Politics

On Wednesday, September 17, Disney’s chief executive Robert Iger, and television chief Dana Walden, exercised Disney’s ownership authority over American Broadcasting Company (ABC), to cancel ABC’s showJimmy Kimmel Live. This appeared to be a response to Trump-appointed FCC chair Brenden Carr expressing outrage about Kimmel during a podcast that same Wednesday. Carr threatened to exert FCC pressure on holders of local licenses for companies like Disney if they did not sufficiently police the content of their subsidiaries. What offended Carr, apparently, were Kimmel’s comments regarding the motives of Charlie Kirk’s suspected killer, specifically a short statement in a monologue on his show, the night of Monday September 15. Kimmel’s supposed violation of FCC rules was his brief innuendo that Charlie Kirk’s killer might be MAGA:

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.

To claim forthrightly that Charlie Kirk’s killer was MAGA would technically have been unnuanced. But lacking nuance is not usually considered grounds for the FCC disproportionately targeting someone. And unnuanced innuendo is a nothing wrapped in a nothing. Yes, yes, in addition to obscure memes that might or might not be groyperish engraved on the bullet casings, and the apprehended suspect having been raised in a gun-toting GOP family, and high school interviewees saying he once supported Trump, we should also keep in mind the media-repeated reports from the Utah governor and Utah prosecutors. The GOP Utah governor has claimed  that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, had become romantically involved with his allegedly male-to-female-transitioning roommate, and had also exhibited evidence of “leftist ideology.” The top prosecutor in the case has elaborated specifically that Robinson, “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented.” Then, on Wednesday, prosecutors released a chat transcript strongly suggesting that (a) Tyler Robinson confessed the killing to his roommate, and (b) that Tyler disdained the MAGA views of his parents.

But so what? Maybe Jimmy Kimmel hadn’t been following the latest news reports that closely.  Or maybe he took the recent prosecutorial feeds to the media with a grain of salt. Regardless, a short 40-word blast of innuendo, quietly bolstered by evidence from earlier media reports, is a very odd thing to read as an FCC violation. But in addition to the ominous outrageousness of abusing FCC authority in this way over this kind of triviality, there’s the nagging question of why the Trump-commanded FCC chair targeted this particular triviality.

Jimmy Kimmel, like other popular comedians on and off network TV, has attacked president Trump on numerous fronts.  One anti-Trump Kimmel bit that lands particularly well is this one, from his show Thursday September 11:

The man who told a crowd of supporters that maybe ‘the Second Amendment people’ should do something — about Hillary Clinton; the man who said he ‘wouldn’t mind’ if someone shot through the fake news media; the man who unleashed a mob on the Capitol and said Liz Cheney should face ‘nine barrels shooting at her’ for supporting his opponent, blames the ‘radical left’ for their rhetoric.

So when Trump’s FCC does a mafioso squeeze on the parent corporation of ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel’s show over a 40-word bit of innuendo about a murder suspect’s possible motives—rather than for everything else anti-Trump Kimmel has ever said—it’s weirdly focused. If the FCC wanted to engage in grotesquely tyrannical persecution of anti-Trump speech for an obviously invalid reason, they could have just demanded Kimmel’s cancelation for his whole corpus of work. Why does Trump’s FCC feel the need to specifically punish idle, insufficiently informed, speculation on the ideological motives of the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk?

My hot take: Team Trump’s goal, in this case, may not be to inhibit idle, insufficiently informed, speculation on these motives, but rather to increase it. Kimmel’s offhand monologue remark reflects a dumb trend in social media discourse in recent days—trying to suss out whether it’s right or wrong to viciously crack down on all “leftists” by putting hours of google searches into Robinson’s ideological background. But those hours would be better spent organizing to thwart the crackdown itself, which has no justification regardless of whatever Robinson’s idiosyncratic youthful wanderings in ideology were between video games. In other words (and to quote antifa rebel commander Admiral Ackbar), “It’s a trap!”

Whatever Team Trump actually intends, I do think they would probably benefit strategically from filling social media spaces with pointlessly heated culture war back and forth on the Kirk killer’s motives. And it would be even better for Team Trump if these arguments could crowd out other, more public policy-relevant, matters of discussion. And I don’t just mean the Trump-implicating Epstein files revelations. Or the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry report acknowledging (with everyone else who knows and cares what genocide is) that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Or the anti-AI hunger strikes on two continents that remind us Gaza may be the canary in the coalmine. Though, yes, please keep up the buzz on these things-that-matter too.

The major reason the Trump Administration would gain from more furiously speculative buzz about murder motives is because talking about these motives implicitly grounds opposition to a Trump administration anti-leftist crackdown in claims that Tyler Robinson was not a leftist.  And that is a very shaky, and indeed kind of stupid, foundation to rely on. I get why opponents of Nazi-like crackdowns might be baited into claiming, in outraged solidarity with Jimmy Kimmel, that “Jimmy was right!” and Tyler Robinson is pure MAGA. But by doing this they will imply, by their demonstrated concern with this issue, that their speculation on this point must be correct for the crackdown to be wrong.

Once that implication hangs heavily enough over the debate, and that rabbit hole debate looms larger than the “how do we best save the Republic?” debates we should be having, then the crackdown will get that much easier. All that needs to happen is for more evidence to come out that Tyler Robinson was indeed romantically involved with his transgender-transitioning roommate, and had indeed come to support trans rights and had rejected MAGA as a result.  If the evidence for the alleged killer’s anti-MAGA, pro-trans rights views grows more airtight (e.g. Tyler’s defense team concedes to all the prosecution’s evidence on these matters as genuine), then Team Trump will have apparently “won” that public policy-irrelevant argument.

