" and not a statement of fact.
It is obviously dishonest. When people defend such dishonesty and claim it's not a lie it reinforces the strong impression being received by hundreds of millions of people that everyone on the left is malicious and potentially dangerous. That's by far the most risky path forward.
People like Kimmel are getting this stuff from social media. It's flooded with people who are denying the truth, even trying to claim he's some sort of MAGA extremist. The author of the top politics Substack, who has over 3.2M Facebook followers and 2.5M subscribers, has told that exact lie. And she hasn't corrected herself either.
Left wing pundits need to be honest with their audience. The killer did it for their beliefs, motivated by their hatreds, encouraged by their celebrations of people like Mangione and Crooks. Instead of taking the high road and being the bearer of bad news, they've doubled down on manipulating their audience.
And now Disney has said that's OK, they approve of that behavior. The left certainly cannot claim to have a problem with misinformation now!
You have deliberately ignored, overlooked, mischaracterized, exaggerated, and regurgitated rhetoric just to fit your narrative. Ignoring anything inconvenient while finger-pointing in outrage is rather comical to those who aren’t on either side.
Also, do you not remember 86-46 MAGA t-shirts? A call to stand up and fight followed by a violent incursion into private areas of the capital in order to “stop the steal” (a lie), where deadly force was REQUIRED as they broke windows and forced through barriers, you know where they were “invited”? Did you forget about all the literal death threats that made to judges and politicians any time they go against Trump? Did you forget all the MAGA death threats sent regarding the women and children families of those same judges? People showing up with guns because drag queens were reading to kids?
Most people don’t have the memory of a goldfish, so the mock outrage just doesn’t cut through the noise.
Having to listen to whatever party isn’t in power whine is just another day for most of us to laugh at the stupidity of it all. It’s new to have to also listen to the ones in power whining and playing the victim still.
And if you think "MAGA gang" is an deliberately insulting term then I want to know what you call all the insaults of the president. MAGA gang is pretty harmless. At Kimmel is right, they try to score political points from it. If you don't see that you shpuld reflect on your own denial.
Maybe you should start check how often the MAGA site called the other side evil, enemy of the state, abomination to god and even wished for the death penalty for Biden and then compare that to what Kimmel said. Ridicilous in taking offense in that but not all what happenend before.
>The killer did it for their beliefs, motivated by their hatreds, encouraged by their celebrations of people like Mangione and Crooks. Instead of taking the high road and being the bearer of bad news, they've doubled down on manipulating their audience.
So you know more about the killer's motives than the authorities or you are just plain wrong
The Guardian article says what I'm saying and quotes the authorities saying that too. Why are you citing that as an argument?
> Prosecutors allege that, after Robinson’s arrest in Kirk’s killing, his mother told investigators that her son had spent the previous year or so becoming “more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented”.
and
> Tyler explained “there is too much evil” and the Turning Point USA executive director “spreads too much hate”.
Who talks like that about conservatives? The left do. What does his family say? That he became left wing and was motivated by trans activism. What do the authorities say? That he was a leftist. What did the bullets that he left behind say? Left wing memes and slogans.
Do you see why social media posts like yours are creating massive concern all across society at the moment? You're not only getting your info from the most biased sources out there but citing reports that contradict what you're saying, maybe without noticing. It's freaky and scaring a lot of people.
How does the FCC even matter anymore when people are increasingly getting their content via streaming? The only reason they have any leverage over Kimmel at all (and not, for example, South Park) is because ABC still broadcasts it.
> How does the FCC even matter anymore when people are increasingly getting their content via streaming?
"The ability of the FCC to regulate internet content and platforms depends on statutory authority. In holding the forums on captioning of online video content, the FCC could look to the language of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which included language that asked the FCC to look at the accessibility of video content used on internet platforms. In other areas, the FCC’s jurisdiction is not as clear, but calls arise regularly for the FCC to act to regulate content that, as we have written in other contexts, looks more and more like broadcast content and competes directly with that content.
Calls for the FCC to regulate internet content and the companies that provide that content are certain to multiply. In another of our weekly summaries of regulatory actions of interest to broadcasters, we noted recent meetings with FCC Commissioners’ offices by representatives of the TV affiliates organizations, in which they asked that the FCC consider regulation of linear programming services delivered through internet platforms in the same way that they regulate cable and satellite multichannel video providers, including the possibility of adopting a system of must-carry and retransmission consent. This is not at all a new idea, having been raised in 2014 in an FCC proceeding that asked for public comment on the question of whether to subject online video providers to MVPD regulation – a proceeding that never resulted in any action" [1].
I disagree. Trump, IMO, has been a cult-like leader for the GOP since 2016. And he even called for more networks to lose their licenses over "dishonesty" after this incident[0]. Not to mention the multitude of scandals that we've seen like: law firm security clearance revocation as retribution for supporting Trump's opponents, deporting legal residents over their protest against Israel, and various lawsuits he's engaged in as President against media corporations, pollsters, etc.. who disfavour him[1].
> Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was
"many" is Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz? To my knowledge, they haven't called out Trump specifically for attacks on the First Amendment, only Brendan Carr. That's fine and dandy, but no one on the right seems willing to take the plunge for some reason on the huge array of issues that cropped up before this FCC threat against ABC.
I think rank and file folks are waking up a bit. Things are hard in the economy and tgey are seeing their moms, aunts, sisters, and daughters get impacted by reductions to women's healthcare.
Nobody has any principles here my friend. There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.
But yes, apparently everyone hates Disney and wants them to go bankrupt. So finally the left and right agree on one thing.
Unfortunately for Kimmel, late night TV is irrelevant dinosaur so he better extract as much money as he can before he inevitably ends up like Colbert.
"long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats"
If we exclude the people advocating violence and discrimination against others due to their immutable characteristics, we find that its not such a "long" list after all.
Comments by government officials aren't protected free speech because government officials control policy.
There have been market panics ended by the right words at the right time. It's a different kind of speech entirely from criticism of the government by those without direct political power.
When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested Jimmy Kimmel should be suspended and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” ABC and its local affiliates were listening.
On Wednesday afternoon, Carr tapped into preexisting MAGA media anger about a Monday night Kimmel monologue and used a right-wing podcaster’s platform to blast Kimmel and pressure ABC’s parent company Disney.
Those are the actions he took as an official at the FCC.
If they'd issued an order, it wouldn't be final until it reached SCOTUS! Most regulatory interaction happens informally. A regulator tells a regulated entity to do something, and they do it. Public statements by the FCC commissioner are significant enough to make it into court cases as evidence of the Commision's intent.
That's not "goal post reconstruction". Someone said the FCC took actions. I thought I might have missed them actually _doing_ something, so I was asking about it. The response was to highlight the statements they said.
The point is the FCC Chair making public statements threatening specific regulatory actions against a regulated entity is an action. You're trying to hold the word action to a higher standard than a judge would. The Rubicon was crossed.
> You're certainly very sure of what I was thinking, but you are again wrong
Nope. You're confusing regulatory actions, broadly, with official actions. The FCC didn't take any official action. The FCC Chair absolutely conveyed a credible threat of official action in response to specific political speech; that constitutes a regulatory action.
Like, the SEC announcing they're going to launch an investigation is a regulatory action. The Fed Chair saying they believe the job market is cooling is a regulatory action.
> The decision was guided by what was in the entertainment company's best interest, rather than external pressure from station owners or the FCC, the sources said.
From today's statement: "Last Wednesday, we [Disney] made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country" [1].
We shouldn’t need to clarify this, but Tim Allen and Roseanne Bar were not threatened by high-ranking government officials, right?
These are two completely different situations. If conservatives want to vote with their dollars and boycott Disney, that’s something I wholeheartedly support. If they want to use their power as federal officials to silence voices they disagree with, that’s unacceptable.
> The political right in this country would love for Disney to be boycotted - just saying
Don't care.
We've got two groups of people in this country: those willing to sacrifice our republic for personal enrichment and those who won't bend the knee. (The former need to be heavily investigated over the coming decade, mostly so we can write statute that makes their behaviour criminal in the future.)
The issue most people have with Disney's behavior is that they didn't even attempt to fight.
It's one thing to say "We're going to comply for now, but here are the things we'll be doing to push back..."
Attempting to can Kimmel because he said something the President doesn't like and because it's politically/economically convenient for Disney, without doing anything else?
> Disney content, financially motivated or not, is some of the most left friendly media there is.
This is kind of true, but it isn't correct to color this as Disney doing a favor to the left. The reason their content is "left" friendly is that most people are pretty aligned with the "left" when it comes to social issues.
They are offering this content because it is popular with the majority of people (and thus profitable), not as some sort of favor to their friends.
Even just the vague suggestion of bending the knee here is a massive mistake. It can’t happen.
Even failing to speak up clearly _against_ ”censorship recommendation” is bad neigh that the business should frankly be cancelled to bankruptcy - including parks, cruises and the rest of it.
Disney has been removing queer characters from shows and movies and canceling shows that have large queer audiences. They're not as left friendly as they'd like you to believe.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If Disney goes some Sinclair analog will take over that will probably call queer people mentally ill or something.
I'd be interested to know why you think that is? So far as I can tell all they've done is sprinkle characters here or there that are or might be gay. I haven't seen any shows criticize wealth inequity or champion UBI.
In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana was denied the property she wanted to purchase by the Harvey Brothers (real estate agents) due to racial and socioeconomic discrimination.
> Disney reinstating Kimmel doesn't necessarily mean his show will immediately appear on all ABC-affiliated networks. Conservative broadcaster Sinclair said last week that "regardless of ABC's plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform."
> Station owner Nexstar helped pressure Disney into suspending Kimmel's show last week when it announced its ABC-affiliated stations would not air the show "for the foreseeable future."
This is Disney doing damage control for their streaming platforms and other properties while Kimmel is still censored from a large % of audience he used to reach.
I hope he comes back with a show that burns Trump and Carr to the ground and dares them to try something like that again.
Sinclair blocking Kimmel's show was the first thought on my mind when I saw this headline.
If Disney had any sense at all, they would have realized back when Sinclair was first forcing all their affiliates to air right-wing propaganda,* that their association with Sinclair is an existential threat.
