The real danger here is that ABC did it before the White House ordered or told them too.
Fascists rise in power the more scared we are to speak.
We've sure come a long way from The Man Show.
One of the defining characteristics of the right is not placing any value on logical consistency. Being a hypocrite will not lose you any support with them.
You can go a lot further back than that. McCarthyism was a powerful cancel culture and vestiges of that still manifest today. Linguistically, the weird and inexplicable way anything to the left of fascism in America can be described as "communism" if someone is in the mood to be pejorative is a vestige of McCarthy, or something even further back from the First Red Scare, I think.
There have been a number of studies around the world, plus some real world examples (Utah gubernatorial 2020) where showing your opponents in a sympathetic light can make a big difference in reductions in political polarization.
It’s especially effective when signaled by the “elite”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00323217241300...
Edit: I hear plenty of stories of people abandoning family members over a difference of political opinion. My MIL won’t talk to a niece of hers after the niece made the same decision. I won’t go so far as to say that’s never warranted, but it seems these days that it’s happening a lot more.
To me, this implies we’re losing acceptability of political “others”.
Turn on the largest mainstream media "news" channel, and you'll hear nothing but mindless hate for 20 hours a day, without consideration for what actual news is occurring.
So up until this point it was perfectly acceptable? Or is this only an issue when the wrong side does it in a fairly moderate way (since the other side regularly and openly embraces and encourages political violence).
However, some people support and vote for, a president who has told his supporters to perform acts of violence against those whose speech he disagrees with, clearly a portion of the population doesn't mind.
I think this is being seriously accelerated by Trump. Why should I treat those I disagree with with dignity and respect when the President (who theoretically is a leader for all Americans, not just the people who voted for him) says things like this?
"And when you look at the agitator, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that’s the left. That’s not the right."
When Trump and Vance start setting a positive example for others to follow, maybe I'll rethink my position, but leadership and accountability start at the top.
All you’re doing is ensuring the strength of their beliefs.
Edit: You don’t have to like someone to not actively attack them at every opportunity, even if what they believe is reprehensible to you.
Have you been in a coma for that decade?
He’s definitely right with that sentence. Do you not think it’s generally true that the right has been on the defensive with regards to cancel culture, and thus is constantly preaching about how cancelling is wrong?
The few times they’ve gotten to go on the offensive, they play the same game, cancelling whoever it is they’re upset about. It’s horseshoe theory all over again.
Ezra Klein, who I generally respect, said he got more crap over
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assa...
than anything else he’s written but I think it was unfortunate that he chose the words because Kirk, among other things, promoted Trump’s lies about the 2000 election, bussed people to the Jan 6 riot, and had a hit list of professors he wanted to punish just like David Horowitz, dad of the Andressen-Horowitz Horowitz. That bit about “prove me wrong” was always disingenuous, it would fool the pearl clutching parents who read The Atlantic and the likes of Ezra Klein. Probably the most harmful thing about illiberal campus leftists is that they allowed illiberal rightists to appear to take the high ground.
To push a domestic metaphor
(Or are the gender roles switched)
I might be off my rocker on this, but!
>prove me wrong
Is such a right-wing to say.
Because it signals that a conservative believes that
*self-improvement is possible*.
Calling out cancel culture today: the youngest kid signals that they give up on self-improvement in favor of acting out, so the elder sibling, who used to be punished for a very similar thing, jumps (gleefully) on it . "Mama look at what she just did!" knowing the parents gonna wring their hands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8
who covers a lot of ground: Shapiro seems rather strong when it comes to articulating that idea of personal responsibility but his satanization of the economic left (e.g. Bernie Sanders) seems forced and unreasonable and Klein sorta "owns" him when it comes to pointing out that many of Trump and Vance's policies and viewpoints are examples of the envy and resentment-based "scavenger" thinking that Shaprio discusses in a dehumanizing way.
Shapiro's attempt to foreclose any difference on economic issues is mirrored, I think, by a certain wish on the left to foreclose difference on cultural issues. One one hand there is an axis that runs through Trotskyites to centrists like Klein who would like to shut down the culture wars because as soon as the culture wars started we started losing [1] [2] but the leftist who enjoys the culture wars is more inclined to satanize the "christofascist" as opposed to the likes of Milton Freedman [3]
There's a tendency on the right to say there is an "objective" reality (the Bible, Ayn Rand's philosophy) whereas Marxism leads you to see there are "two sides" to any issue. It gets the left in no end of trouble thinking about Blacks because if you go talk to Black people you will find they really do see things differently from white people in the aggregate but that they also see things differently from one another.
So like Rhett Butler or Han Solo if I'm asked to take a side on something like "cancel culture" I'm going to say "my side". I'm sure someone got canceled who deserved it and someone got canceled who didn't deserve it. There is no "due process" but there's also a feeling (see Klein) that due process is as much a problem as it is a solution. I sure as hell hate the "debate" over it.
[1] that theory would say that Reagan's economic policies didn't have any appeal to a mass base
[2] to be fair, almost always white male although sometimes gay
[3] and it's a credit to the rise of financialization: when I grew up I learned the financial advice that if I take care of my bank account my credit score will take care of itself; the paradigm for financial advise on both the internet and in magazines has been "(1) stop people from stealing your identity, and (2) use this one weird trick to raise your FICO score" since 2010 -- leftists once might have cared about labor, opportunity, taxes and such, today they care about insurance (e.g. health insurance) and credit (student loans). The idea that you might have your own money to spend on something you want to spend it on is right out of the 1950s like the stay at hom emome.
Ah, here was a great place to substitute your coinage "identarian"-- Ime I can't distinguish the identarians who enjoy the culture wars in terms of left from right (unless we equate right with white, & that's something we have to amicably agree to disagree :) one could forgiveably id the killer of Kirk as a right-identarian, eg, but that still feels less correct than simply "identarian" (normal folks would not resort to moderately planned violence).. you can see by the shell engravings TR sort of took pleasure in the planning vs Luigi..
(Yes, in other words, the economic left, or more precisely the nonpractising left, was too welcoming of identarians in precisely the same way the churchgoing center wasnt- 1970s to mid 1980s)
Now as for "leftist" in [3] I'd assume you mean "what passes for a classic leftist (like Bernie & 2000s Paul) amongst the millennials/gen z". More to say here, insurance over taxes is imho the correct Marxist valuation.. ? After all "from each according to his ability etc etc" is a succinct description of insurance
>due process is as much a problem as it is a solution
Now this is an interesting take, well, I can see Klein saying it in exasperation (in the podcast-to-be-read-- thanks!), but what is your emotional-valence here? (I can guess, but the guess would be more intricate than I can jot down from the hip :)
A mini-shot though.. if one truly enjoys hard work, problems would be as much of a joy as solutions. Centrists (like PG and "functional" Grothendieck) would be careful to tolerate schlep without seeing value in labor-in-itself.. schizos right+epsilon of center, or stoics* left+epsilon a-ways.. however..
*I would substitute "epicureans" here, but "stoics" would do fine for pedantry
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-heavenly-a...
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/constituent-parts-of-a-...
I can't approve completely of his appropriate of dynamical systems theory but the idea that Kirk was "killed by memes" appeals to me as does Fred's description of these as "brainrot". People on the right are likely to see some transfurry in there [1] whereas left-leaning women are going to see anything coded young male as right wing. The FBI profile of the postmodern shooter is that he had a copy of The Communist Manifesto but he kept up his neighbors listening to Rush (the Canadian band) and people will make what they want of it.
As for Klein and due process I can say I am very frustrated not least because due process is frustrating but because we're in a dilemma because the alternatives are worse. (I can see how Curtis Yarvin's crypto-degrowth philosophy of "just wait until the dieoff and we can go back to solar-economy feudalism" could appeal to some) Of course that frustration with due process is the subject of his recent book Abundance which I have ambiguous feelings about: part of me wants to believe it, but I think it is a tough sell to many people who see it as warmed over neoliberalism [3] who think rent control is a good idea, like the populism of Matt Stoller, never mind this sort of usually unstated issue
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/good-cities-cant-exist-without...
as it is people will complain that somebody else complains about not being safe downtown while they (1) live a hikkiomori lifestyle or (2) live in the suburbs and/or order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.
[1] my take though is furries are even-headed, as a committed kemonomimi [2] I always trying to bait them based on their bad taste in art
[2] https://safebooru.donmai.us/posts/3773068
[3] "but wait... we're not talking liberating the private sector from the government, we're talking about liberating the government from the government!"
Thanks for the Klein pointers, I see the sections on rent are precisely what I require to formulate copy for an insurance-market-based ad to thoughtful Marxists :) TODO-- close-read those with a postulate that Klein has read & wrestled with late era Jacobs
Decarlos Brown is someone I'd ID as right-identarian & more specifically that kind of center-right+epsilon schizo I was hinting at (if I put myself in a Martian's shoes)
But reflecting on that with FredDeBoer freshly paged in: the left-identarians (predominantly women plus a smattering of depressive gays who haven't mustered the courage to experiment with hormone replacement therapy)
Just do a better job of publicly suppressing their glee vizavis less emotionally adroit young cis-males, black or white
Hikkikomori culture in the US is only barely an appropriation-- I'm sure the HKs in ah Saitama dont get distracted by young women loitering in the backstreets of Shibuya/Shinjuku: rather it's the superior habits in moral hygiene (outsiders would say it's indoctrination, but why then would the mtgow-equivalent in Tokyo proper not succeed?)
Yep this is the disingenuity. If i were Ezra I'd have rehearsed with a unrepentant Randian 10x to come up with something more aggressive.
Dems will get that he's weaseling, but Republicans will have it go over their heads.. Mamdani-style listening would be marginally better; to throw Shapiros phrase back at him, it's the "praise" that he pretends not to notice that should be the most concerning
Self-help for Shapiros would not be writing Randian "bronze-age" fairytales (self-help as practiced by "narcissist by nurture" trivially succumbs to Kohutese infernos), but to get as far away from Rand and the Iron Age as sanely possible. (but that'd require some hormonal injections or dissociative research substances ?)
we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist".
whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times.
maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait.
