JOHN SEXTON FROM HOTAIR
There’s an ongoing debate, happening almost exclusively on the far left, about whether or not Jimmy Kimmel even said what everyone else thinks he said. Rolling Stone is leading this charge.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his monologue on Monday.
Kimmel’s slightly ambiguous comments came after conservatives spent the weekend blaming the left and transgender people for Kirk’s killing. At the time, the public knew little about the alleged shooter’s motives. Prosecutors disclosed on Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, told his trans roommate and apparent romantic partner, “I had enough of his hatred.”…
While there’s some room for disagreement about what Kimmel meant or was trying to say, he did not actually say on ABC that the alleged killer was a MAGA member, as the right would have you believe.
This is apparently the exact defense that Kimmel himself was planning to use on Wednesday night. It was after learning about his plan to defend his comments as being taken out of context that the suits at Disney decided to pull his show indefinitely.
But most people, even most people on the left, have been more honest about what Kimmel seemed to be saying. Here’s Vox, definitely not a right-wing outlet, description of what got Kimmel in trouble:
Kimmel’s downfall began with some admittedly ill-advised speculation in Monday’s monologue: “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.”
At the time, the evidence suggested the shooter very likely was not a MAGA believer (and evidence released the next day showed that he almost certainly was on the political left).
This is pretty similar to what Brian Stelter said on CNN (see here).
Kimmel was expressing what we’ve heard some other liberals say in recent days that the motives are unclear and that maybe the suspect in this case was a Republican or was some sort of far right fringe figure. Of course, there has been a lot of discussion about that in recent days. There’s a lot of evidence pointing in other directions about the suspect, but Kimmel was on the air talking about this, making a very serious commentary amid his jokes in his monologue Monday night.
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people on the left at least understood what it was people on the right were reacting to. It wasn’t Kimmel’s flat joke about Trump’s stages of grief, it was the suggestion that the killer was right wing.