Back then, they should have started dropping their affiliation with Sinclar one tower at a time, as they secure alternative broadcast arrangements in each area. Starting to do it now is better late than never, but I bet Disney execs are too clueless and spineless to stand up to Sinclair is any real way at all, in part because it will cost them a few $$$.
I clearly said: "as they secure alternative broadcast arrangements in each area"
TV broadcast tower agreements are not ossified. Every year some station switches from one to another. Comcast buying NBC led to quite a spate of that in several markets. It can be slightly disruptive on the fringes (like Comcast/NBC*) or it can go unnoticed or even improve reception.
Now this is real patriotism if the First Amendment can quickly prevail, over lesser isms and their anti-American proponents.
Right now, ABC only live-streams on the open web (no Disney+ or anything needed) the shows from their national studios and local affiliates that are produced in-house, mainly from the news departments. Once the news is over each time, on the internet you only get more live news from the web anchor's control room desk, or something like reruns of investigative stories.
Maybe it would have been quite an ordeal to obtain web rights for the entertainment shows (that's a lot), or perhaps they have been holding out to collect extra revenue from those advertisers before showing them online. A year or two ago there were not yet ads on the web during the broadcast news breaks, only a spinner on a splash screen until the ad was over. It wasn't really too bad like that. Now there are ads but I don't know if they are the same as the broadcast ones.
Regardless, this might be a good time to flush it out like it could have been already if they set their mind to it.
Get Kimmel and his advertisers, guests, and musicians to agree to go live on the web and on the air simultaneously so anybody on the web can watch it like they used to do in real-time regardless of whether their local affiliate carries it on the air or not.
Doesn't Walt Disney have an entertainment lawyer or two that could handle this if the right geek was supervising the sprint? Attorneys pulling their weight, with geeks doing the engineering full stop and it could be ready in a week.
This would also be a good time to make special deals with other entertainment powerhouses to get artists like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen to appear who can help build popularity beyond the ability of the haters. And not stop until it's been accomplished.
Maybe a worldwide audience would compensate for a loss in local broadcast consumers.
Never know until you try.
If at all possible they need to throw a grassroots monkey wrench into any media merger plans for the foreseeable future too.
One of the highest priorities for the HN algorithm is to promote good interactions and discourage bad interactions. The logic is if you have a lot of people bickering with each other, regardless of the topic, it normalizes bad behavior. HN is trying to sustain itself as a forum with great discussions, so it very intentionally downranks anything that looks to the algorithm like it has people bickering with each other (eg. Up vote/down vote wars as a proxy for disagreement). Yes, this means many important topics move off the homepage because there is lots of disagreement within them. Encouraging good discussions is consciously viewed as more important than any individual topic.
I think that last line is getting to the point more than most of the discussion I see.
The host of the show doesn’t really decide what he’s going to say. He reads the script the writers deliver (with his approval, I’m sure). He’s the talking head of a production team.
Jimmy Kimmel the person didn’t get taken off the air. Jimmy Kimmel the show did.
That makes it relatively easy to go back on the air, if they simply give new direction (constraints) to the writing team that satisfy the network.
If I were to guess, I doubt Jimmy Kimmel the person cares what the team is or is not allowed to write in the script.
Brendan Carr is overwhelmingly partisan and suprisingly unqualified for the role he occupies as the Chair of the FCC.
Anyone paying attention to his actions over his time in office is not surprised by this outcome.
Carr has been regularly going on podcasts and threatening that the FCC will be "going after" anyone unfavorable to the Trump administration, this is just the first time a company flinched in response.
Im happy to hear Disney is rethinking their reflexive reaction.
Its deeply troubling to see the priorities of the FCC shift from expanding things like access to broadband to instead prioritize podcast appearances and fascistic threats.
Expect more of this, as Carr seems to only be emboldened by the outcome.
The reasoning for why they canned him is a total facade. Nothing he said was really that inflammatory. They canned him because they were afraid the FCC would screw them, then they saw their viewers were angry so they re-negged. Run of the mill spineless bean counters. They kind of won it both ways though, because they were able to feign loyalty and show gov't they only re-instated "because they had to for the money", which Trump will empathize with.
It's worth remembering that Disney is a mega-corporation and all their calculus is like this. They aren't "on our side" (or, for that matter, particularly against LGBTQIA+ interests); they're on the side with money. A company that size doesn't have morals; it has assets and liabilities.
That's why the Disney+ boycott / cancellation response mattered: it forced them to put losing their ABC network affiliate broadcast rights from the government on the T-sheet against losing their expensive bet on Disney+ (and all the consolidation power and direct-feedline money that brings in). If the viewers hadn't acted to put something on the other side of the T-sheet, it'd be an easy choice for the company.
I mostly agree, but the conditions that would upset Trump still exist; more so, in fact, because of the outsized attention this got for Kimmel. And yet here he comes anyways!
I mentioned this in another thread: I think the phrase "anything other than" really messed with people. In the context of his sentence, it does not necessarily mean "obviously he's MAGA", in contrast to how it's often (but not always) used in English. He's using it to emphasize MAGA's behavior, not to emphasize his own opinion of the killer's politics.
Also, it simply wouldn't have made sense for him to declare that the guy was MAGA (or anything else), unless Kimmel is more unreasonable than I thought. I don't know much about him, so I could be wrong on this point, but it just seems like a misinterpretation to me that is fixed by Occam's razor.
Did he actually outright say the shooter was MAGA? The clip I've heard everywhere doesn't have Kimmel saying that at all, just talking about how Republicans are dead-set on making the shooter out not to be one of them (while at that time almost no information about the perpetrator was released).
> “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who m**dered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
I think “as anything other than one of them” could be interpreted that way…maybe.
It also reflects exactly what one could see from the GOP leaders and influencers up to that point, which people immediately assumed this person belonged to their preferred group of boogey men, women, and children.
With the context cues in how he said it, I see how some people could interpret it that way. He profession is being a high context speaker, so I think this interpretation is reasonable.
But, I don't think the interpretation matters, either way. It's not reasonable to use either as justification for his show being cancelled.
Actually what he 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." and it's been taken for granted that what he meant is that Tyler Robinson is MAGA, but that's not strictly what he said.
1. There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
Look, I'm not a Trump apologist. But if you're going to condemn Trump for what it sure looks like he's saying (but he technically didn't quite say), then don't be surprised when other people get condemned by the same standard.
2. If I understand correctly, the shooter's family was fairly conservative. So the right's reaction of "no, he was left" was, at the time, a baseless deflection of baseless accusations.
> There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
The people doing this kind of reframing of Trump's statements are typically doing so to make them seem less inflammatory, usually in response to those who take him at his literal word. 'It's just a joke', 'an exaggeration', 'he didn't mean it literally'. Given how things have been going, it's clear he hasn't been joking.
Kimmel's monologue, taken literally, is completely benign.
At this point his political views are still not clear. You can be pro-trans and pro-Trump at the same time. See: Caitlyn Jenner, who supported Trump in the 2024 election.
Even more so given that all of this pinning on extreme-left groups started before they even found Tyler Robinson and that they did the same in Minnesota a few months ago. I think it's basically accurate: they are desperately trying to characterise it on anyone but their own, and have no regards for any facts. Even if Robinson really is far-left in every way (certainly a realistic possibility), they will be "correct" merely by accident in hindsight.
> At this point his political views are still not clear.
Clear as day. Deranged leftist. No question. As someone who is even now wrong for the right reasons, I wonder if you think maybe the right-for-the-wrong-reasons crowd might have heuristics that are useful and lead to good decision making, and that you have rejected.
Evidence of his actual political affiliation has come out?
All I’ve seen so far is a million sides harping on one minor point of the existing evidence and using that to claim their political opponents are at fault.
The new meta from the past few shootings appears to be just instantly claiming the shooter is from their political opponents side, and then double down on the claim no matter what happens
> Evidence of his actual political affiliation has come out?
Yes, assuming Spencer Cox, Utah law enforcement etc. are not lying.
He is said to have been in a relationship with an MtF partner, and to have communicated repeatedly with that partner, showing sympathy for LGBTQ issues in general, alluding to being part of a left-wing support community, and describing Kirk as a "fascist" and "hateful". His mother has stated that he has shifted towards left-wing politics recently, specifically as regards LGBTQ issues. Much was made initially of his "MAGA" father — who turned him in, and there is much evidence of political disagreement between the two (including in the above-mentioned communications). Cox asserted the suspect to be a leftist in an interview with Meet the Press on the 14th (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/utah-gov-spence...).
Those points could also fit a groyper with parents who don’t recognize that subset of right ideology but appears to have no problem with things like cat boy girlfriends, and were in a feud with Kirk in the months prior to this.
There’s bit and pieces here but nothing conclusive so actually yea I kinda do distrust those figures in government coming out and strongly stating it was one of their political enemies.
I don’t think the conservatives had anything to do with Charlie Kirk dying, but I would not be surprised if they had a playbook ready to go for such an event given how strong of claims they were making about the shooter when the evidence at that point in time didn’t exist.
> Those points could also fit a groyper with parents who don’t recognize that subset of right ideology
You really think they would mistake a groyper for a leftist?
> I would not be surprised if they had a playbook ready to go for such an event given how strong of claims they were making about the shooter when the evidence at that point in time didn’t exist.
"The shooter in a political assassination represents an ideology opposed to the victim and was motivated by a political position opposed to the victim's" should be everyone's prior. It doesn't require a playbook.
He does appear to have a strong bias in past statements, although I don't know how rigorous this analysis is.
"A separate study from the organization claimed that 92 percent of the jokes Kimmel made on his show since January 2023 were at the expense of conservatives, and 97 percent of his political guests were left-leaning."
"Bias" is biased here. There's no reason that jokes should be 50-50% in favor of however political parties are configured. It's entirely possible (and currently the case) that one side of the political aisle is worse and more deserving of ridicule.
Regarding the bleach, it's true he didn't recommend it, but the full quote of him saying it makes it clear that he is a very stupid person.
Also, just today, he promoted bunch of fake science and medicine about Tylenol causing autism, so he's only gotten worse at this since his big bleach idea.
Why do we hold women and comedians to some sort of high standard but there is a whole montage of right wing grifters actively calling for liberal lives?