And that's my cue to take yet another hit to my HN karma by asking, incredulously, "WTF are they teaching kids in school these days?"
> During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country.
> During World War II, the camps were referred to both as relocation centers and concentration camps by government officials and in the press. Roosevelt himself referred to the camps as concentration camps on different occasions, including at a press conference held on October 20, 1942.
> In a 1961 interview, Harry S. Truman stated "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
> Not to be confused with Extermination camp. A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.
People are more contradictory than pure theory. FDR was progressive in some aspects, regressive in others. A leftie, he wasn’t, and there’s more to politics than mere left/right, or we wouldn’t have trans Trump supporters.
They - and Hitler - are notable for their totalitarianism. I bear no illusions that folks like Stalin wanted anything more than power.
FDR’s era, the furthest left the U.S. has been, true to form had this element... showing how concentrated state power, left or right, risks curtailing freedom.
In modern times, we've seen Guantánamo survive multiple admins on both sides.
In this case I’m not sure if that was inherently related to Roosevelt’s progressive/left policies. A moderate or rightwing government likely would have done something similar at the time.
My argument is that New Deal policies paved the way - culturally, institutionally, legislatively - for the United States to quickly mobilize for war, which also significantly reduced the friction for something like this to occur.
So yes, it could have happened under more centrist regimes entering the war, but the scale and timing would likely have been minimized in comparison.
Culturally I don’t see it as somehow exceptional. US government regularly employed highly authoritarian policies to suppress or remove people based on racial or ideological grounds since the very beginning.
Even in WW1 German Americans had the benefit of being white and forming a very significant proportion of the population so anything like this was obviously infeasible. But their cultural and linguistic identity was suppressed and they were forced to assimilate under the threat of violence.
When you take the Sedition Act and other similar policies in relation to how much of a threat US faced in WW1 compared to WW2 I’d day what Roosevelt did wasn’t that extreme.
In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - local violence, language bans, mobs.
By WWII the U.S. was far larger, more cohesive, and had a strong federal state; without that scale and central capacity, something like internment would have been much harder to pull off.
During Jim Crow, at the State level in the south, it would be applicable, but that doesn't mean much in today's terms.
Education?
Religious values?
Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon genelines?
A more-enlightened electorate?
Nothing but your own empty prejudices and comforting assumptions?
It can happen here, and it can happen to your party, too. It just didn't this time.
I consider myself a leftist, but it's a bit naive to think that "this bad, horrible thing" must be associated only with right-leaning ideology. Leftists can do bad, horrible things just as much as right-wing folks can. "Putting people in concentration camps" isn't a right-wing or left-wing thing, it's a totalitarian/anti-human-rights thing. We can argue that, as of late, right-wing people seem to have more of an appetite for that sort of thing, and I'd probably agree, but that doesn't make concentration camps a "right-wing thing".
I would absolutely consider FDR to be one of the most (if not the most) leftist presidents the US has had. His putting people in concentration camps doesn't change that; it just makes him a racist piece of shit, like so many others of his time (not that the time period excuses it).
Well.. if you exclude all the very successful political movements which considered themselves “leftist”.
Bit of a no true Scotsman thing.
These are not even close to the same.
It's devoid of proportionality & it accepts a narrative crafted by the right-wingers themselves through repetition for exactly this purpose. There was never ever any doubt that all the hyperbolic outrage from the right about grassroots "cancel culture" was going to be used by the authors to excuse actual censorship as far as their current power and societal normalization allows them to. Preparing the ground for a "You did it first!" is not exactly innovative, it's fascism 101.
The right has consistently tried to cancel people, has tried to censor people, has complained/played the refs about moderation saying their rights to say racist stuff was being infringed even when it was a moderation decision by a private company not the government
And then under Trump it's only gotten worse/more divorced from any principles
If you are going to morally judge the actions behind cancellation attempts, "I don't find Dave Chappelle's jokes funny" is not morally equivalent to "I don't think people should celebrate the murder of those they disagree with."
Also, lets ignore the fact that there is a difference between consumers boycotting something and a government agency outright threatening a private company.
It's a nonsensical argument that the attack was random. It's farfetched that it was for some unrelated-to-politics reason given that these men as far as we know had no connection to each other, and it's nonsensical to believe that someone beloved by most people in the right wing would be targeted by a fellow right-winger.
If someone like AOC or Bernie Sanders was viciously attacked at an event, you can't tell me that you would accept an unsourced assertion that "it was actually a marxist that harmed them."
Look up groypers and Nick Fuentes - he's a right winger who was NOT a fan of Charlie Kirk and amassed a following about it. There is _some_ very mild evidence to believe that it's possible (I personally don't think that's the case FWIW)
While searching for more information on this I found an interesting link to something Grok wrote, answering the question of whether the shooter followed Loomer. It was quite interesting. No idea if any of it is true but given Musk's well known efforts to get Grok to favor the right it is sure amusing it would say this:
> Yes, based on reports and social media discussions following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, the shooter, identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson from a "good Christian gun-loving MAGA family," followed Laura Loomer on X (formerly Twitter). Robinson was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and appeared to have been influenced by far-right online rhetoric, including potential inspiration from Loomer's recent criticisms of Kirk as a "traitor" and "charlatan" who betrayed Trump. This detail emerged as investigators reviewed Robinson's social media activity after his capture on September 12, 2025. Loomer, a prominent far-right influencer, had posted multiple times in July 2025 attacking Kirk for hosting guests critical of Trump and engaging in "dialog with Democrats," which some speculate may have radicalized followers like Robinson. While the exact motive remains under investigation, the follow relationship aligns with broader patterns of intra-conservative online feuds escalating into real-world violence.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/laura-loomer...
[2] > I don’t ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.
> Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.
> TPUSA was only able to thrive thanks to the generosity of President Trump.
> On the one year anniversary of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Charlie hosted @ComicDaveSmith at @TPUSA ’s SAS conference where Dave Smith was able to speak to a bunch of conservative youth at an organization that claims to be Pro-Trump.
> 3 weeks ago, Dave Smith called for President Trump to be IMPEACHED and REMOVED from office over his decision to blow up Iran’s nuclear facilities.
> Charlie played both sides of the Iran issue on his show as we all saw, because he wants to play to both sides of the aisle.
> The honorable thing to do is to have a position and actually defend it to the death instead of flip flopping.
> Smith said all of MAGA “should turn on Trump” and abandon him. He said this 3 weeks ago.
> See the clip below.
> TPUSA is definitely not pro-Trump. If they were, they certainly aren’t anymore.
> Out of all of the incredible pro-Trump voices out there who support the President, Charlie decided to host Dave Smith?
> It really is shameful. And I am honestly just disgusted by the nonstop flip flopping on the right.
Mr. Kimmel does not assert Mr. Robinson was "MAGA". Simply that the, "MAGA gang" is trying to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.
He absolutely did insinuate just that.
Dunno if English is your second language or what but that definitely insinuates the killer is MAGA and is the quote people have an issue with.
It's a classic deliberate line skate but it clearly states what the "MAGA Gang" is asserted to have done without actually claiming the killer to be be part of that "Gang".
It wouldn't pass muster in an English libel Court and it's a milquetoast sentence in the US first amendment free speech world.
Further it is a bald matter of demonstrable fact that multiple voices that could be characterised as "MAGA" were indeed making numerous assertions about the killer and their motives before any facts other than the shooting itself were known.
This makes the Kimmel statement little more than a dull piece of observational social commentary.
Given Mr. Robinson's upbringing being very similar to many MAGA, it would make sense for them to attempt to distance themselves from him, no?
The same way non-maga would distance themselves by asserting how unusual his access to firearms and firearms training is compared to the general public?
Maybe English is not your first language? Critical reading skills are important.
So, first, both of those two (AOC in particular) have been the subject of extreme criticism from the tankie/accelerationist bits of the leftophere. It's 100% not out of the realm of possibility to imagine them being the target of an individual loon motivated by the right combinations of freakouts.
But also, it's not "unsourced" to say that Robinson comes from a conservative background, that he was a church-going-enough Mormon to be recognizable to his pastor, that he's informed by and involved in right-leaning edgelord/groyperist meme culture (that halloween costume was a pretty smoky gun), that he executed the murder with a family weapon to which he had easy access and apparently solid familiarity, etc...
I mean, his background looks extremely Trumpy. He's also apparently a closeted gay man with a hatred of Kirk in particular. And that doesn't make a lot of sense in total. But then that's the way it is with murderers. It's not a philosophy for the consistently rational.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/charlie-kirk-assassination-w...
That article doesn't substantiate your statement. The single quote in the charging document it's talking about is that he had become "more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented", which is obviously not the same thing. Otherwise Thiel and Jenner would be "left wing" in your world view.
Real people's views are complicated, especially those of an insane murderer.
Although in the end, the most chilling thing isn't the killer, it's the thousands of progressives who have been openly celebrating the murder[1], just based on the fact that he disagreed with their beliefs.
[1] if you think I'm exaggerating, just watch the supercut of them in Sh0eonhead's latest video. It goes on for a long time.
What I've come to realise is that few are prepared to bell the cat and prosecute unconstitutional behaviour.
Did anyone ask the FCC chair to do this? Is it on record? Do you imagine the FCC chair to be cat that needs to be belled?
The FCC chair isn't the cat that needs to be belled.
Ballistics is a pseudoscience.
> Did anyone ask the FCC chair to do this?
Why did anyone have to ask him? He spoke in his capacity as a government official, and he has the power to do what he threatened. That's sufficient to say "the government is suppressing free speech".
COVID is still fresh enough that people should remember. If you were pro or anti anything 5 years ago it probably hurt you since sentiment swung both ways and both positions look silly in hindsight.
Except that he was fired right after the FCC chair threatened ABC. That feels more like government censorship than business.
Unless now "business" encompasses "it's better for business to not criticize the government". Which I suppose it does, under Trump. But that's not something we should accept or allow in a free society, under the constitution we have.
I think it's too easy to sort of anthropomorphize these kinds of conflicts --- Kimmel's show has a large staff, and he's responsible for their livelihoods --- but it wouldn't be totally out of the question that Kimmel steered right into this.