Yes, technically speaking, opposition to hatefully scapegoating trans people is not an exclusively “leftist” position per se (in much the same way that opposing endless quagmire wars is not an exclusively leftist position). Also, as a matter of courtroom persuasion, the “he was enraged by the victim’s hateful prejudice against the person he loves” angle might make a human jury feel a tug of empathy for Robinson. The prosecution seems to be trying to make everyone hate Robinson more than the average political assassin for having committed a crime of passion out of love. The attempt to humanize the defendant would usually be an odd prosecutorial strategy under different political circumstances. But this is all less important than the fact that cracking down on people collectively to punish them for the act of any individual is horrifically wrong, even if the individual and the group punished share some ideological features in common.

More generally, strategies on what to emphasize should keep in mind that Trump builds tyrannical power by playing with the public mood. Actual truth and law don’t matter to him, as they have never constrained him that much. If, in the court of public opinion, the killer gets demonstrably proven as anti-Trump, after masses of Trump-opposing social media influencers are on record passionately speculating that he wasn’t, that’s bad news. Trump knows how to ride that we-got-them vibe to trample even more extremely on the rights of all his “leftist” political enemies.

Team Trump would define “leftist” with increasingly absurd looseness as the crackdown accelerated, of course. The scope of the crackdown would be ultimately without reference to anything specific about Tyler Robinson’s life and views. Judging by the hints dropped and lawsuits filed by the crackdown enthusiasts so far, crackdown targets would include George Soros (“Jewrge” Soros), network TV, colleges and universities, scientists, the New York Times, whoever at the Wall Street Journal greenlit the publication of the birthday card to Epstein, and, for all we know, the actors in The Chosen.

When the mass protests hit the streets in response, I expect the absence of many of those who spent days arguing with bots over X that Tyler Robinson was definitely a MAGA groyper not a pro-trans rights liberal.  Having been seduced into irrelevantly arguing about Tyler Robinson’s assassination motives, and then been proven wrong, they would feel too embarrassed and humiliated to show their faces. “Damn, I really thought he was MAGA,” many of them would text whisper to each other. “And, since it turns out he isn’t, I guess we just have no fulcrum from which to oppose a full-on tyrannical crackdown that eviscerates all previously-enjoyed constitutional protections.”

It might be helpful to pause at this point to remember under what precise circumstances it is relevant to speculate on possible motives for possible crimes. If some individual is suspected of killing some other individual, then investigating that person’s motives has relevance for only four things: (1) establishing motive to reduce doubt that the suspect is, indeed, the perpetrator, (2) addressing the possibility that a larger group of individuals was involved in the killing, (3) determining how to legally designate the crime, and (4) determining appropriate sentencing if the suspect is found guilty. In other words, discussions about the possible motive for one instance of killing are only relevant to matters involving how the state should perceive and interact with the suspect/s.

Discussing the motives underlying one act of killing is not relevant for determining the wisdom and legality of public policy targeting large swathes of people for holding a certain ideology, or having a certain identity. Discussion of criminal motives might gain slightly more public policy relevance if a disproportionate share of all killings over a recent period of time appear to have a common ideological motive.  Even then, however, any probabilistic link between ideology and inclination to kill should never become an excuse to walk all over masses of people’s rights just because of their apparent ideology.

Yes, after September 11, 2001, a huge bipartisan share of the U.S. economy, government and mainstream society got bound up in doing precisely this kind of rights-trampling on the basis of ideology. It started with trampling on “Islamist” ideology, which spilled over naturally into trampling on Muslim, and generally brown, identity (Arun Kundnani’s The Muslims Are Coming! is a good primer on how this spillover worked).

Later, there were some much less oppressive—neither torturous nor mass-murderous—excesses in response to the disproportionate share of U.S. domestic terrorism being broadly “right wing.” These excesses heated up particularly after January 6, 2021, what with the violent attempted overthrow of a legitimate presidential election and all. Where these anti-rightist excesses occurred, though, they were ironically symbiotic with diminished institutional willingness to genuinely thwart billionaire-backed criminal activity (which increasingly leans hard right).  The mild anti-rightist excesses freaked out “ordinary folks”-type right wingers, and many independents also. And, ironically or on purpose, the purveyors of these excesses failed pathetically at holding accountable the larger (wealthier, more powerful) criminal networks that actually enable right wing terror as well as the still ongoing rightist institutional assault on democracy and political rights.  That mix of dumb persecution of the ordinary with broader capitulation to the powerful is part of the story of how Trump got back to power. And why he brought public health-crucifying madmen like RFK Jr. and Elon Musk to power with him.

Perhaps we want to remember these earlier excesses of ideology-scapegoating rights-trampling more fondly because more respectable non-Trump presidents engaged in them. But that didn’t make them right. Those rights-tramplings were evil and stupid then, and Trump’s borderline sardonic pantomime riff on that evil and stupidity is also evil and stupid.

Let’s try to resist the temptation to enable even more of this evil and stupidity. Let’s not get baited into debating a single suspected killer’s motivations against a backdrop of Trump threatening a Nazi-like crackdown on his political opponents over the issue.  Let’s focus instead on why Nazi-like crackdowns are always wrong, apologize for any Nazi-like (or milder but still unhelpful) crackdowns we might have partisanly or bipartisanly legitimized in previous years. And then let’s try, from the firmest foundations we can find, to stop the ongoing one.