And it wasn't even a joke, it was a statement about what was going on. It isn't even about what he said, or even Kimmel. Unless he wasn't slathering all over the fake mythos of white washing this Kimmels racist, bigoted hateful grift, the right was going to go after him for literally anything.
Kimmel's crime is laughing at Trump and pointing out his brain dead hypocrisy.
For further context, he said that the right was doing everything in their power to portray him as anything but one of them. I.e. in the absence of evidence they were attempting to pin the blame on the left.
You are correct, and it's important that we don't continue the game of telephone that seems to be destroying this country.
"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 with everything they can to score political points from it."
This was his exact quote and he's 100% right. The entire admin had called out the "Radical left" as the perpetrators before we even had a photo of the shooter. Can we please go back towards the reality where we actually read and understand the words being said instead of having them all parroted to us by media headlines?
True, but I guess I could see how people hearing it might read it that way. The general debate was between the shooter being a left winger or a right winger. He said they were wrong about him not being a right winger.
He didn't even necessarily say they were wrong about it. He just emphasized that their top priority was making sure they could score points from it:
> 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. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.
He didn't say that either technically. He said the right was trying very hard to make it look like the guy was not MAGA, which was true. Before any information was known, the right was claiming he was trans, a Democrat, whatever, and saying they had to go to war with the left, etc.
We have to hold comedians to highest possible journalistic standard while allowing Fox News to be entertainment. This country runs on double standards.
If you want to ban saying something false then you need to start with arresting everyone who loudly and aggressively claimed that the murdered of the Democratic politicians in Minnesota was a far-left extremist and all of that. People are still claiming this, I believe.
Or maybe start with all the people who kept on claiming that migrants are eating people's cats and dogs.
etc. etc. etc. I can go on and on.
Applying the most strictest of strictest interpretation of the law for your enemies while being exceedingly lax with the law for your friends is one if the key hallmarks of authoritarianism.
You can say basically whatever you want in the United States, with few exceptions.
‘Inciting imminent lawlessness’ aka starting a riot is not protected speech, making threats against the US President is also illegal. There might be other items of speech that are forbidden that I am not remembering.
You can be sued for defamation, but it’s very hard to prove as you must prove the speaker knew what they were saying was false, which is hard to prove.
But lies? You can lie all you want as a private citizen and the government cannot stop you.
That's not how law works in most places. Even in most European countries with more expansive defamation laws merely saying false things as such is not against the law. And it wasn't really defaming anyone, so none of that applies in the first place.
He wouldn't be reinstated if it was censorship. The government didn't back down, just Disney did. This just shows Disney wasn't forced to remove him as some thought, they cancelled his show willingly so could take it back.
Business consolidation is a civil rights issue. Now every industry is led by giant monopolies that owe the administration favors. The appeasement of autocrats by capitalists for more market control is so inextricable from capitalism itself that any "capitalism" without it is a pure fantasy.
Ironically the FCC will be approving the Nexstar waiver after finding that the merger will not impact the national conversation by having one group own too many stations/have too much power.
It's seriously embarrassing a bunch of conservatives are demanding Kimmel to be cancelled over his frankly tame comments when they were all most likely the exact same people screaming about the "cancel culture liberals" for years. Truly pathetic how they're flip flopping on this.
and frankly i don't care about kimmel either, i just think if people are going to complain on either side they need to thicken their skin and accept when the tables turn
If the president didn't say or tweet every thought that came into his head, he would probably be more successful at implementing even more of his authoritarian goals.
Disney was really in a pickle here, because the "right" already hates them for having a few gay characters and characters of disfavored races, so capitulating to Trump's illegal and immoral censorship would leave them with no political allies.
Disney made a preschool-level bad choice. Grade schoolers have figured out that capitulating to a bully is how you signal you want more bulling.
Disney also had examples of law firms and universities that bent the knee to the whitehouse - and how that turned out for them. The reward for tanking their reputations was more whitehouse demands.
I mean, businesses need to be impartial and take no sides. Their goal is to serve both sides of the aisle. If you have a business or you're the CEO, CTO, etc., you can share your political views privately.
> I mean, businesses need to be impartial and take no sides. Their goal is to serve both sides of the aisle.
Selling in itself tends to be impartial. The experience can be something else. The place I buy tires from proudly advertises their fandom for the WH occupant. They also treat me better than the neutral-appearing, sanitized tire shops.
If my county harassed them for their advertised orientation, the bad actor in that equation would be my county.
For anyone not informed, Jones’ exorbitant fines were that way because of his consistently excessive behavior in court and lack of willingness to cooperate. The judge gave him multiple chances. You shouldn’t expect that to happen to anyone else because normal people obey their lawyer when their lawyer tells them to quiet down.
Jones was defaulted before trial in both cases because he wasn't complying with discovery. The defense asked for documents and testimony which his company refused to provide. Documents like the finances for the company (totally normal). You are correct that he was given multiple chances to fix the problem. He'd literally fire his lawyers between almost every deposition so that they couldn't provide the requested documents.
But the actual fines came from the jury from the trial. civil cases have 2 parts, are you guilty and if so for how much. Jones lost the "are you guilty" by default and the how much was determined by a jury of his peers after a trial (and accepted by the judge).
I think with Jones it's important to get everything straight as he likes to claim that he was silenced and steamrolled. He was neither. He lost that much money because his actions were horrendous.
> And no, there's no need for politeness, because the assassination victim was an asshole
I mean, did you see what he was wearing? He definitely had it coming.
I wasn't a fan of his, but if your source about what Charlie Kirk was out there doing and saying is The Nation of all places, you're not exactly informed on the topic.
I collect propaganda videos on Instagram. Here's a couple examples that were floating around recently:
Seeing a lot of hate for a trans person here? https://www.instagram.com/p/DOfU33FDEwp/
So it's nice that he managed to be superficially polite to one trans person once (while not actually saying anything of substance except that they should just stop being trans), but let's not pretend that he had any kind of sympathetic view of trans people.
I'm trying not to read too much into it, but if anything, that's the kind of strident response that I would expect from a group that is questioning their own responsibility in this.
If your reaction to someone saying untrue things is to immediately apply political pressure to hush them up, you've either lost confidence that the truth can win out in public light or you have something to hide.
Well, for sure it wasn't hate speech, and even if it was, the federal government should have no say in whether it's aired, but it pretty easily crosses the threshold "our" side (I'm being presumptive about your politics) set over the last 5 years for misinformation. I don't want to take the other side of this "it's bad he was censored" argument, but I don't think we should be valorizing what Kimmel said, either.
“The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,”
That is no more an accusation or a statement of fact as me saying "politicians are anything other than self-interested." It's a rhetorical claim, not a statement of fact.
It wasn't one of them. The implication of the statement was pretty clear. I'm twitchy about this because my TL and all the spaces I talk about politics in were lit up with people trying to find some combination of tea leaves indicating Robinson was a Nick Fuentes follower. I was personally convinced the shooter would be ideologically illegible, like the Minnesota shooter --- another "O9A" case. I was wrong. So was Kimmel.
And there was just no reason for him to be! I was mouthing off on local politics boards and in Slack channels; there were no consequences. Kimmel went out on that limb on broadcast television. It's a dying medium, but it's still a bigger deal than saying it privately.
Again: none of this is to say that he deserved the outcome he got. Though, I've said this before and will repeat it: the administration probably did us a huge favor here, shifting the narrative from the Kirk shooting to Kimmel's censorship.
The idea he is pushing misinformation is ridiculous,he didn't speak on the motives of the shooter only on magas insistence he wasn't maga. He didn't say he was maga, merely focused on the performative finger pointing of Republicans
> he didn't speak on the motives of the shooter only on magas insistence he wasn't maga. He didn't say he was maga, merely focused on the performative finger pointing of Republicans
The only thing that could have validated such finger pointing is a belief that the shooter actually was "maga". In the absence of such a belief, to say that "maga" was disavowing the shooter is not an accusation of wrongdoing. But the claim was prefaced with an assertion that "we hit a new low" in the form of this disavowal; therefore Kimmel did see it as an accusation of wrongdoing.
I don't think he "is", present tense, and implying continuity, "pushing misinformation". I think he's an entertainer with basically my politics and a pretty good writing staff, and I think he made a mistake common at that moment to people with my politics. I don't find it disqualifying. But it was not, in and of itself, good.
His employer was pressured by the government to fire him because he made a joke about the president and his followers. That's a huge deal for anyone who cares about free speech.
I would love to see some citations here around serious violence problems on the left. I understand HN can be a bubble chamber, so I'm genuinely looking for a first party source the can corroborate that kind of statement
Meh. Kimmel has a history of racist and sexist comedy, to include blackface performances. For me, that’s a big turn off.
I think Ted Cruz had the right attitude for this one. It’s unwise to hammer unfairly on the opposition when you’re in power, because the pendulum inevitably swings back.
This is incredibly hyperbolic and misleading. The Communications Act of 1934 was passed for a variety of very necessary reasons at the time, the most important being making sure broadcasters didn't hijack each other's signals.
Coughlin's show coincided with the creation of the FCC and they never really tangled. His show was pulled off the network a full 5 years after the FCC was established. FCC regulation may have had a part in that, but there is no reason to believe he in particular was targeted and certainly not that the law was passed to target him.
In an amusingly bald bit of Wikipedia editorializing, while the Coughlin page links to the Communications Act page in the context of (as the upthread throwaway account[1] says) half-implying that it was created to censor opinions...
For anyone interested, I went digging. In fact the citation for that (FCC Chair) McNinch quote that is (not quite correctly) excerpted in the Coughlin article is a 1938 Times article talking about how he'd "recently" said it in a speech (I can't find a cite for the speech itself).
The FCC was created in 1934, four years earlier. So arguing from this basis that it was created to censor is clearly just plain wrong. The wikipedia narrative on the Coughlin page is basically a lie.
Government licensing of radio spectrum preceded the FCC and was in response to the RF chaos that hampered the rescue operation after the sinking of the Titanic[1].
You are spreading misinformation. The FCC existed before Coughlin. Furthermore, the FCC declined to take action on Coughlin despite all the pressure it got from the public. Instead, it was the National Association of Broadcasters that forced him off the air.