There's nothing new about this, though: ABC also took Bill Maher off the air, 20 years ago, almost identical circumstances. Maher wound up at HBO. Kimmel will wind up on a podcast, and, like Conan, probably gain in relevance.
Moments later
I think some people here might be too young to immediately get the Maher reference, but the point there was: he was forced off the air for political reasons as well.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(The quote they created is also nowhere close to what I was saying or what I believe, but I'm not interested in litigating that.)
Edit: Funnily enough, I can't actually find this policy in the guideline. I see now that dang said it's actually not a guideline but telling people not to do it anyway is apparently a thing, which I find really fucking weird. Also funny that the same 'quote as framing' device (which I'm now avoiding) is used to paraphrase a position in the guidelines!
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
like in Haskell-ish terms:
shorten :: String -> String
shorten "Did you even read the article! It mentions that" = "The article mentions that"If you think your position was misunderstood then that’s that’s the real issue, not punctuation usage. IMO it would be better addressed by engaging with the substance of the post (including the salient point that the Maher case is not comparable) rather finding some technical violation of HN common law to pick at. I’m sure there’s also a guideline against derailing substantive discussions into irrelevant picking over minor guidelines.
Threats from the head of the FCC bandied about on a far-right podcast? Hello?
I get why this is all activating and like I guess I agree, it's obviously bad, but it's also really stupid. These are programs written for middle-aged suburban professionals that air primarily to elderly customers who still watch linear television. Kimmel would have drastically more reach on an indie show online (who would you rather be, just in terms of reach, Kimmel or Hinchcliffe?).
The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air. Late-night hosts getting fucked over for crossing the interests of their corporate owners is a very old story; one of the great sitcoms of all time is based entirely off the premise (in fact, two of the great sitcoms of all time are).
Kimmel's got a good writing team. He's talented. He should have gotten off this dead time slot a long time ago.
Who cares about Kimmel.
You think they will stop at television? They'll deplatform people on the alternate media next, YouTube, Twitch, Kick, etc. They've already started to look at Twitch this very week.
Will you even notice when your train has arrived at the Gulag?
You acknowledged it was bad (sorta, kinda), but the rest is IMO completely irrelevant. "Galactic-scale complaints" or not (we don't know), the head of the FCC appearing on Benny Johnson's podcast threatening to pull their broadcast licence (he probably could not) is unprecedented. And one can wonder how many of the aforementioned complaints his comments incited.
Now they'll lose subscribers anyway.
(Obviously it won't be a literal train given the state of our rail infrastructure but more likely a van in practice :p)
Welcome aboard. We left the station a few months ago.
You are wearing the metaphor thin.
The point was that intimidation by government of media organizations has been happening for months, this is the latest.
Suppression of free speech by government is applied unequally. Hypocrisy is a feature.
> Then does it matter if I notice it or not?
That's up to you, but it doesn't change the reality.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
Sure, but shouldn't we continue to call out the fact that this administration is wielding power to censor? I do agree with you that late-night talk shows are a dying format, and maybe Kimmel would have been out (for whatever reasons, perhaps his own) in the next year or so, but to me, that's besides the point.
How is this relevant ? Are the Presidency and FCC now giving career advice?
> The fact is it's not Kimmel's air, it's corporate air.
not even corporate air - it’s government air obviously
His comments were not a fireable offence. He can’t steer into something if there’s nothing to steer into.
Maher, like the Dixie Chicks and Garofalo, criticized a deeply popular war (regardless of what you think of it) and were ostensibly cancelled pre-cancellation era. The government didn't issue a statement through a right-wing podcast stating that the network better toe the line or get it's affiliate license revoked.
You are right, this has happened before. This is far more like the purges of the red scare. People were just (perhaps naively) hoping society had progressed from where we were ~70 years ago.
That is a stretch, "similar" is a better characterization. The Wikipedia article says he made the comments days after 9/11, and advertisers withdrew and the show suffered as a result, but the show wasn't cancelled until the following June.
Keep in mind also that Trump threatened getting Kimmel of the air a couple of months ago
Additionally, the FCC chief also threatened affiliates today
Is it all a coincidence ? Could be.
But absent a statement from Kimmel we can conclude that pressure was applied to ABC or it’s affiliates to censor speech
Kindly, your post reads like a variation of the “Broken window fallacy”
Hey, who needs late night comedy shows any more
You have way too much karma for this
Is it against the public good to question the motives of the president of the United States?
Is it misuse of public airwaves to point out the lack of evidence on hand to divine the political affiliations of this school shooter?
For example in the granting of permits for marches.
But I do keep thinking about the fact that the move to the right among young men, will probably pretty quickly reverse itself, if they keep going after media/video games/porn, etc.
Debates about the quality of this sort of content aside, wow, that's just what we need, a generation of new adults who have no idea what's going on...
This is blatantly false. This was a single youtube channel's mistaken belief
It was incorrect. Restricted Mode is completely unrelated to the issue, and plenty of the videos that are doing just fine are not available if you have restricted mode on.
There's still no definitive answer IMO, but it might be that an analytics endpoint was blocked by ad blockers.
Note that the people affected by this problem say they are getting the same revenue, just view counts changed. That means their videos are getting the same number of not-adblocked views.
They are platforms too, and US-based too, and IIRC Patreon has already been caught at least twice engaging in censorship : against some right-wingers, and some porn.
(They are at least less able to manipulate speech through recommendations I guess...)
Probably to wring a few bucks out as they circle the drain in the same fashion as every other old formerly prestigious brand name.
Realistically, how could anyone be okay with the level of power this administration is wielding? I struggle to see a peaceful transfer of this specific set of powers. Unless the assumption is just that the left will always behave "more responsibly."
Probably true, which means you're in for a full-blown dictatorship for, oh, 30 years or so before (perhaps) some violent revolution.
The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies.
But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.
All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.
Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.
These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal.
Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since.
Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected.
As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize.
Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA.
If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules.
If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do.
This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.
Funny you imagine there is consensus with any of that. The right doesn't want government healthcare. They don't want government sponsored childcare. They could care less about higher education. They want no gun laws. And they don't want black people to benefit from infrastructure.
There is no forming consensus with that position.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/07/25/poll-majority--supp...
But it's hard to make it happen when Fox paints any kind of gun measure as crazy leftist tyranny and then deep-pocketed fringe organizations like the NRA vow to punish any Republican who collaborates on compromise measures.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...
The “left” on the other hand seems way more heterogeneous in that sense (which does seem like a significant political disadvantage in practical terms).
Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and laptops. That was not being done to benefit the political rights.
So there was that example.
Now the FCC threatened ABC/Disney to pull a show because the orange guy dislikes him. I isolation, just this one incident is the death of the concept of America. If we consider the context :thisisfine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...
Edit: URL was malformed due to copy paste error...
You second link is 404 and I have no idea what you're talking about. The subject is what used to be the United States. A concept that no longer exists because we're too shitty.
People, the government and scientists were all spreading misinformation depending on what the official messaging was at the time.
Case in point: Early on, the government was saying "Masks are not effective at stopping COVID-19" due to them wanting to control supply. When that happened, there was a large number of studies that came out showing just that. When you looked at the methodology, it was "Mask over mouth, cough into Petri dish" and see if any COVID was detectable in dish. Also "Virus particle size is much smaller than openings on mask"
When the government changed it's stance, all of those were retracted. It took the WHO 2 YEARS to change their stance and say that COVID-19 was airborne:
>In the spring of 2020, as covid-19 took hold, confusion reigned among scientists, doctors, public health experts, and others. Many insisted the spread of the new virus was through the air, yet the World Health Organization refused to use the terms “airborne” or “aerosol”1 in the context of covid-19 until 2021.2 This had repercussions as the world debated mask wearing (and what types of masks were suitable) and whether indoor spaces were a factor in infection.
>Now, four years later and after two years of deliberation by experts,3 WHO has altered its definition of the “airborne” spread of infectious pathogens in the hope of avoiding the confusion and miscommunication that characterised the first year of the pandemic—and threatened attempts to control the virus’s spread.
The previous administration was doing the same thing; Publicly saying that they wanted to change laws, that these companies were killing people etc. At the same time, they were also asking the companies to remove people for their speech. The threat was implicit.
I don't like that the current republican administration is doing it now, I didn't like it when the previous democrat administration was doing it then.
The only way to keep it from happening is for everyone to speak up, for that to happen you also need to recognize when your team is doing the same thing and call them out. Look at the comments saying "I bet we won't hear from the freeze peach crowd", of course you won't see them. Not because they don't care however but because their disagreement of the government action is getting lost in the noise of your crowds.
I see. You're trying to pretend that intentionally subverting public health measures should be free speech and that the Biden administration did something like what the authoritarians are doing now. I disagree, though I'm not super familiar with the government intervention or lack of during covid. I have no desire to discuss it as it has no relevance to this context.
You're lying by creating a false equivalence and don't deserve replies.
The Supreme Court has been walking that back ever since(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio).
>There is no clearly established public health exception among the 43 judicially recognized exceptions to the First Amendment. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/ronald-kl-collins-first-a...
Please don't accuse me of lying, it's rude. Especially if you are also saying you are not familiar with what happened at that time.
It is a shame that you are unable to look at a situation where high level officials from one administration were asking why someone was allowed to express their views and that the administration was looking into how to hold them accountable and see how it is the mirror.
"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts" - White House press secretary Jen Psaki
"Shouldn't they(Facebook and Twitter) be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?" - MSNBC "Certainly, they should be held accountable, You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem." - White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” - FCC Chair Brendan Carr
The exact opposite of what has happened here.
The same will be the situation with laptops.
COVID was completely different because the government was essentially mandating certain measures in order to contain a widespread epidemic (which killed a million people by the way), and so calls to disregard those measures were extremely problematic to public health.
Can't believe you're equating it with what happened here.
Laptops: not sure what that is.
That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney.
And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds.
Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.
If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of.
By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't.
So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).
As with all authoritarian regimes, their assumption is that this is the end of history and those in power today will be in power forever. You're also right that they believe liberals will never do what they're doing now.
But the old guard is dying. Trump, Bush, Biden, Clinton, Obama are all boomers+ who will be dead sooner rather than later. The younger generation realizes the pendulum is about to swing, power will be ours to take, and you can be damn sure we will not behave like our parents and grandparents did.
So me personally, when I see them take Kimmel off the air for "not serving the public interest", all I hear is permission for the first progressive millennial president to shut down all of right wing AM talk radio on that same basis. And you know who else sees it that way? Right wing AM talk radio hosts, who have been the only ones on the right asking MAGA to pump the brakes on what they're doing (see: Tucker Carlson).
Like, literally, your ability to understand the world around you.
If that's not "tech," then I think folks need to broaden their perspective.
My explanation was a little bit narrow by mentioning tech though, that just happens to be the general thing shared most of the time.
Since everything is connected to everything else, by your logic, every discussion forum must discuss everything.
If you prefer more open-ended discussions about everything, I would suggest trying Twitter or Bluesky .
Having different sites focussed on different topics is very useful to people, and I don’t think the world would be better if we got rid of it.
All those concerns are valid but we've turned off the flags now.
This is just the exploitation of a tragedy in order to consolidate more power and win more political points.
They also have a $6.2 billion bid for even more local stations by acquiring Tegna, a deal which will have to be approved by the guy at the FCC who yesterday was telling local affiliates to threaten to pull Kimmel's show!
https://apnews.com/article/nexstar-tegna-newsnation-cw-trump...
This is a 1st amendment issue.
> Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”
> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
An absolutely unmistakable direct threat from the chairman of the FCC.
Dylann Roof is right wing and a racist and evil. I can say that, why can't you say the truth about Tyler.
If you tell the truth and tell your side to stop, then things will calm down.
> 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
"My side" is Americans who think political violence is disgusting.
What 'side' are you on?
News just today--
Republican DoJ censored longitudinal study previously published by DoJ which revealed that far and away the most U.S. political violence is perpetrated by... Republicans! Both internally and internationally.
Utah Republicans put a suicide watch on Kirk-shooting suspect because they want the pleasure of killing him themselves.
Noem is bragging that she shot the family hunting dog because he was "worthless"; all he would do is "massacre chickens" at her hunting lodge, and tried to bite her. She also put down a "disgusting, musky billy goat" that lived around her compound. She said wanted to come clean and show how she can "responsibility". She bragged that the story of shooting her dog got her the top slot at ICE.
Republicans:
- Bullying - Bigotry - Censorship - Election interference - Gerrymandering - Blackballing - Targeting for death - Persecuting - Trafficking - Inciting & agitating - Grifting
The beat goes on.
As W used to say "You're either with us..."
this is so chillingly reminiscent of a serial killers autobiography.
Putting useless or malicious animals down is merciful and common place and definitely not the making of serial killers.
Maybe that's part of the problem? You kill what you consider "useless" or "malicious". Noem killed a puppy.
The sheep herder kills the wolf. The farmer kills the bugs that eat the crop. The rancher kills the coyote that kills his calves.
What exactly was the alternative? She should have let the dog continue to kill her chickens?
In a wooded mountain region I frequent (not sure if it's "rural" by colloquial terms, though the USPS classifies it that way), most people try to avoid dangerous wildlife. Killing them is a last resort, and represents a failure to respect nature.
I don't get the "useless" bit. Why would you kill a "useless" animal? Just let it be.
and really the moose are a lot more likely than bears to go after you.
more qualifiers as well such as with calf or cubs, hunting and predation engagement being interrupted ect.
If your dog is killing your chickens, he's impacting your production.
If a goat is too old to reproduce, they're just costing money to feed and care.
Margins are thin on a farm and there's little room for such liabilities.
Thus it has been for thousands of years in agriculture.
I disagree that she was bragging about it. I think she was illustrating that she can do what needs done, even the unpleasant parts. I believe it resonated well with anyone who's had to do similar tasks.
It was bragging because it's meant to be a story about how she's capable of doing the "hard" things, which is the perspective that reality is tough, and you need to be willing to hurt some people to do "the right" thing.
It's literally Call of Duty's philosophy, that only the "hardest" people, who can do literally cruel and awful things, like illegal torture, because they must be done, and those bleeding heart liberals can't kill a dog if it's the "right" thing.
what many people call a useless dog, is actually the case of a useless person, with no skills at all regarding husbandry or behavior management.
gloating, feeling powerful as a result of causing death or discomfort, yes those actually are the making of serial killers.
The chickens are an investment and produce. A dog that kills chickens is a liability and it's nearly impossible to change that behavior once they get a taste for it. It will never be a good work dog.
When you live in a rural area, nobody wants a chicken-killing dog cause most them have chickens - and those that don't - have neighbors that have chickens and you don't want to be that neighbor.
If there are reasonable alternatives, please do avail yourself. When there are none, putting an animal down is best and is common practice.
rate limited when i replied to you so my response below:
>We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”
Where is the lie?
In my defense, I linked to a very recent exchange that I had with that exact same person about nearly the same topic. In a normal conversation or debate that would be considered totally appropriate, and I imagine I was caught by an automated rule, since I was immediately throttled.
But I understand the reason for the rule and I will attempt not to break it again. Sorry to give you more work and thanks for the site.
It depends on to what extent the killing was leftist violence, and who you're referring to when you say "them".
What do you think were the killer's motivations? Let's see how closely you've been paying attention.
When I say "them" it is in reference to the statements made in the wake of political violence. You hear a lot of mentions of "them" from pundits and politicians. It's a cowardly way to let the viewer fill in whatever they want for "them", "the left", "maga", "antifa", "globalists", etc.
What were the killer's motivations? I haven't been paying close attention.
To the extent that this person is slandering someone I condemn it. To the extent that this person is referring to the bad actors responsible I support it.
Seems rather simple to me but let me know what you don't understand.
> What were the killer's motivations? I haven't been paying close attention.
I'm not trying to be combative but you're speaking from a place of willful ignorance. This is adding very little to the conversation.
It's not a specific "them" but rather a placeholder for anyone in opposition to the person speaking. Just look at tweets from prominent figures immediately after the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. "They did this." "We need to protect ourselves from them."
You reframe the use of "them" as an accusation about a person who can claim slander. It's not that. It's a cowardly way to avoid facing reprecussions by slandering a vague group.
> you're speaking from a place of willful ignorance
Except the conversation is about being consistent in condemning people who use "them" reactively. It doesn't matter if Kimmel is right or wrong in claiming the shooter is maga, which - for me - is the more important conversation.
https://x.com/martinwalsh__/status/1967758029157437754
https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1967903888868077994
https://x.com/AlHSantana/status/1968104234588717543
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/sacramento/abc10-sh...
Who do you condemn?
As much as I can tell, they're mad because Kimmel pointed out a couple of instances where Trump seemed to care more about his new ballroom at the WH than about the recent murder of Kirk.
I've been reluctant to toss around the f-word, but it doesn't feel like an exaggeration to call this fascism. Kimmel said nothing that should have warranted a suspension.
https://people.com/donald-trump-misses-charlie-kirk-vigil-11...
What a time.
But what else can you do? They already control the media and corporations.
Kimmel
We hit some new lows over the week end 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 pointer, there was uh 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.
Reporter
My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?
Trump
I think very good, and by the way right there you see all the trucks. They've just started construction of the new ball room for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for a 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty.
Kimmel
Yes. He's at the fourth stage of grief. Construction.
Demolition. Construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called their friend. This is how a four year old mourns a gold fish, ok? And it didn't just happen once.
Regardless of what Kimmel said and if you think it was appropriate or not, we are seeing this administration use this as an opportunity to trample on the free speech rights of everyone they disagree with. If everyone's rights are not protected, then nobody's are.
What, in the clip, could reasonably be referred to as "the sickest conduct possible?" No one with a healthy, functioning mind could possibly use that language to talk about Kimmel's comments in that clip.
10 years ago I'm fairly certain these moves would have been met with a strong reaction from the public, but now nobody cares...
This thread is certainly active with those critical of the administration.
Note, the public at large did not know what Kimmel said until now. The Streisand effect is coming into play, because it was so uncontroversial.
The podcast part, I agree, although it's sad in someways, as it demolishes the national conversation, and makes easier to appeal to "your group" rather than "all groups".
I don't care about Jimmey Kimmel's jokes nor do I watch his show with any regularity -- but I sure as hell care about his right to make jokes.
https://www.nexstar.tv/nexstar-media-group-inc-enters-into-d...
How about sue the government just the like numerous other times they have? But that wouldn’t work in today’s world where the justice department is practically another appendage of the President himself.
Available here if anyone's curious on an unofficial site https://bingewatch.to/watch-series/watch-south-park-hd-39503...
Everybody "wins"... The right get to gloat, the left get to have talking points and Sinclair get's to freshen up their line up while we all fight it out in the comments.
I'll bet there was a cigar smoke filled back room chat when the discission was made $$$.
It just baffles me that people think they can say things that "turn up the heat" or "endorse the furtherance of current trends" and not expect some part of system (including big companies that more or less operate at the pleasure of regulators/government) to turn right back around and attack them.
I'm not saying I expect everyone to be as jaded as me, but know where your pay comes from.
Edit: Looks like Kimmel didn't say anything specific endorsing it and my last sentence was accurate more than I wanted it to be.
Update: "things like this" is meant to refer to the act of suspending Kimmel's show in response to the specific, rather innocuous, comments he made in his monologue
All of them are bad but the ones on the left end of the sentence are more bad than the ones on the right.
Edit: The endorsements and firings broadly speaking, not regards to anything specific to Kimmel or ABC
The reality is very simple: Nexstar wants federal approval for a merger. They know engaging in this censorship increases the likelihood of their merger being approved. So you’re exactly as jaded as you should be, just with the wrong target.
It’s not about “Jimmy”, it’s about his audience.
Out of the two, “company wants to win favor with Trump for a merger” is actually the simpler theory.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of his statements, even if what he did say was factually inaccurate.
That paired with comments criticizing the Dear Leader were enough. This is a new low in corporate cowardice toward Trump bullying.