> After making attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program Golden Hour to broadcast antisemitic commentary. In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5]
Absolute howler. He was a full-throated Nazi. He literally cheered for Kristallnacht[1].
> During his radio broadcast on November 20, 1938, while reports of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany were still on the front pages of many American newspapers, Coughlin defended the Nazi attacks as justified. Claiming to merely be a “student of history,” he traced “the causes of the effect known as Naziism” [sic] for his listeners, concluding that Nazism had “evolved to act as a defense mechanism against the incursions of Communism.”
Coughlin was an anti-communist antisemite who was sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini and advocated for government control over industry in the 1930s. I would also read that as fascism, yes.
> In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, using the slogan "Social Justice".
Sounds like you're confused, or disingenuous? I prefer to give benefit of the doubt though. Which part of the Nazi policies and anti-semitism that he advocated do you consider peaceful?
If you didn't think it was a worthwhile source, why did you link it? Seems to be a bit of a double standard if you're using it to bolster your claim (without actually using the page, mind you) and object to others doing the same.
The statement "The FCC was created in order to prevent the airing of opinions the government disfavored" does not seem to be "incontrovertible".
Important to note, the source for this section is an article from slate, which also includes paragraphs such as:
> During the blowback, Coughlin could still count on support from one corner. Nazi Germany characterized the efforts to rein in Coughlin as “a typical case of Jewish terrorism of American public opinion.” Coughlin agreed, portraying himself as a victim of Jewish-owned media.
> It got worse. On Dec. 5, 1938, in Coughlin’s house organ Social Justice, under his own byline, he plagiarized a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, originally delivered in 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. By then, quipsters were referring to Coughlin’s church as “the Shrine of the Little Führer.”[1]
Hahaha this quote is fantastic! Bound to piss off all kinds of nut jobs and radicals!
> In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, using the slogan "Social Justice".
Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this jackass
You should not find it weird to see any comment in this thread immediately flagged due to an opposing view disagreeing with it. It's a hot political story in nature, therefore it's controversial. It's really this simple.
So now we know the reality. An employer, Disney, felt an employee, Kimmel, was damaging their business, let's not forget the point of an employee is to make money for their employer, and as a result took corrective action with the employee. Who was not fired. If a waiter at a restaurant was offending the customers, he would have been fired. Kimmel was treated very kindly and will continue to receive his paycheck. Looks like the wailing about free speech missed the mark
Irrelevant. You were arguing this was an ordinary part of business, and the point is that it clearly isn’t.
Now you’re moving on to how much it matters that the government made such a demand. It matters very much, because it is unprecedented and outrageous. But I was only replying to your partial account, which left out the most crucial aspect of the entire affair.
> It matters very much, because it is unprecedented and outrageous
It isn't unprecedented, Biden administration did that as well. This is normal for the US government, they never were strict with free speech they always pressured corporations to censor.
Companies are driven by profits, but their decisions are usually based on legalities. I think their knee-jerk reaction to pull Kimmel was due to what might happen, or what the government was threatening to do. That doesn't amount to damages, legally. However, if they bring Kimmel back, and the government follows through on its initial threats, then that does amount to damages for which they can sue the government.
I'm sure Disney is aware that there will be consequences to reinstating Kimmel. Maybe their proposed merger won't go through. Maybe something else—but they will be punished by the administration for it.
They didn't ignore it. The show was suspended for several days. Over some really tame remarks. The warning is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
Disney was probably inundated with demands from other on air talent to reinstate the employee. They then made the calculated judgment that maintaining good employee relations was on balance better served by putting the employee back on the assembly line. This is all usual and standard business. Anyone on here that has ever worked a job has contract that says what they can and cannot do while in the employ of the company.
Even if a man is dying of cancer that does not justify the government murdering him.
The Trump appointed FCC head, who is currently evaluating multiple multi-billion dollar requests, said about Kimmel 'we can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way'.
Disney was getting some pretty funny international ridicule over canceling Kimmel. The best I've seen was this video [1] produced by a late-night show in the Netherlands of Disney announcing a new direction to better serve today's audiences.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_hQ1plKmCM
I took it as more of a ridicule of Trump than Disney.
Disney needs a win badly, even if it's imagined.
[flagged]
>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.
>In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
Can you show methe lie Kimmel told?
I wonder if US citizens are too far ensconced in team politics to get the real words said.
Breaking apart the above, 'MAGA' as a start. Not republican. Not right wing. MAGA. There is a difference, MAGA being a wide range of people mostly on the right. And when someone references MAGA as a specific group, they're not saying "the right" necessarily, but "people who identify as MAGA".
Both the democrats and republicans in the US have a myriad of groupings of individuals who are forced under one banner or the other.
For example there are christians which believe that their local democrats won't represent them, so they're forced to join the republican camp.
And beyond this, a democrat running in California will espouse entirely different beliefs than one running in Ohio. Or Texas.
So if there is some undesirable characteristic specific to MAGA but not necessarily the right or all republicans, this could apply here. And therefore, "One of them" doesn't necessarily mean 'left' or 'right', because somethings are about individual actions of specific people, not about pointing at an entire team.
Outside of eliminating campaign funding, having more than two political parties in the US would be key, I think, to fixing some of this.
That kind of denialism doesn't help, it just empowers the "eye for an eye" faction even more because they see that the left is incapable of self reflection.
The killer is far left. There is plenty of evidence and it's all fully consistent on that matter, even beyond the obvious nature of the act itself. It has been consistent since the first moments.
The right are upset about this! And they're even more upset about the mass celebrations on the left at the successful assassination. It comes on the heels of multiple attempts on Trump, Antifa trying to mass murder ICE agents and many other horrific events that show a sustained pattern of behavior.
When Kimmel claimed the "MAGA gang" (a deliberately insulting term) had "hit new lows", he was making the insane claim that being upset about political assassination is a "low" and "point scoring". And then he went on to deceive his audience. Instead of admitting that the "MAGA gang" were correct from the start, he claims they were "desperately trying" to "characterize" the assassin as on the left.
This phrasing tells the listener that the reason the right had to "desperately try" is because what they were saying was "a new low", weak or untrue, which is why it was a mere "characterization" and not a statement of fact.
It is obviously dishonest. When people defend such dishonesty and claim it's not a lie it reinforces the strong impression being received by hundreds of millions of people that everyone on the left is malicious and potentially dangerous. That's by far the most risky path forward.
People like Kimmel are getting this stuff from social media. It's flooded with people who are denying the truth, even trying to claim he's some sort of MAGA extremist. The author of the top politics Substack, who has over 3.2M Facebook followers and 2.5M subscribers, has told that exact lie. And she hasn't corrected herself either.
Left wing pundits need to be honest with their audience. The killer did it for their beliefs, motivated by their hatreds, encouraged by their celebrations of people like Mangione and Crooks. Instead of taking the high road and being the bearer of bad news, they've doubled down on manipulating their audience.
And now Disney has said that's OK, they approve of that behavior. The left certainly cannot claim to have a problem with misinformation now!
You have deliberately ignored, overlooked, mischaracterized, exaggerated, and regurgitated rhetoric just to fit your narrative. Ignoring anything inconvenient while finger-pointing in outrage is rather comical to those who aren’t on either side.
Also, do you not remember 86-46 MAGA t-shirts? A call to stand up and fight followed by a violent incursion into private areas of the capital in order to “stop the steal” (a lie), where deadly force was REQUIRED as they broke windows and forced through barriers, you know where they were “invited”? Did you forget about all the literal death threats that made to judges and politicians any time they go against Trump? Did you forget all the MAGA death threats sent regarding the women and children families of those same judges? People showing up with guns because drag queens were reading to kids?
Most people don’t have the memory of a goldfish, so the mock outrage just doesn’t cut through the noise.
Having to listen to whatever party isn’t in power whine is just another day for most of us to laugh at the stupidity of it all. It’s new to have to also listen to the ones in power whining and playing the victim still.
Oh I found the lie
>"a new low"
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/20/politics/fact-check-charl...
And if you think "MAGA gang" is an deliberately insulting term then I want to know what you call all the insaults of the president. MAGA gang is pretty harmless. At Kimmel is right, they try to score political points from it. If you don't see that you shpuld reflect on your own denial.
Maybe you should start check how often the MAGA site called the other side evil, enemy of the state, abomination to god and even wished for the death penalty for Biden and then compare that to what Kimmel said. Ridicilous in taking offense in that but not all what happenend before.
>The killer did it for their beliefs, motivated by their hatreds, encouraged by their celebrations of people like Mangione and Crooks. Instead of taking the high road and being the bearer of bad news, they've doubled down on manipulating their audience.
So you know more about the killer's motives than the authorities or you are just plain wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/charlie-kirk...
The Guardian article says what I'm saying and quotes the authorities saying that too. Why are you citing that as an argument?
> Prosecutors allege that, after Robinson’s arrest in Kirk’s killing, his mother told investigators that her son had spent the previous year or so becoming “more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented”.
and
> Tyler explained “there is too much evil” and the Turning Point USA executive director “spreads too much hate”.
Who talks like that about conservatives? The left do. What does his family say? That he became left wing and was motivated by trans activism. What do the authorities say? That he was a leftist. What did the bullets that he left behind say? Left wing memes and slogans.
Do you see why social media posts like yours are creating massive concern all across society at the moment? You're not only getting your info from the most biased sources out there but citing reports that contradict what you're saying, maybe without noticing. It's freaky and scaring a lot of people.
As if conservatives don’t say the exact same type of things, get real.
[dead]
How does the FCC even matter anymore when people are increasingly getting their content via streaming? The only reason they have any leverage over Kimmel at all (and not, for example, South Park) is because ABC still broadcasts it.
> How does the FCC even matter anymore when people are increasingly getting their content via streaming?
"The ability of the FCC to regulate internet content and platforms depends on statutory authority. In holding the forums on captioning of online video content, the FCC could look to the language of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which included language that asked the FCC to look at the accessibility of video content used on internet platforms. In other areas, the FCC’s jurisdiction is not as clear, but calls arise regularly for the FCC to act to regulate content that, as we have written in other contexts, looks more and more like broadcast content and competes directly with that content.