And in any case, a significant majority of political violence is caused by right-wing extremists. Of course the DOJ just deleted that report because it was inconvenient to their narrative.
https://people.com/department-of-justice-quietly-deletes-stu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Un...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45207030
Over the last 40 years: 8/16 attacks on that list are linked to White Supremacists(Counting OKC) ~50%
In the last 15 years, again about 50% are linked to White Supremacists and ~41% linked to Radical Islam.
A more complete list is actually prompted at the top of that section and is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat....
However, you've possibly read that already since you're 41% number appears to be sourced from that page and is specifically talking about deaths and not events from 9/11/2001 to 2017. That 41% is heavily influenced by the deadliest event which was the Orlando Shooting, and if you look at the overall picture, 73% of events were perpetrated by white supremacists.
Honestly, directly reading the GAO study and the other, more recent, studies is a lot more illuminating and illustrates the growing issue of white supremacy and far-right political violence.
A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative
Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US
between 2008 and 2016.[27] It found:[28]
115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were
foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them
resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.
63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents
were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of
them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.
19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents
were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of
them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as
"plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused
7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[15]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat...
Also, the page only has pretty good resources up until like 2020, where it ends with a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies which reviews data up to May 2020, and DHS which reviews data from 2018-2019. The CSIS one is pretty good because it includes graphs of data over time and really shows the worrying increase across the board but the staggering increase of "right-wing" violence since the mid 2010s.
CSIS has a few more studies more recently it looks like. There's https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terro... from 2022, which shows that 49% of events were committed by far-right and 40% were far-left. However, the far-right were more likely to target people with guns and bombs and the far-left were more likely to target property with melee and incendiary weapons, so 28 of the 30 deaths were from the far-right while the far-left accounted for 1.
Then a few more years later, there's https://www.csis.org/analysis/rising-threat-anti-government-.... Which is more about the increase in "partisan political belief" based attacks, and then gives some examples instead of breaking it down further.
However, CSIS likewise uses their own database of attacks, and in between the other studies and the most recent one it appears they changed their methodology of what attacks were included to make it more strictly about an attempt or threat to kill (which would remove a lot of the property based attacks from the previous study), premeditation, and desire to strike fear broadly. I'd be interested in seeing a revisitation of their previous methods with their new datasets, or even to actually be able to see the dataset itself.
Hating Kirk is nothing unusual. Maybe something in his conservative upbringing led him to believe violence was an acceptable action based on his hate.
That's not a belief shared by the Democratic Party.
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/12/20/1-4-americans-sympathize...
> It found 28% of people who identified as liberal supported the murder, compared to 5% of conservatives.
Both the left and the right (which tends to be poorer right now) are massively affected by the cost and non-coverage of insurance. The LEFT WING is violent right now.
Why lie? Just because you have a short memory, and cannot recall:
* A right wing extremist killed the MN speaker of the house, her spouse, and their dog
* A right wing extremist attacked Speaker Pelosi's house in an attempt to kidnap her, and attacked her husband with a hammer (an incident that republicans were happy to crack jokes about)
* January 6th, 2021
* 2022 A right wing extremist shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.
* 2025 A right wing extremist shot up a school in Colorado
* 2018 A right wing extremist sent mail bombs to democrats
Or do you think attacks on matter if the people killed is someone you like?
The facts really don't agree with you on that:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1nksbmg/guy_...
AND LUIGI HELPED PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT MORE!
Engage with the facts.
The post you have is a guy with 100k subs
Destiny has nearly a million and has been incensing the situation.
The right is killing people, right now. You pretending that it's a right/left thing, when it clearly isn't, speaks to your ... intent.
Regardless of this specific case the “right” ignores, supports or even encourages political violence on a much bigger scale than anyone else.
So why is it only a problem in some specific cases but not in general?
The specific (ridiculous) claim is that this person was well adjusted prior to college, then attended college, and through his one semester at college became not just a leftist but a leftist who was willing to murder for his ideology.
I swear, people talk about colleges like everybody is forced to watch soviet propaganda in a Clockwork Orange esque restraint.
South Park can go on because they make money. Talk-shows are already dying and cutting them is easy choice even under mild pressure.
The value talk they use is PR aimed at stakeholders (customers, employees, government). No company has taken a stance where they willingly accept net negative returns if they have other choice.
Not just corporations, every institution from the church to every silo in your government to big nonprofits. The latter ones just have less measurable goals than profit, but they sociopathically seek their goals all the same. Beyond a certain scale organizations staffed by humans no longer act human.
Demonstrably untrue. Nihilist generalizations make a poster feel cool, but they aren't helpful.
Moral grandstanding does not work.
> Stop criticizing large corporations as moral entities. They have no other incentives other than money.
I want better for the world.
Amoral entities can work towards good goals when incentives are right. Empty moral grandstanding does not help.
Organizations are led by humans.
I want better for the world.
Looks like Lèse-majesté is making a comeback
> ABC said it was pulling the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show off the air “indefinitely” after controversial comments by its host about the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
but the article says the following, which is entirely different:
> “The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.
>
> “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving,” he added.
CNN doesn't show a clip, but explains what was said & the events that caused this.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/business/video/abc-jimmy-kimm...
Never believe those who claim to be in favor of free speech, but then use threats of legal intervention against those who practice it.
Government officials also threatened to pull the government provided broadcasting licenses that the corporation has. That’s free speech related.
>“It’s time for them to step and say this garbage…isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” he said.
>Carr’s threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing “the power of censorship” or interfering “with the right of free speech.” There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for “news distortion,” in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.
>Hours after Carr’s Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel’s comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.
Source: https://www.vox.com/politics/461887/jimmy-kimmel-suspension-...
I agree it could have been worded better but I think it’s clear if you watch it in context.
Nonsense. Feel free to point out how my comments about just the first amendment is related to you equating that to licensing terms.
> which in all likelihood had most to do with business decisions as WSJ reports
I am not convinced. Please provide the WSJ report. Seems the FCC chair saying "easy way or hard way" was more salient.
To boot, Kimmel is back on the air. If there were substance to the abrupt firing for business reasons, or regulatory, Kimmel would not have been reinstated.
> just pointing out that the airwaves in question are much more restricted than general speech in the United States
I do agree. The restrictions are for obscene speech generally. It is significant when that is extended to political speech.
> United States and debates over what is allowed would not automatically escalate to a constitutional concern.
Indeed. Except in this case we have selective enforcement at the behest of the government for what the government does not like. It is exactly First Amendment territory.
No. His employer responded to threats from the Republican federal government to prevent them from broadcasting by pulling their FCC license or prevent their merger.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/16/us/text-message-tyler-robinso...
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/9/15/charlie-kirk-ki...
Off topic, but has there been convincing evidence that the suspect is right wing/MAGA, as Kimmel implied? I've seen some posts on reddit to this effect, but they're far from convincing.
>The sugar industry desperately trying to characterize the obesity crisis as being caused by anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
what would your conclusion be? That sugar isn't a contributing factor to obesity?
Another one is "he was all but dead" which can be understood as "he was really in a bad shape, almost dead", or "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say"
There are a few more like these (especially in short titles, where I have to analyze word by word the sentence to make sure I got it right)
Even in your example, I think you misunderstand. "He was all but dead" is never used to mean "he was absolutely not dead, as opposed to what they say". That would be "he was anything but dead".
However, there is a caveat, since even native speakers increasingly over the years speak English "wrongly". Of course, when they do it enough, it's no longer wrong. So maybe you did hear a native speaker use the phrase "he was all but dead" with the latter meaning, but I would put that usage in the "wrong" camp as of 2025.
ah, sorry I was not clear - what I meant with the "or" is that there are 2 ways to understand this sentence, one of them being incorrect :)
Granted, it is not reasonable to expect everyone to have been terminally online for this issue, but even before this statement was made, it was clear if you visited places with right-wing bias (e.g. 4chan) that almost no one was concerned this guy might be MAGA. And if you looked at more grey tribe places (e.g. ACX open-thread comments / discussion), it was also already clear the preponderance of evidence and reason in fact definitely point to it being far more likely the guy was left than right (or at minimum some idiosyncratic, but definitely not "groyper" or "MAGA" rightist). Heck, this was even clear if you read through enough Reddit comments sorting by "controversial".
Also, it was abundantly clear the sentiments were: Blue tribe social media desperately looking for evidence against obvious left/progressive connections, Red tribe media gleefully pointing out left/progressive connections, and gray tribe places generally having the usual mix + typical frustration at the over-certainty of everyone else.
I.e., the reality is that the "desperation" was almost entirely on the left (understandably) trying to disown the shooter. What there was on the MAGA right was maniacal glee about all the potential (and prima facie more reasonable) left-wing connections. I doubt noting these overall patterns instead would have saved Kimmel, but choosing to frame the whole thing as "desperate MAGA" was just an insinuation that really ran directly opposite to the facts and reason.
But that's not what he's saying. He was saying "they were quick to paint him as blue tribe before knowing his tribe." It is just constructed like a sentence that ambiguously also means "desperately constructing that he was not red tribe."
>Red tribe media gleefully pointing out left/progressive connections
Which is synonymous with what JK said. That the reaction was "he was a them, not us, therefore justifying our prejudices."
As others have pointed out, this kind of insinuation is very hard to see as anything other than deliberate, given basic media literacy and how modern media operates (https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-t...). To save you a click:
> The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality.
But I do think, after decades of reflection, that comedians are correct when they point out that stereotypical humor shouldn't be off limits to any performer (of any background/color), but is... e.g. Owen Benjamin, Chappelle, Seinfeld.
This seems confusing to me. The default "neutral" position on any murder, most of all when you don't know much about the victim, is that murder is a horrible thing, is it not? Is that what you mean, or do you mean you aren't sure if this was good or bad?
Any human with their head screwed on straight innately assigns a very negative value weight to murder. To get yourself into a situation where you aren't sure about a murder would require you to have pretty strong beliefs about the victim or circumstance, which you claim to not have.
Murderers walk freely among you, and we're not all bad people. A few good people earn their legal kills.
A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution) — yet ours thrives on division, getting people to hate better with bigger hearts.
¢¢
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society..."
what? This is nuts. Are you saying you murder people?
> A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution)
Yes I agree with this. There are a lot of people that do vigils and prayers and eulogies when people die. Then there are people that go: he deserved it and XXX is next. The former does not drive division. The latter does - and that's what needs to stop.
Yes; I talked about this here two months ago [0]. In my circumstance, I would do it again with even less hesitation...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44476115#44482107
I also have a brother — served four tours as enlisted grunt kicking in combatants' doors — whose tally far exceeds my own (war. is. hell).
It's not that I'm encouraging murder (I'm not); rather, I'm encouraging people to not live in a world where killing is never an acceptible outcome (because it is, sometimes justifiably).
Some actions should literally be paid for with guilty lives ("FAFO"), e.g. child molesters.
Given identical circumstances, I would hesitate even less doing this again.
Thanks for your feedback and previous discussion.
----
I know I'm crazy (the fun side) but can be serious when trying to share commonalities / discriminations (against murderers — lol — I get your initial point/comment).
Have a great day.
So why single out this one? I mean who cares about school shootings? One nutjob murdering another nutjob on the other hand…
At least they used to. I've lived through the 80s and 90s as a kid, so when someone was murdered - even someone that no one knew - everyone in the country cried.
These days people's minds are so used to it, we're all warped. We were not meant to handle information at that level, so, effectively, we're broken.
It's why there is Tyler Robinson and Luigi and Decarlos. We used to have a country that this kind of thing was so outrageous that it was rare.
And what's even crazier is in the 80s and 90s is that everyone had guns. Even life-long democrats! There wasn't even a movement to get rid of guns. (Well of course there was but it was basically 3 people)
People do care about murder for a lot of different reasons.
I may disagree with the vast majority of Charlie Kirk's opinions, but he was at a university, inviting others who strongly disagreed with him to debate him, face-to-face. I may not be a particular fan of this style of interaction (I find it to be more about shock value/talking points/getting clips of particular stupid things people will say than actual clarification or education), it was still an open forum that shouldn't be feared in a free society that supposedly values free speech.
The evidence for this appears non-existent: https://www.axios.com/2025/09/15/groyper-charlie-kirk-nick-f...
could you list the assassinations that you are not neutral on? I feel the list could be interesting if not prolly infamous
You're quoting a Chappelle joke that he made literally from a fucking netflix special. He's definitely been "cancelled" making millions off of trans jokes. Amazing evidence that comedy is illegal now. I honestly don't know how anyone could take this drivel seriously unless they literally only consume media from a very narrow selection of highly biased resources.
>Mel Brooks had the right of it. Fascism and Authoritarianism is defeated by satire and mockery. The ideology is too outrageous to survive any such scrutiny.
Terrible precedent aside, how could Disney think that capitulating here will result in anything other than more attempts to control their programming in the short term?
It was counter to what was reported by federal investigators the day before the show. He was deliberately spreading misinformation.
Kimmel did not assert Mr. Robinson was anything he wasn't. Kimmel noted how some people are doing everything possible to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.
The discord chats and his relationship with a trans woman were AFAIK not revealed yet, or at least were so new that they maybe hadn't made it to Kimmel's writers room.
That kind of problem gets a demand of a retraction, not a firing.
Contrast that to a Fox News host calling for mass executions of homeless people the other day (and since that day there have been multiple mass killings of homeless people). That guy got off with a thin apology.
“just kill ’em”
But the FCC accuses Kimmel of “alienating the audience”.
And it's not like it's a surprise either. As Sartre observed[0] decades ago:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
It's quite nauseating.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...
I'd say yes, they all should be. The first amendment demands it.
This collaboration between corporations and the government to silence political dissent is something else entirely so can we please not “both sides” this ?
This type of both-sides-ism is dumb, especially here when one side is using the power of the federal government to get dissenting voices taken off the air.
1. Trump was president in 2019 and 2020.
2. There is an important difference between a bureaucrat calling up someone at Facebook at arguing a position about policy and the chair of the FCC threatening to remove broadcast licenses. Notable, Supreme Court has even weighed in on the former and found it well within the rights of the government to do.
As for point 2, I am not aware of any of the government directed censorship going reaching the Supreme Court.
>On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden's efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield's response that Biden would continue to "call it out," Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...
However, the Constitution also sometimes protects intentionally false speech such as parody and comedy.
You can see that it's a heavily nuanced issue.
I can't find any specific references to that. Is there a statement from an FCC commissioner or from Obama when he was president?
I'd really like to see such statements.
I fully disagree with cancelling Kimmel due to any governmental pressure (if that's what happened) and I'm absolutely horrified with the firings that are being gloated about at the moment but let's not pretend here. The left was very much out of bounds on the cancelling. Which doesn't make it any better when the right does it.
I really think this needs to stop. It's not the society we want to live in. People need to be able to express controversial or disagreeable opinions and I don't care what ideology they are.
No, no, it's everyone else that is wrong =)
And there's a huge difference between someone getting cancelled due to social pressure, vs. getting cancelled because the government is trying to silence your speech.
I feel like this is the sort of thing a prediction market might be able sort out.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/ty...
It seems he was "raised right", with easy access to firearms and ammunition. Items not nearly as common in left voting urban areas.
However, Mr. Kimmel's comments centered on the fact that his political leanings, and reasoning for the school shooting are not entirely clear.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26098852-tyler-robin...
What in his upbringing led him to believe the way to handle the situation was with violence is unclear.
Kimmel did not repeat rumors, he asserted that the political affiliations were unknown.
edit: He asserted the "MAGA gang" trying to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson, which is true. It does not mean Kimmel views Robinson as "MAGA".
MAGA is trying to distance themselves from the killer, and so is the left. No one wants to be associated with that guy, and for good reason.
I added an edit after re-reading the comments.
To be fair, that doesn't necessarily say anything about his politics. I know plenty of liberals with MAGA parents. I don't think we can draw any conclusions as to his politics at this time.
This is a really bad misunderstanding of what he said. It’s clear as day, and yet you’re unable to comprehend
Yet, you're insulting those who can read the words on a page.
Why?
Most leftists despise their parents politics. None of this suggests a rightward leaning of the culprit himself.
And do you have a source on that? Anecdotally, most "leftists" I know have left leaning parents. But it's up to the person to define if they are or are not "leftist", because it's a rather narrow, small minded world view that has to define things in those terms.
> None of this suggests a rightward leaning of the culprit himself.
Nor does it suggest his leftward leaning. Maybe it suggests why he used violence as a means to enact social change on the world.
edit:spelling
Not really
> it's a rather narrow, small minded world view that has to define things in those terms.
Doesn’t follow. Words have meaning, and can be applied where they make sense.
If you cannot comprehend the shades of grey in the world, maybe you need more exposure to it.
The government has no such right. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
You forgot the rest of the quote:
“In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
That, however, is criticism of the administration.
If you're nodding along in agreement, then you should also know my long-term commitment to consistency in tolerating factually wrong, distasteful, divisive and even hateful speech has also left me in the uncomfortable position of defending (at least in part) the right of Charlie Kirk, JK Rowling and many others I don't agree with to be heard without anyone calling for silencing them. I'm 100% supportive of disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking ideas we don't agree with but I draw a hard line at shouting down, deplatforming or canceling them. If you just stopped nodding along, and instead started coming up with reasons why Kimmel should be heard but Charlie Kirk shouldn't, then you might be part of the problem. IMHO, the only truly defensible ethical high-ground on this requires consistency regardless of the person, politics or offense their speech might cause.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
No one has died from being cancelled so spare everyone the pity story.
If you want to spend your time defending JK Rowling, that’s on you. It doesn’t make you a hero for making sure people fully understand precisely what kind of a bigot JK Rowling is.
What is deplatforming if not a group of people choosing to ignore that person? It is not fair that you get to decide at what level ignoring another is okay. Deplatforming and cancelling are just methods of taking away easy access to a platform for hateful bad faith arguments. Those affected by it can still can go build their own platform to host that rhetoric (Trump has done this with Truth social).
What was the offensive or disagreeable part? Seems like standard satire to me.
I saw another newer post that was probably made because the poster didn't see this post, and a comment made in there linked to this discussion.
Supposedly posts with very high comments/upvote ratio are automatically classified as toxic and downranked.
That combined with random users flagging it, presumably.
In any case, seems more algorithmic than editorial (which is not to say that the latter never occurs around here in general)
HNs is a fairly typical "lock threads that degrade to flamewars" strategy that i first encountered more than 20 years ago.
One answer might be the same cowardice seen at ABC. But that's just one of the possibilities.
they get merged to a single discussion.
This post had about 60 upvotes where the one that the comments go moved from was at something like 175. So it basically kills a posts ability to gain traction.
it is of course in the interests of billionaire-owned companies like YC to keep the community all about "hacking" and "getting VC money" and away from rightfully discussing the most alarming period in the US' history since the Civil War. because hackers need to be at their screens spinning more gold for them and not getting disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of society into an authoritarian dystopia.
That in dark times there is a tendency for all open discussion venues to descend into the same pits.
And there is value in avoiding that.
The fact that this discussion is still here strikes me as moderation in moderation. A nice balance.
Every user has their own list of which stories ought to clear the bar for frontpage representation, and it's impossible to include them all. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that HN has (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). As a result, there's no HN reader who gets the frontpage they want, including us. This is baked into the fundamentals of how the site is designed, unless and until we start customizing the frontpage per user preferences.
There's another important aspect that I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 and still haven't explained very well. In that post it's called "the temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories"—a clumsy phrase—but if you follow the argument, the conclusion it's impossible to prioritize political stories by importance on HN, even if everyone were to agree about what the important stories actually are.
I think your immediately following phrase captures the idea well: "Curiosity withers under repetition," and that's compounded by topical subjects inherently being ephemeral.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/11/musk-trum...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-policy-...
If people can't keep up, or interest decays, the opposition lose weight.
The times are such that I don't think that policy is tenable.
And I hope we can return soon enough to a time when that policy will be tenable.
And yet, my mother, who voted for this admin, would stand by the statement that we live in the free'est country in the world.
The truly horrific thing is that it's death by a thousand cuts, rather than the huge tyrannical violation that would cause people to stream out into the streets for change.