Calls for the FCC to regulate internet content and the companies that provide that content are certain to multiply. In another of our weekly summaries of regulatory actions of interest to broadcasters, we noted recent meetings with FCC Commissioners’ offices by representatives of the TV affiliates organizations, in which they asked that the FCC consider regulation of linear programming services delivered through internet platforms in the same way that they regulate cable and satellite multichannel video providers, including the possibility of adopting a system of must-carry and retransmission consent. This is not at all a new idea, having been raised in 2014 in an FCC proceeding that asked for public comment on the question of whether to subject online video providers to MVPD regulation – a proceeding that never resulted in any action" [1].
[1] https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2022/05/articles/does-the-f...
Because they still have leverage over local stations and in turn those stats have leverage over ABC/Disney.
They capitulated because they lost the right a few years ago, and they can't lose the left either.
I hope it cost them a few percent revenue at least. I’m not resubscribing any time soon.
The political right in this country would love for Disney to be boycotted - just saying.
WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE POLITICAL!!
The bar is much higher for the left.
[flagged]
The “right” isn’t a single voice. Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/ted-cruz-fcc-brend...
The left is not a single voice. A few dangerous voices cheered assasinations while many decried it for what it was.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,... you know what they say
> The “right” isn’t a single voice.
I disagree. Trump, IMO, has been a cult-like leader for the GOP since 2016. And he even called for more networks to lose their licenses over "dishonesty" after this incident[0]. Not to mention the multitude of scandals that we've seen like: law firm security clearance revocation as retribution for supporting Trump's opponents, deporting legal residents over their protest against Israel, and various lawsuits he's engaged in as President against media corporations, pollsters, etc.. who disfavour him[1].
> Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was
"many" is Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz? To my knowledge, they haven't called out Trump specifically for attacks on the First Amendment, only Brendan Carr. That's fine and dandy, but no one on the right seems willing to take the plunge for some reason on the huge array of issues that cropped up before this FCC threat against ABC.
0: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5514110-trump-ne...
1: https://www.ibanet.org/Trumps-assault-on-the-First-Amendment
I think rank and file folks are waking up a bit. Things are hard in the economy and tgey are seeing their moms, aunts, sisters, and daughters get impacted by reductions to women's healthcare.
Nobody has any principles here my friend. There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.
But yes, apparently everyone hates Disney and wants them to go bankrupt. So finally the left and right agree on one thing.
Unfortunately for Kimmel, late night TV is irrelevant dinosaur so he better extract as much money as he can before he inevitably ends up like Colbert.
"long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats"
If we exclude the people advocating violence and discrimination against others due to their immutable characteristics, we find that its not such a "long" list after all.
> long list of people canceled
This FCC action was censorship, not cancel culture.
What, exactly, was the FCC action here? Not comments by people at the FCC, what specific actions did the FCC take?
Comments by government officials aren't protected free speech because government officials control policy.
There have been market panics ended by the right words at the right time. It's a different kind of speech entirely from criticism of the government by those without direct political power.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/media/brendan-carr-jimmy-kimm...
Those are the actions he took as an official at the FCC.[flagged]
> so no actions, just statements
This is mind-numbing goal-post reconstruction.
If they'd issued an order, it wouldn't be final until it reached SCOTUS! Most regulatory interaction happens informally. A regulator tells a regulated entity to do something, and they do it. Public statements by the FCC commissioner are significant enough to make it into court cases as evidence of the Commision's intent.
That's not "goal post reconstruction". Someone said the FCC took actions. I thought I might have missed them actually _doing_ something, so I was asking about it. The response was to highlight the statements they said.
The point is the FCC Chair making public statements threatening specific regulatory actions against a regulated entity is an action. You're trying to hold the word action to a higher standard than a judge would. The Rubicon was crossed.
[flagged]
> You're certainly very sure of what I was thinking, but you are again wrong
Nope. You're confusing regulatory actions, broadly, with official actions. The FCC didn't take any official action. The FCC Chair absolutely conveyed a credible threat of official action in response to specific political speech; that constitutes a regulatory action.
Like, the SEC announcing they're going to launch an investigation is a regulatory action. The Fed Chair saying they believe the job market is cooling is a regulatory action.
They literally said the easy way or the hard way. What do you think the hard way is?
Reuter's reported that Disney did this to protect the company’s interest and was not due to the FCC.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-says-j...
Protect the company from what? What is the quote you're referencing here?
> The decision was guided by what was in the entertainment company's best interest, rather than external pressure from station owners or the FCC, the sources said.
That's a word salad.
From today's statement: "Last Wednesday, we [Disney] made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country" [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/22/nx-s1-5550330/jimmy-kimmel-ba...
It's not a word salad. It says this wasn't because of the FCC. Disney made the decision. And then they unmade it.
> There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.
The list I keep seeing from people on the right is Rosanne Barr and Tim Allen... who were "cancelled" in 2018 and 2017 respectively.
My memory is bad, so.. who was the wokie leftist President in office in 2017 and 2018 again?
We shouldn’t need to clarify this, but Tim Allen and Roseanne Bar were not threatened by high-ranking government officials, right?
These are two completely different situations. If conservatives want to vote with their dollars and boycott Disney, that’s something I wholeheartedly support. If they want to use their power as federal officials to silence voices they disagree with, that’s unacceptable.
> The political right in this country would love for Disney to be boycotted - just saying
Don't care.
We've got two groups of people in this country: those willing to sacrifice our republic for personal enrichment and those who won't bend the knee. (The former need to be heavily investigated over the coming decade, mostly so we can write statute that makes their behaviour criminal in the future.)
What about those who have to bend the knee because they are responsible for thousands of jobs?
Do you care about the normal people working at ABC who would lose their jobs if ABC loses its license?
The issue most people have with Disney's behavior is that they didn't even attempt to fight.
It's one thing to say "We're going to comply for now, but here are the things we'll be doing to push back..."
Attempting to can Kimmel because he said something the President doesn't like and because it's politically/economically convenient for Disney, without doing anything else?
That's just cowardice.
So we should all surender all of our rights and beliefs on the altar of The Economy
That's one thing that bugs the shit out of me about the effective altruism crowd.
If everyone justifies acting like a capitalist monster, so then they can use their gains to do good things...
... but as soon as they retire they're replaced by someone else also doing EA...
... then the end result is the entire economy controlled by monsters, always. (Plus a bunch of wealthy retirees playing charity)
It's a game of chicken that Trump has been losing. Even Tucker Carlson is saying "wait a minute". Disney/ABC is just run by cowards.
Disney is a friend. You want to hurt them just enough to make a point but not enough to seriously hurt a actual ally.
Disney content, financially motivated or not, is some of the most left friendly media there is.
> Disney content, financially motivated or not, is some of the most left friendly media there is.
This is kind of true, but it isn't correct to color this as Disney doing a favor to the left. The reason their content is "left" friendly is that most people are pretty aligned with the "left" when it comes to social issues.
They are offering this content because it is popular with the majority of people (and thus profitable), not as some sort of favor to their friends.
I thought we had all collective moved past the naive idea that any corporation is ever "your friend".
But it’s also naive to think corporations aren’t made of feeling humans who sometimes want to do the right thing.
Agreed... but Disney is a terrible example of that. Sometimes an anti-example, historically.
I have no mega corporations on my friend list.
Even just the vague suggestion of bending the knee here is a massive mistake. It can’t happen.
Even failing to speak up clearly _against_ ”censorship recommendation” is bad neigh that the business should frankly be cancelled to bankruptcy - including parks, cruises and the rest of it.
Strange how people are more willing to fight the companies that are somewhat on their side than those who are openly opposing them.
It's a lot easier to affect the behavior of a company that's actively trying to get your business, versus one that has already written you off.
Like canceling newsmax? Or quitting Rogan?
I can’t. And I can’t vote. I can not buy a Tesla and cancel Disney but that’s it.
Disney has been removing queer characters from shows and movies and canceling shows that have large queer audiences. They're not as left friendly as they'd like you to believe.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If Disney goes some Sinclair analog will take over that will probably call queer people mentally ill or something.
You both make good points.
Disney forgot who their friends were. They need to stay in the sin bin until they fully realize it.
I'd be interested to know why you think that is? So far as I can tell all they've done is sprinkle characters here or there that are or might be gay. I haven't seen any shows criticize wealth inequity or champion UBI.
In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana was denied the property she wanted to purchase by the Harvey Brothers (real estate agents) due to racial and socioeconomic discrimination.
Aladdin criticizes wealth inequality.
UBI isn't easily adapted into children's programming.
> Disney reinstating Kimmel doesn't necessarily mean his show will immediately appear on all ABC-affiliated networks. Conservative broadcaster Sinclair said last week that "regardless of ABC's plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform."
> Station owner Nexstar helped pressure Disney into suspending Kimmel's show last week when it announced its ABC-affiliated stations would not air the show "for the foreseeable future."
This is Disney doing damage control for their streaming platforms and other properties while Kimmel is still censored from a large % of audience he used to reach.
I hope he comes back with a show that burns Trump and Carr to the ground and dares them to try something like that again.
Sinclair blocking Kimmel's show was the first thought on my mind when I saw this headline.
If Disney had any sense at all, they would have realized back when Sinclair was first forcing all their affiliates to air right-wing propaganda,* that their association with Sinclair is an existential threat.
Back then, they should have started dropping their affiliation with Sinclar one tower at a time, as they secure alternative broadcast arrangements in each area. Starting to do it now is better late than never, but I bet Disney execs are too clueless and spineless to stand up to Sinclair is any real way at all, in part because it will cost them a few $$$.
* https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/19/sinclair.kerry/
Unfortunately trying to drop Sinclair stations piecemeal (or otherwise) would break enough markets to attract regulatory attention.
One just does not drop ABC from a market and expect nobody to notice.
I clearly said: "as they secure alternative broadcast arrangements in each area"
TV broadcast tower agreements are not ossified. Every year some station switches from one to another. Comcast buying NBC led to quite a spate of that in several markets. It can be slightly disruptive on the fringes (like Comcast/NBC*) or it can go unnoticed or even improve reception.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbVXUaDAcBg
If you don't think companies like Sinclair should have so much power, contact the FCC and let them know the Nexstar merger shouldn't go through.
https://www.fcc.gov/transaction/nexstar-tribune
But can Disney do anything about the censoring by Nextstar and Sinclair?