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000692392-w...
Lots of people say things like "I know I should read, but it's this whole thing..." and then you find out they've been stuck on page 3 of Wuthering Heights for forty years, because someone convinced them they ought to be reading that, and it's haunted them from their night-stand ever since.
Don't let anyone tell you what to read, pick up something that sounds fun to you, and read it. Choosing to read something is always and in every circumstance better than sitting in front of a screen and passively yielding to whatever evening the advertisers have planned out for you.
i'm saying: reading is like gambling, it's a lot of fun!
If I pick something up and it sucks, I feel bad stopping and force myself to finish it (which will take 8 months because I hate it).
And that stops any reading progress.
Ironically, I plan on reading Wuthering Heights this October.
Alongside Charlie Kirk."
This isn't a drill. It's also not a real fire. Half truths are a grifter's greenbacks.
Do you think the CEO would have fired you for being conservative? Or do you think your career wouldn't have advanced because people wouldn't want to associate with someone who's always saying things they find abhorrent?
And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
If I was your co-worker, I wouldn't want to know your non-work related opinions, especially your political opinions. That assumes we're not working on someone's political campaign.
Your opinions that don't relate to your job are irrelevant -- at work. And as such, why would anyone, whether they agree with you or not, want to hear you (or anyone else) pontificate about how you "Like Ike" and that his Vice President would make a much better President than that (gasp!) Catholic, rum-runner/gangster's son from Massachusetts.
Yes, I'm deliberately using examples from 65+ years ago. Because it doesn't matter what the content of those opinions are. Unless you work for the RNCC or the DNC, etc. those opinions have no value or meaning in the workplace.
I'm not afraid to express my opinions, but I choose not to do so while I'm actively on the job. That you do it out of fear is, on the one hand, unfortunate but, on the other hand, a good thing as no one really wants to hear them anyway.
Keep up the good work!
>And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
Good. I'm sure that, regardless of how you think your peers would perceive your opinions, they are much less interested in those opinions than they are about the quality and quantity of your work, your opinions of the work and work environment, and how you interact on a personal level with others.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Then I moved to a very red state remote. And none of my co-workers cared until I got a new boss out off Chicago who was excited to have someone on his team that lived in God's country. But for him I wasn't conservative enough (I made a joke about not wanting to use my aerospace degree to make nukes so I switched to software. Guess what he did before software? FML) and I was gone for my wrong think. And I don't think I passed his 'God's country' purity test.
“I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here.”
I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_i...
How can it not be an overreach ?
You can't make this stuff up.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/fcc-chair-brendan-carr-defends...
Regulating “false information?”
There was no false information and the substance of the clip is just video of a person responding to a question.
https://progressive.org/op-eds/weve-always-known-fox-news-is...
I guess Fox is next then. After all, the FCC is definitely not going to be found anything less than even handed.
I’ve been hearing a variation of this for at least 9 months. Can’t help but see Americans as frogs in the boiling water. Surely it can’t get hotter than this, can it?
How long until Fallon and Myers after the president all but threatened them? Guess we’ll find out how high this water will go.
But if the FCC actually strong armed the media due to political reasons, would it stand up in the courts? Disney has more than enough money to fight it. One possibility is that they're using this as an opportunity to cut the show, which maybe they were leaning towards anyway. It effectively redirects blame to the FCC instead of the company that actually made the decision.
> The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a crime or a catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial “public harm” if aired.
> FCC rules specifically say that the “public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties.”
> Broadcasters may air disclaimers that clearly characterize programming as fiction to avoid violating FCC rules about public harm.
It’s very obvious that Kimmel didn’t cause, and couldn’t have caused, any public harm.
That all being said, what I don't like is that even if ABC execs decided that they found what Kimmel said distasteful or offensive, this still looks an awful lot like acting out of fear of a president who famously is very spiteful to anyone who says anything bad about him.
Edit: to clarify, the CEO of Disney caved to pressure from affiliates owned by a Nexstar who are actively petitioning the FCC to relax media ownership rules so they can buy more affiliates than the law allows.
If that's not infringing on first amendment rights, I don't know what is. The right will of course support this; they tend to treat the constitution and laws as flexible whenever their ideology requires it.
Oh I'm sure they'll figure it out.
Perhaps the morons running the US need to first look at their first amendment, before moving to the second. Extremely disappointed that even Rand Paul is for such moves.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
How many companies, media people and politicians need to bend the knee before someone stands up and says this has all gone far enough?
lese majesty /s
Anyone living in the USA should by now have made a decision where their line in the sand lies. Without a free press or opposition things can move quickly so decide now. If I was a member of a minority likely to be a target I would want to know I had an exit strategy.
Old track, but just hard to imagine what would have happened if Biden was asked about his corruption and answered like that. But it's hypothetical anyway, since no previous president would ever be rug-pulling crypto scams or selling watches and bibles.
I just can't believe how weekly, or sometimes daily, I share these wild stories and videos with some friends and they keep behaving like anything about this is normal. There are so many things that would make me go WTF even without the context of the constant grift it all comes with.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")
> The word is, and it's a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It's really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!
Nexstar owns outright a bunch of broadcast zones in America, with zero conpetition in those broadcast areas. So them folding and everyone else following suit isn't much of a surprise. It's pathetic that media ownership has degraded to such a sorry lame ass state, that there's many markets where almost all broadcast media is via one company. The decayed anti-health of media continues to plague this nation, allow the worst poxes to spread.
https://latenighter.com/news/jimmy-kimmels-removal-comes-ami...
Money isn't an excuse to do whatever you want
A change of status quo in this case, will require massive loss of Disney+ subscriptions, which is not that probable.
That's why you can blame them, because billions of private dollars should not outweigh maintaining a stable democracy and civil society for all. "Just following market incentives to maximize shareholder value" is 2025's "just following orders".
"Well, we needed to acquiesce to fascism for our stock price" is not acceptable. Over and over and over we are told about how corporations are job creators and serve a valuable function in our society. We are told that having power distributed across corporations that are in competition with one another is a protection against tyranny.
Fat lot of good that did.
If there were a monopoly on media from ONE broadcaster, and that broadcaster didn't fight back, that's a wrap.
But to be sure, competition is NOT an innate feature of capitalism (economic power naturally consolidates in laissez-faire markets), but competition is an external check on capitalism's power; which is empowered by government regulation; and creates mixed market economies. Just as well, mixed market economies - and the ability to have multiple companies for goods and services - are an external check on government AND society power, as well as other companies themselves. It allows people to choose who to work for, buy/sell from, and build their own enterprise if they don't agree with present-day offerings.
More accurate to say "I" as you'll find quite a large number of people blaming ABC for their actions in the coming days.
Also, you can cancel and then re-sub right away with one extra click (and keep any discounted rate). Let them see the numbers and a warning.
I hate cancel culture whether it’s coming from the conservative right (we’ve had that in Ireland for most of the 20th century) or the liberal left (more recently) and I believe that comedy should be able to transgress social norms and push up against boundaries but what I saw of Kimmel was wholly innocuous.
If you can fit in the Aliens show before your billing date it's worth watching if you are a normal person that can allow yourself to enjoy TV shows.
They might think it will save them but acquiescing to a bully never works. It just shows you’re weak and can be pushed around.
Sensitive much? Not really the emotional intelligence and maturity one wants from an establishment running a country of 300 million people and all the problems that encapsulates.
The US is in all kinds of trouble and, unfortunately, the rest of the world is going to get some of it on them.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/roseanne-barr-obama-adviser-...
If it’s useful to argue for free speech in one breath, then for censorship in the next, followed by “its just words” - it will be argued in that order.
The utility function is politics, not reason or logic. Getting people to engage, and get tied up in the logic, is a feature not a bug. It wastes energy and creates the impression that this is an issue resolved with words and understanding.
You are trying to draw a conclusion from the information available, and then you ask: What if I ignore the central piece of evidence?
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/trump-absolutely-love-steph...
Make no mistake, this is a witch hunt. Very soon there will be no one left who publicly speaks out against Trump.
Jimmy was wrong to say what he said. At best it was a bad-faith assertion, at worst it was propaganda. It wasn’t even true, or likely to be true given what we knew.
The fact is that someone is dead. That is the strongest form of censorship. That is the strongest attack on “free speech”.
Jimmy pulled indefinitely? In my opinion it’s unfair. ABC is not innocent here.
But at least Jimmy didn’t have a bullet put into his neck.
> 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
Which is factual. It does not make assertions about Mr. Robinson. It represents a factual observation that many of the "MAGA gang" are attempting to distance themselves.
> We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately -snip-
Pretty loaded statement. Desperately? On what basis?
The “fact” is that MAGA didn’t have the slightest fear the shooter was one of them. They all assumed he wasn’t bc it made the most sense given context and available evidence.
Anger? Sure. Desperation? No lol.
> trying to characterize this kid
That shooter is 22. That’s a full blown adult. Calling him a kid is not only false but also gross in this context. It’s an attempt to evoke sympathy for a murderer.
> as anything other than one of them
Another false supposition. They are actually trying to characterize him as a far left nutjob. Not just “anything”, but “Liberal”. The thing about propaganda is certain words aren’t allowed in certain contexts.
Second, it implies the shooter was likely one of them which was highly improbable to all concerned — most especially to MAGA.
> and doing everything they can to score political points for it
What political points Jimmy? It’s more likely they are just upset that a good friend got shot and killed in broad daylight for speaking his views. Charlie Kirk was a huge ally of MAGA and a friend to many of them. So they want justice.
Of course Jimmy can’t say that (propaganda has rules), so here he is acting saying it’s about vague political points (sounds convincing) and not genuine grief/outrage.
If you have watched any of the coverage, desperately is correct. Anecdotally, many conservatives on social media practically celebrated when the bullet cases were found with memes that could suggest the shooter was "left wing". How much coverage and how fast did that news spread?
> The “fact” is that MAGA didn’t have the slightest fear the shooter was one of them
MAGA is not a hive mind. You should not pretend that they are a unified entity. Many individuals did, because there has been more extremist right wing violence against moderate right wingers. Given the shooter was experienced with firearms, it certainly made things foggy.