>Disney reinstates Jimmy Kimmel
It couldn't happen to more deserving citizens.
Now this is real patriotism if the First Amendment can quickly prevail, over lesser isms and their anti-American proponents.
Right now, ABC only live-streams on the open web (no Disney+ or anything needed) the shows from their national studios and local affiliates that are produced in-house, mainly from the news departments. Once the news is over each time, on the internet you only get more live news from the web anchor's control room desk, or something like reruns of investigative stories.
Maybe it would have been quite an ordeal to obtain web rights for the entertainment shows (that's a lot), or perhaps they have been holding out to collect extra revenue from those advertisers before showing them online. A year or two ago there were not yet ads on the web during the broadcast news breaks, only a spinner on a splash screen until the ad was over. It wasn't really too bad like that. Now there are ads but I don't know if they are the same as the broadcast ones.
Regardless, this might be a good time to flush it out like it could have been already if they set their mind to it.
Get Kimmel and his advertisers, guests, and musicians to agree to go live on the web and on the air simultaneously so anybody on the web can watch it like they used to do in real-time regardless of whether their local affiliate carries it on the air or not.
Doesn't Walt Disney have an entertainment lawyer or two that could handle this if the right geek was supervising the sprint? Attorneys pulling their weight, with geeks doing the engineering full stop and it could be ready in a week.
This would also be a good time to make special deals with other entertainment powerhouses to get artists like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen to appear who can help build popularity beyond the ability of the haters. And not stop until it's been accomplished.
Maybe a worldwide audience would compensate for a loss in local broadcast consumers.
Never know until you try.
If at all possible they need to throw a grassroots monkey wrench into any media merger plans for the foreseeable future too.
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Is it me, or is this awesome site turning into Reddit v2?
Weird that this got more than 100 votes in less than an hour then got pushed to page 2. I don't understand the HN algorithm I guess.
One of the highest priorities for the HN algorithm is to promote good interactions and discourage bad interactions. The logic is if you have a lot of people bickering with each other, regardless of the topic, it normalizes bad behavior. HN is trying to sustain itself as a forum with great discussions, so it very intentionally downranks anything that looks to the algorithm like it has people bickering with each other (eg. Up vote/down vote wars as a proxy for disagreement). Yes, this means many important topics move off the homepage because there is lots of disagreement within them. Encouraging good discussions is consciously viewed as more important than any individual topic.
It set off the flamewar detector. That's pretty standard (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
People like curiosity, not vitriol.
Just bookmark https://news.ycombinator.com/active and you will see the actual, real frontpage.
Those threads wouldn't exist if the real frontpage didn't exist, because the real frontpage is what keeps this site existing at all.
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Only after a backlash. I'm sure Jimmy will still take it because what other choice does he have really.
But if he were solid he'd do a Johnny Depp and be like "never working with you fuckers again".
Granted, he has a lot more support staff whose jobs he needs to worry about, too.
Good last line. Yep, I immediately thought of all the behind the camera people it takes to run a show like that.
Conan O'brien also notably ensured his entire team was account for during the whole Tonight Show debacle, and onward.
He's still under contract with ABC too so he's not got an easy way out
I think that last line is getting to the point more than most of the discussion I see.
The host of the show doesn’t really decide what he’s going to say. He reads the script the writers deliver (with his approval, I’m sure). He’s the talking head of a production team.
Jimmy Kimmel the person didn’t get taken off the air. Jimmy Kimmel the show did.
That makes it relatively easy to go back on the air, if they simply give new direction (constraints) to the writing team that satisfy the network.
If I were to guess, I doubt Jimmy Kimmel the person cares what the team is or is not allowed to write in the script.
Brendan Carr is overwhelmingly partisan and suprisingly unqualified for the role he occupies as the Chair of the FCC. Anyone paying attention to his actions over his time in office is not surprised by this outcome. Carr has been regularly going on podcasts and threatening that the FCC will be "going after" anyone unfavorable to the Trump administration, this is just the first time a company flinched in response. Im happy to hear Disney is rethinking their reflexive reaction.
Its deeply troubling to see the priorities of the FCC shift from expanding things like access to broadband to instead prioritize podcast appearances and fascistic threats. Expect more of this, as Carr seems to only be emboldened by the outcome.
Carr needs to leave. It isn't his job to police the political airwaves.
The reasoning for why they canned him is a total facade. Nothing he said was really that inflammatory. They canned him because they were afraid the FCC would screw them, then they saw their viewers were angry so they re-negged. Run of the mill spineless bean counters. They kind of won it both ways though, because they were able to feign loyalty and show gov't they only re-instated "because they had to for the money", which Trump will empathize with.
I believe statements directed at Donald's emotional reaction to the incident were the most impactful to any direct reaction from the White House.
To Donald's credit he gave a moving and eloquent eulogy for the First Amendment at the recent memorial.
And then, standing next to the widow, did the stupidest goofy whiteboy dance I've ever seen. Because he is a malignant narcissist with zero tact.
It's worth remembering that Disney is a mega-corporation and all their calculus is like this. They aren't "on our side" (or, for that matter, particularly against LGBTQIA+ interests); they're on the side with money. A company that size doesn't have morals; it has assets and liabilities.
That's why the Disney+ boycott / cancellation response mattered: it forced them to put losing their ABC network affiliate broadcast rights from the government on the T-sheet against losing their expensive bet on Disney+ (and all the consolidation power and direct-feedline money that brings in). If the viewers hadn't acted to put something on the other side of the T-sheet, it'd be an easy choice for the company.
I mostly agree, but the conditions that would upset Trump still exist; more so, in fact, because of the outsized attention this got for Kimmel. And yet here he comes anyways!
"reneged"
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>The shooter was a MAGA conservative
I mentioned this in another thread: I think the phrase "anything other than" really messed with people. In the context of his sentence, it does not necessarily mean "obviously he's MAGA", in contrast to how it's often (but not always) used in English. He's using it to emphasize MAGA's behavior, not to emphasize his own opinion of the killer's politics.
Also, it simply wouldn't have made sense for him to declare that the guy was MAGA (or anything else), unless Kimmel is more unreasonable than I thought. I don't know much about him, so I could be wrong on this point, but it just seems like a misinterpretation to me that is fixed by Occam's razor.
Did he actually outright say the shooter was MAGA? The clip I've heard everywhere doesn't have Kimmel saying that at all, just talking about how Republicans are dead-set on making the shooter out not to be one of them (while at that time almost no information about the perpetrator was released).
> “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who m**dered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
I think “as anything other than one of them” could be interpreted that way…maybe.
It also reflects exactly what one could see from the GOP leaders and influencers up to that point, which people immediately assumed this person belonged to their preferred group of boogey men, women, and children.
He said that maga are saying he isn't maga which is objectively true and doesn't weigh in on his actual motives
If read directly, then I agree.
With the context cues in how he said it, I see how some people could interpret it that way. He profession is being a high context speaker, so I think this interpretation is reasonable.
But, I don't think the interpretation matters, either way. It's not reasonable to use either as justification for his show being cancelled.
Actually what he 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." and it's been taken for granted that what he meant is that Tyler Robinson is MAGA, but that's not strictly what he said.
Two points:
1. There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
Look, I'm not a Trump apologist. But if you're going to condemn Trump for what it sure looks like he's saying (but he technically didn't quite say), then don't be surprised when other people get condemned by the same standard.
2. If I understand correctly, the shooter's family was fairly conservative. So the right's reaction of "no, he was left" was, at the time, a baseless deflection of baseless accusations.
> There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
The people doing this kind of reframing of Trump's statements are typically doing so to make them seem less inflammatory, usually in response to those who take him at his literal word. 'It's just a joke', 'an exaggeration', 'he didn't mean it literally'. Given how things have been going, it's clear he hasn't been joking.
Kimmel's monologue, taken literally, is completely benign.
At this point his political views are still not clear. You can be pro-trans and pro-Trump at the same time. See: Caitlyn Jenner, who supported Trump in the 2024 election.
Even more so given that all of this pinning on extreme-left groups started before they even found Tyler Robinson and that they did the same in Minnesota a few months ago. I think it's basically accurate: they are desperately trying to characterise it on anyone but their own, and have no regards for any facts. Even if Robinson really is far-left in every way (certainly a realistic possibility), they will be "correct" merely by accident in hindsight.
> At this point his political views are still not clear.
Clear as day. Deranged leftist. No question. As someone who is even now wrong for the right reasons, I wonder if you think maybe the right-for-the-wrong-reasons crowd might have heuristics that are useful and lead to good decision making, and that you have rejected.
Evidence of his actual political affiliation has come out?
All I’ve seen so far is a million sides harping on one minor point of the existing evidence and using that to claim their political opponents are at fault.
The new meta from the past few shootings appears to be just instantly claiming the shooter is from their political opponents side, and then double down on the claim no matter what happens
> Evidence of his actual political affiliation has come out?
Yes, assuming Spencer Cox, Utah law enforcement etc. are not lying.
He is said to have been in a relationship with an MtF partner, and to have communicated repeatedly with that partner, showing sympathy for LGBTQ issues in general, alluding to being part of a left-wing support community, and describing Kirk as a "fascist" and "hateful". His mother has stated that he has shifted towards left-wing politics recently, specifically as regards LGBTQ issues. Much was made initially of his "MAGA" father — who turned him in, and there is much evidence of political disagreement between the two (including in the above-mentioned communications). Cox asserted the suspect to be a leftist in an interview with Meet the Press on the 14th (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/utah-gov-spence...).
Those points could also fit a groyper with parents who don’t recognize that subset of right ideology but appears to have no problem with things like cat boy girlfriends, and were in a feud with Kirk in the months prior to this.
There’s bit and pieces here but nothing conclusive so actually yea I kinda do distrust those figures in government coming out and strongly stating it was one of their political enemies.
I don’t think the conservatives had anything to do with Charlie Kirk dying, but I would not be surprised if they had a playbook ready to go for such an event given how strong of claims they were making about the shooter when the evidence at that point in time didn’t exist.
Never waste a good crisis and all that
> Those points could also fit a groyper with parents who don’t recognize that subset of right ideology
You really think they would mistake a groyper for a leftist?
> I would not be surprised if they had a playbook ready to go for such an event given how strong of claims they were making about the shooter when the evidence at that point in time didn’t exist.
"The shooter in a political assassination represents an ideology opposed to the victim and was motivated by a political position opposed to the victim's" should be everyone's prior. It doesn't require a playbook.
He does appear to have a strong bias in past statements, although I don't know how rigorous this analysis is.
"A separate study from the organization claimed that 92 percent of the jokes Kimmel made on his show since January 2023 were at the expense of conservatives, and 97 percent of his political guests were left-leaning."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/media/article-15117605/jimmy-kim...
He is a comedian, he can make fun of whomever he wants, on TV.
"Bias" is biased here. There's no reason that jokes should be 50-50% in favor of however political parties are configured. It's entirely possible (and currently the case) that one side of the political aisle is worse and more deserving of ridicule.
There is no lack of bad behavior on either side of the aisle, for sure.
Is this warranted? I don't know.
Comedians making fun of public figures, organizations, parties, movements etc is not bad behavior. It’s an open society.
I don't mean talk show hosts.
I'm taken aback by a president who recommends bleach as an antiviral.
I'm taken aback by a member of congress who married her brother as part of her visa process.
It just gets worse. How are we living like this?
My exit strategy is more fluid than I like.
> I'm taken aback by a president who recommends bleach as an antiviral.
Trump asked if disinfectant could be injected. He did not recommend injecting or drinking bleach.[1]
> I'm taken aback by a member of congress who married her brother as part of her visa process.
There is no credible evidence Ilhan Omar married her brother.[2]
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-inject-bleach-covid-...
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ilhan-omar-marry-brother/
Regarding the bleach, it's true he didn't recommend it, but the full quote of him saying it makes it clear that he is a very stupid person.
Also, just today, he promoted bunch of fake science and medicine about Tylenol causing autism, so he's only gotten worse at this since his big bleach idea.
I believe that all people are apertures to the divine, and bear that signature.
I believe that each and every one can show us something, not that we must demand it, but in that moment that it reveals itself, we should understand.
Perhaps I am very foolish in this way. I prefer to be a fool.
This is the statement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Commandment
I don't understand what that means, but it doesn't seem like that means we should allow crazy people to be president.
And? He is comedian that runs a late night show.
Why do we hold women and comedians to some sort of high standard but there is a whole montage of right wing grifters actively calling for liberal lives?
And it wasn't even a joke, it was a statement about what was going on. It isn't even about what he said, or even Kimmel. Unless he wasn't slathering all over the fake mythos of white washing this Kimmels racist, bigoted hateful grift, the right was going to go after him for literally anything.
Kimmel's crime is laughing at Trump and pointing out his brain dead hypocrisy.
This is it, the whole thing. https://youtu.be/U6NJJ0FcvYY?t=252
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He did not say the shooter was a MAGA conservative.
For further context, he said that the right was doing everything in their power to portray him as anything but one of them. I.e. in the absence of evidence they were attempting to pin the blame on the left.
You are correct, and it's important that we don't continue the game of telephone that seems to be destroying this country.
"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 with everything they can to score political points from it."
This was his exact quote and he's 100% right. The entire admin had called out the "Radical left" as the perpetrators before we even had a photo of the shooter. Can we please go back towards the reality where we actually read and understand the words being said instead of having them all parroted to us by media headlines?
True, but I guess I could see how people hearing it might read it that way. The general debate was between the shooter being a left winger or a right winger. He said they were wrong about him not being a right winger.
He didn't even necessarily say they were wrong about it. He just emphasized that their top priority was making sure they could score points from it:
> 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. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.
He didn't say that either technically. He said the right was trying very hard to make it look like the guy was not MAGA, which was true. Before any information was known, the right was claiming he was trans, a Democrat, whatever, and saying they had to go to war with the left, etc.
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The US constitution generally protects the right to make false statements, intentionally or not, in all but a few situations.
(censored, don't want to pay with karma for this question)
I think it unlikely any of this applies, since Kimmel is nominally a comedian.
We have to hold comedians to highest possible journalistic standard while allowing Fox News to be entertainment. This country runs on double standards.
I don't see how this is related, because "will cause substantial public harm" doesn't appear to apply in any way.
And that does not cover what happened here. Not even close.
If you want to ban saying something false then you need to start with arresting everyone who loudly and aggressively claimed that the murdered of the Democratic politicians in Minnesota was a far-left extremist and all of that. People are still claiming this, I believe.
Or maybe start with all the people who kept on claiming that migrants are eating people's cats and dogs.
etc. etc. etc. I can go on and on.
Applying the most strictest of strictest interpretation of the law for your enemies while being exceedingly lax with the law for your friends is one if the key hallmarks of authoritarianism.
You can say basically whatever you want in the United States, with few exceptions.
‘Inciting imminent lawlessness’ aka starting a riot is not protected speech, making threats against the US President is also illegal. There might be other items of speech that are forbidden that I am not remembering.
You can be sued for defamation, but it’s very hard to prove as you must prove the speaker knew what they were saying was false, which is hard to prove.
But lies? You can lie all you want as a private citizen and the government cannot stop you.
That's not how law works in most places. Even in most European countries with more expansive defamation laws merely saying false things as such is not against the law. And it wasn't really defaming anyone, so none of that applies in the first place.
(censored, don't want to pay with karma)
But not American press laws
I think the word "censorship" applies here.
He wouldn't be reinstated if it was censorship. The government didn't back down, just Disney did. This just shows Disney wasn't forced to remove him as some thought, they cancelled his show willingly so could take it back.
The gov openly pressured Disney to drop him -- that's what censorship is.
The fact that Disney reversed course (based on whatever internal calculations we don't know) doesn't mean it wasn't censorship to begin with.
Business consolidation is a civil rights issue. Now every industry is led by giant monopolies that owe the administration favors. The appeasement of autocrats by capitalists for more market control is so inextricable from capitalism itself that any "capitalism" without it is a pure fantasy.
Ironically the FCC will be approving the Nexstar waiver after finding that the merger will not impact the national conversation by having one group own too many stations/have too much power.
It's seriously embarrassing a bunch of conservatives are demanding Kimmel to be cancelled over his frankly tame comments when they were all most likely the exact same people screaming about the "cancel culture liberals" for years. Truly pathetic how they're flip flopping on this.
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i'm not a liberal
and frankly i don't care about kimmel either, i just think if people are going to complain on either side they need to thicken their skin and accept when the tables turn
Had the FCC not been so blatant about axing the shows due to speech, and had the backlash been softer, this would have succeeded.
If the president didn't say or tweet every thought that came into his head, he would probably be more successful at implementing even more of his authoritarian goals.
Disney was really in a pickle here, because the "right" already hates them for having a few gay characters and characters of disfavored races, so capitulating to Trump's illegal and immoral censorship would leave them with no political allies.
> Disney was really in a pickle here
Disney made a preschool-level bad choice. Grade schoolers have figured out that capitulating to a bully is how you signal you want more bulling.
Disney also had examples of law firms and universities that bent the knee to the whitehouse - and how that turned out for them. The reward for tanking their reputations was more whitehouse demands.
I mean, businesses need to be impartial and take no sides. Their goal is to serve both sides of the aisle. If you have a business or you're the CEO, CTO, etc., you can share your political views privately.
> I mean, businesses need to be impartial and take no sides. Their goal is to serve both sides of the aisle.
Selling in itself tends to be impartial. The experience can be something else. The place I buy tires from proudly advertises their fandom for the WH occupant. They also treat me better than the neutral-appearing, sanitized tire shops.
If my county harassed them for their advertised orientation, the bad actor in that equation would be my county.
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For anyone not informed, Jones’ exorbitant fines were that way because of his consistently excessive behavior in court and lack of willingness to cooperate. The judge gave him multiple chances. You shouldn’t expect that to happen to anyone else because normal people obey their lawyer when their lawyer tells them to quiet down.
This isn't true.
Jones was defaulted before trial in both cases because he wasn't complying with discovery. The defense asked for documents and testimony which his company refused to provide. Documents like the finances for the company (totally normal). You are correct that he was given multiple chances to fix the problem. He'd literally fire his lawyers between almost every deposition so that they couldn't provide the requested documents.
But the actual fines came from the jury from the trial. civil cases have 2 parts, are you guilty and if so for how much. Jones lost the "are you guilty" by default and the how much was determined by a jury of his peers after a trial (and accepted by the judge).
I think with Jones it's important to get everything straight as he likes to claim that he was silenced and steamrolled. He was neither. He lost that much money because his actions were horrendous.
He managed to literally default a billion dollar defamation case, which is really something.
> A comment which has been flagged to death
... is not an invitation to contribute your own top-level polemic.
> And no, there's no need for politeness, because the assassination victim was an asshole
I mean, did you see what he was wearing? He definitely had it coming.
I wasn't a fan of his, but if your source about what Charlie Kirk was out there doing and saying is The Nation of all places, you're not exactly informed on the topic.
I collect propaganda videos on Instagram. Here's a couple examples that were floating around recently: Seeing a lot of hate for a trans person here? https://www.instagram.com/p/DOfU33FDEwp/
Also, weird for the supposed "Christian Nationalist" to be arguing against... Christian Nationalism, no? https://www.instagram.com/p/DOlpE-rEWFZ/
You're rebuttal is basically: "I was at 3000m above sea level once and water boiled there at 90C, so if you say water boils at 100C, that's wrong!"
He also deadnamed an individual trans person in public and said that they were an abomination to God (0:31):
https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1701259614077989121
So it's nice that he managed to be superficially polite to one trans person once (while not actually saying anything of substance except that they should just stop being trans), but let's not pretend that he had any kind of sympathetic view of trans people.
Overall, his attitude to the 'alphabet mafia' reminds me rather a lot of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQf5jL3a4iU
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It’s amazing the disconnect from Kimmel’s statement and the response.
At first I thought the clips showing what he said might be the wrong clip…. Nope.
I'm trying not to read too much into it, but if anything, that's the kind of strident response that I would expect from a group that is questioning their own responsibility in this.
If your reaction to someone saying untrue things is to immediately apply political pressure to hush them up, you've either lost confidence that the truth can win out in public light or you have something to hide.
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Well, for sure it wasn't hate speech, and even if it was, the federal government should have no say in whether it's aired, but it pretty easily crosses the threshold "our" side (I'm being presumptive about your politics) set over the last 5 years for misinformation. I don't want to take the other side of this "it's bad he was censored" argument, but I don't think we should be valorizing what Kimmel said, either.
Let's look at the quote again:
“The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,”
That is no more an accusation or a statement of fact as me saying "politicians are anything other than self-interested." It's a rhetorical claim, not a statement of fact.
It wasn't one of them. The implication of the statement was pretty clear. I'm twitchy about this because my TL and all the spaces I talk about politics in were lit up with people trying to find some combination of tea leaves indicating Robinson was a Nick Fuentes follower. I was personally convinced the shooter would be ideologically illegible, like the Minnesota shooter --- another "O9A" case. I was wrong. So was Kimmel.
And there was just no reason for him to be! I was mouthing off on local politics boards and in Slack channels; there were no consequences. Kimmel went out on that limb on broadcast television. It's a dying medium, but it's still a bigger deal than saying it privately.
Again: none of this is to say that he deserved the outcome he got. Though, I've said this before and will repeat it: the administration probably did us a huge favor here, shifting the narrative from the Kirk shooting to Kimmel's censorship.
The idea he is pushing misinformation is ridiculous,he didn't speak on the motives of the shooter only on magas insistence he wasn't maga. He didn't say he was maga, merely focused on the performative finger pointing of Republicans
> he didn't speak on the motives of the shooter only on magas insistence he wasn't maga. He didn't say he was maga, merely focused on the performative finger pointing of Republicans
The only thing that could have validated such finger pointing is a belief that the shooter actually was "maga". In the absence of such a belief, to say that "maga" was disavowing the shooter is not an accusation of wrongdoing. But the claim was prefaced with an assertion that "we hit a new low" in the form of this disavowal; therefore Kimmel did see it as an accusation of wrongdoing.
I don't think he "is", present tense, and implying continuity, "pushing misinformation". I think he's an entertainer with basically my politics and a pretty good writing staff, and I think he made a mistake common at that moment to people with my politics. I don't find it disqualifying. But it was not, in and of itself, good.
If any mistake was made, it was that he let a rhetorical statement sound more like a 'fact' about republicans (see my earlier comment).
Edit: and republicans definitely know the difference, but they played up a sad situation to their benefit to hurt an opponent.
And, to be sure, if people wanted to react to what he said by declaring loudly they were boycotting his show, they're welcomed to.
The FCC isn't "people" in this sense, and it does not have the same freedom of speech that the American citizen has, nor should it.
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Nah.
His employer was pressured by the government to fire him because he made a joke about the president and his followers. That's a huge deal for anyone who cares about free speech.
It’s a very effective technique to gain unchecked political power. Ask Orban or Putin.
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I would love to see some citations here around serious violence problems on the left. I understand HN can be a bubble chamber, so I'm genuinely looking for a first party source the can corroborate that kind of statement
Right wing violence vastly outnumbers left wing violence
Shooter is most likely a Nick Fuentes fanboy
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Meh. Kimmel has a history of racist and sexist comedy, to include blackface performances. For me, that’s a big turn off.
I think Ted Cruz had the right attitude for this one. It’s unwise to hammer unfairly on the opposition when you’re in power, because the pendulum inevitably swings back.
The FCC was created in order to prevent the airing of opinions the government disfavored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
This is incredibly hyperbolic and misleading. The Communications Act of 1934 was passed for a variety of very necessary reasons at the time, the most important being making sure broadcasters didn't hijack each other's signals.
Coughlin's show coincided with the creation of the FCC and they never really tangled. His show was pulled off the network a full 5 years after the FCC was established. FCC regulation may have had a part in that, but there is no reason to believe he in particular was targeted and certainly not that the law was passed to target him.
In an amusingly bald bit of Wikipedia editorializing, while the Coughlin page links to the Communications Act page in the context of (as the upthread throwaway account[1] says) half-implying that it was created to censor opinions...
...the actual page linked doesn't mention Coughlin at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
[1] The habit of throwing discussion bombs like this from throwaway accounts is another sign of HN's decay.
For anyone interested, I went digging. In fact the citation for that (FCC Chair) McNinch quote that is (not quite correctly) excerpted in the Coughlin article is a 1938 Times article talking about how he'd "recently" said it in a speech (I can't find a cite for the speech itself).
The FCC was created in 1934, four years earlier. So arguing from this basis that it was created to censor is clearly just plain wrong. The wikipedia narrative on the Coughlin page is basically a lie.
Government licensing of radio spectrum preceded the FCC and was in response to the RF chaos that hampered the rescue operation after the sinking of the Titanic[1].
[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/radio-act-of-1912/
That's why I wrote "the FCC" of which is the thread subject.
Never heard of him before. Thanks for sharing.
You are spreading misinformation. The FCC existed before Coughlin. Furthermore, the FCC declined to take action on Coughlin despite all the pressure it got from the public. Instead, it was the National Association of Broadcasters that forced him off the air.
Coughlin started broadcasting in 1926. The FCC was created in 1934.
How exactly did the FCC exist before him?
[flagged]
By comparison, Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyle) was executed for treason (the last person to in the UK to receive such a punishment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Joyce
He advocated for peace. Maybe you read that as fascism.
From the page linked:
> After making attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program Golden Hour to broadcast antisemitic commentary. In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5]
Absolute howler. He was a full-throated Nazi. He literally cheered for Kristallnacht[1].
> During his radio broadcast on November 20, 1938, while reports of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany were still on the front pages of many American newspapers, Coughlin defended the Nazi attacks as justified. Claiming to merely be a “student of history,” he traced “the causes of the effect known as Naziism” [sic] for his listeners, concluding that Nazism had “evolved to act as a defense mechanism against the incursions of Communism.”
[1] https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/pe...
Coughlin was an anti-communist antisemite who was sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini and advocated for government control over industry in the 1930s. I would also read that as fascism, yes.
> In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, using the slogan "Social Justice".
Sounds like you're confused, or disingenuous? I prefer to give benefit of the doubt though. Which part of the Nazi policies and anti-semitism that he advocated do you consider peaceful?
You didn't quote anything he said. Likely because the wiki page hardly quotes him and that's the extent of your knowledge.
If you didn't think it was a worthwhile source, why did you link it? Seems to be a bit of a double standard if you're using it to bolster your claim (without actually using the page, mind you) and object to others doing the same.
Wikipedia is useful as a source for incontrovertible biographical details. Less so for political opinions which bias towards the editors.
The statement "The FCC was created in order to prevent the airing of opinions the government disfavored" does not seem to be "incontrovertible".
Important to note, the source for this section is an article from slate, which also includes paragraphs such as:
> During the blowback, Coughlin could still count on support from one corner. Nazi Germany characterized the efforts to rein in Coughlin as “a typical case of Jewish terrorism of American public opinion.” Coughlin agreed, portraying himself as a victim of Jewish-owned media.
> It got worse. On Dec. 5, 1938, in Coughlin’s house organ Social Justice, under his own byline, he plagiarized a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, originally delivered in 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. By then, quipsters were referring to Coughlin’s church as “the Shrine of the Little Führer.”[1]
But I supposed this is spurious as well.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/father-coughlin-deplatf...
Correct, and that's more information and citation than you shared.
Hahaha this quote is fantastic! Bound to piss off all kinds of nut jobs and radicals!
> In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[5] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, using the slogan "Social Justice".
Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this jackass
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45338613
Dupe is flagged.
Weird, this isnt a controversial story at all. FCC dramatically overstepped on free speech, cooler and saner heads prevailed.
You should not find it weird to see any comment in this thread immediately flagged due to an opposing view disagreeing with it. It's a hot political story in nature, therefore it's controversial. It's really this simple.
Censorship. It works.
Apparently it is weaker than boycotting
And there goes the remaining customers of Disney. And hopefully their licenses.
I suspect the vast majority of customers before and after this whole thing aren't participating in a boycott either way.
So now we know the reality. An employer, Disney, felt an employee, Kimmel, was damaging their business, let's not forget the point of an employee is to make money for their employer, and as a result took corrective action with the employee. Who was not fired. If a waiter at a restaurant was offending the customers, he would have been fired. Kimmel was treated very kindly and will continue to receive his paycheck. Looks like the wailing about free speech missed the mark
You left out the part where a government official all but demanded they do what they did.
Must have been a VERY strong demand for Disney to completely ignore it.
Irrelevant. You were arguing this was an ordinary part of business, and the point is that it clearly isn’t.
Now you’re moving on to how much it matters that the government made such a demand. It matters very much, because it is unprecedented and outrageous. But I was only replying to your partial account, which left out the most crucial aspect of the entire affair.
> It matters very much, because it is unprecedented and outrageous
It isn't unprecedented, Biden administration did that as well. This is normal for the US government, they never were strict with free speech they always pressured corporations to censor.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...
Anything equivalent to “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” said to a TV network by the official who can withdraw their licence to broadcast?
Companies are driven by profits, but their decisions are usually based on legalities. I think their knee-jerk reaction to pull Kimmel was due to what might happen, or what the government was threatening to do. That doesn't amount to damages, legally. However, if they bring Kimmel back, and the government follows through on its initial threats, then that does amount to damages for which they can sue the government.
I'm sure Disney is aware that there will be consequences to reinstating Kimmel. Maybe their proposed merger won't go through. Maybe something else—but they will be punished by the administration for it.
They didn't ignore it. The show was suspended for several days. Over some really tame remarks. The warning is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
Land of the free, home of the brave? Ring a bell?
More accurately,
now we have another take on the story, this time the crafted PR spin from Disney retconned for damage control.
Disney was probably inundated with demands from other on air talent to reinstate the employee. They then made the calculated judgment that maintaining good employee relations was on balance better served by putting the employee back on the assembly line. This is all usual and standard business. Anyone on here that has ever worked a job has contract that says what they can and cannot do while in the employ of the company.
People absolutely have the right to self identify in public as a person who accepts corporate PR statements as objective reality.
It's not for everyone, but each to their own.
Even if a man is dying of cancer that does not justify the government murdering him.
The Trump appointed FCC head, who is currently evaluating multiple multi-billion dollar requests, said about Kimmel 'we can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way'.