> That shooter is 22. That’s a full blown adult.
Depends on who you ask. Car rental companies would disagree with you.
> Second, it implies the shooter was likely one of them which was highly improbable to all concerned
You clearly have not heard of Nick Fuentes.
> What political points Jimmy?
Now you're just making bad faith arguments. "We are under attack" is the political points they want to score. You don't have to be that clever to figure it out.
What happened to freedom of speech?
Which is IMO a bad decision. You can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you.
Do I even need the sarcasm mark?
This is not where the revolution would be. Ever.
Why else would the administration be so afraid of a few jokes?
But maybe we get new generations of comedians that will.
Joe Rogan, the Fear Factor host turned Right Wing podcaster? Is he know for comedy? I thought his brief failed stint of stand up comedy is why he switched to podcasting.
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-mocked-botching-joe-biden...
One of many examples. Joe is outraged because he thinks Joe Biden talked about airports during the revolutionary war. He goes on to state that someone who makes such comments shouldn't have a job. When it's revealed that it's a Trump statement he pivots to "oh he just made a mistake when speaking". It's so blatantly obvious and happens constantly.
I mean he's not like Tucker say.
> December 22, 2023: "Pull him," Rogan said. "If you had any other job, and you were talking like that, they would go, 'Hey, you're done.'"
but mysteriously not when it turns out to be Trump:
> November 5, 2024: Popular podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump on the eve of the election, a move Trump’s team swiftly touted as a major win in the final hours of their campaign. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/joe-rogan-trump-endo...)
I guess my point is: these people are all interconnected and it’s almost like when you hear about how actors all know each other and hang out, or congresspeople play golf together, but for fascism.
Maybe (maybe) ten years ago you could get away with this opinion. I'm not sure how you could say this in 2025 in good faith.
But I was refering to was the specific idea of what has been labeled the "Rogansphere" by his critics. This refers to a loose media/comedy ecosystem orbiting Joe Rogan, his podcast, Austin (comedy) clubs, and a web of frequent guests and adjacent podcasters/comedians who cross-promote each other on YouTube and podcasts. This network rose to prominence in a push to normalize "anti-woke" and right-leaning narratives under a free-speech banner. This was a pretty popular niche to serve as the term "cancel culture" gained more traction. At the time even many otherwise (american-)left-leaning people would express frustration with liberal attempts to police language etc.
This popular niche was especially present in comedy with a discourse about what and who you could joke about and since Joe Rogan played a big role into giving that topic traction I cynically called it "Joe Rogan school of comedy". I am no alone in thinking that way, comedian Marc Maron puts it better than I could in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N4W05eyto&t=307s
Joe Rogan owns a comedy club in Austin as well. [1]
Joe Rogan is a pretty busy guy.. I would imagine his professional network amongst comedians was pretty large before he blew up as a podcaster. This is not only to say that Joe Rogan has multiple comedies, but is also very likely to be very influential amongst as well.
[1] https://www.comedyinyoureye.com/post/inside-the-comedy-club-...
So: As much as I admire Mel Brooks, this is just wishful thinking.
Let's perhaps say that if satire doesn't directly prevent authoritarianism, it works as a very effective canary in the mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_speech ("...said to be the last speech made publicly, and on a high level, in Germany against National Socialism...")
An ironic tombstone for freedom of speech:
"They will bear them and follow the Führer with unwavering loyalty, if they are allowed to have their part in the planning and in the work, if every word of criticism is not taken for ill will, and if despairing patriots are not branded as enemies of the state."
https://www.openculture.com/2020/11/before-creating-the-moom...
Tom Lehrer - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7275489-i-don-t-think-this-...
What Gavin Newsom is doing is, I think, a bit more subtle. He's signaling to Democratic supporters "Here's a guy willing to mock and ridicule Trump," because the established Democrats were too afraid to even do that - which explains why in this age of Trump, Democrats' poll numbers are still in the gutter.
The lend lease part is not correct. Lend lease went mostly to UK (Google AI says about 60% of lend lease went to UK & the rest of lend lease was split between USSR & China. Take that with a grain of salt)
Not to be taken with a grant of salt, according to wikipedia: "Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production. " [1]
Also per wikipedia, USSR produced about 30k light tanks, 65k medium tanks (eg: t-34), and 13k heavy tanks. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#/media...
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_producti...
UK sent stuff to USSR, too, including probably some of the stuff they got from the US, and they delivered it to Murmansk (rather than requiring the Soviets to come get it) during which their convoys and sailors took losses from the German navy.
I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies. The US sent advisors, too, e.g., in how to build factories.
Of course, a few years later the US was sending stuff to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, one of the purposes of which was to build up Germany so it could resist future Soviet aggression.
Yes, but that wasn't part of the "lend lease" program.
The quantity of materials sent from the UK to the USSR was significant. Just it was not part of the lend lease program. (Arguably this is something better, just direct aid without strings attached).
The quantities of what the UK gave to the USSR was a sacrifice of blood and treasure: "food and raw materials, roughly £30 billion in today’s money. This included 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft, while public charitable donations provided approximately £5.3 million (roughly £490 million in today’s money) in medical stores...."
"Some of these supplies were purchased in the United States (US) by the UK for delivery directly to the USSR. Most British supplies were carried by sea to Northern Russia, docking at Archangel or Murmansk, by a series of Arctic convoys, which were subject to sustained German attacks from three dimensions from powerful German forces based in Northern Norway" [1]
> I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies
Sounds plausible (I would hesitate to repeat it without seeing the data behind the numbers). I'm curious how the number breaks down as a relative amount.
[1] https://www.geostrategy.org.uk/britains-world/telling-the-tr...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482#45283234
Thank you for helping me think about / express this better.
Napoleon shut down all the newspapers that criticized him. He was only undone by Waterloo (actually mostly by his own folly of trying to invade Russia ...)
I don't think there's any record of Authoritarianism being defeated by satire, if for no other reason than the authoritarians shut the satire down.
Looks like it's time for an American _Solidarność_
- Month 0 (Jan 1933): Hitler appointed Chancellor
- Month 1 (Feb 1933): Reichstag fire; Reichstag Fire Decree suspends key civil liberties
- Month 2 (Mar 1933): Reichstag elections; Enabling Act passed; Dachau concentration camp opened
- Month 3 (Apr 1933): nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses; Civil Service Law purges Jews and political opponents from state jobs
- Month 4 (May 1933): independent trade unions seized and dissolved; replaced by the German Labour Front (DAF)
- Month 5 (Jun 1933): Social Democratic Party banned nationally
- Month 6 (Jul 1933): Law Against the Formation of New Parties makes Germany a one-party state
- Month 8 (Sep 1933): Reich Chamber of Culture law brings arts and press under Propaganda Ministry control
- Month 9 (Oct 1933): Editors’ Law (Schriftleitergesetz) excludes Jews from journalism and subjects editors to regime oversight
- Month 10 (Nov 1933): one-list Reichstag “election” and referendum held with opposition already illegal
- Month 12 (Jan 1934): Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich abolishes state parliaments and centralizes power
- Months 17–18 (Jun–Jul 1934): Night of the Long Knives purge eliminates SA leadership and other rivals
- Month 19 (Aug 1934): law merging President and Chancellor signed; Hindenburg dies; army swears personal oath to Hitler, Hitler becomes Führer
- Month 32 (Sep 1935): Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship and outlaw marriages/relations with “Aryans”
I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?
What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.
Justice Antonin Scalia's opening statement before a 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0
Even more worth reading are the Federalist Papers, cover-to-cover, as he suggested. The depth to which the Framers considered the kind of situations we are in today is amazing.
oops, I guess
But, the anti-federalists lost the argument at the time. That doesn't mean the argument was resolved completely. It just means the federalists convinced enough people the Constitution was "good enough" for ratification. We are meant to continue improving it.
Now that we know for sure that the anti federalists were right about the necessary and proper clause and the interstate commerce clause we should be arguing for amendments. Convince enough people and it happens.
There's no discussion, no indication what really happened, facts are irrelevant, all lies and threats:
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/trump-free-speech-abc-...
The pretext is really falling away.
It's not about Kimmel or the money, it's about the next person not stepping out of line so they don't face the consequences.
There was also the theory that it was a black person, hence all the death threats to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=death+threats+hbcu
So, yes, there was quite a bit of "see, it wasn't one of ours, it was one of yours" after the guy was caught. Especially when the images of the shooter's mother started surfacing indicating he was raised that way. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tyler+robinson+mother+gun . Charlie Kirk's mother at the memorial service specifically blamed college for radicalizing him, saying that good mother's wouldn't send their kids to college. (I don't have that clip.)
In general, my philosophy is to not speculate publicly when the shooter was going to get caught and identified quickly anyway.
“For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn't be one of us — that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country… Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for… But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”
This is why I think the American government is doomed in its current construction. First past the post voting has conditioned people like you to believe that everything is binary. You describe a world with only two parties that can have no dissention in those parties and no possible disagreements among their members. Isn't it obvious how flawed that mindset is?
This country desperately needs more than two options to every issue, but our system is inadvertently designed to ensure that doesn't happen.
He also inscribed a bullet with "If you read this, you are gay lmao."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/us/politics/tyler-robinso...
Umm, not necessarily. Apparently, the engravings are used by right wing trolls[0][1][2], many of them who absolutely despised Charlie Kirk.
As such, let's not jump to any conclusions unless and until we have factual information.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-a-groyper...
[1] https://mastodon.world/@jeffowski/115199287909601561
[2] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/639/464/1e4
America has two parties because both parties are very internally open. Democrats have given up on that in the last few primaries but that's still very new, and Republicans are still open. You can enter as an outsider and take over the parties. That's how the Republicans ended up with Trump.
If the two parties were less internally democratic you'd see the same situation in the UK where there are two dominant parties and a bunch of smaller parties that occasionally end up in coalition but mostly act to push the main parties around by threatening to take too many votes.
The UK having a parliamentary system counteracts this due to when the coalition building step happens. In a parliamentary system, the government is formed via coalition building in the parliament after an election. However, the US being a presidential system means that post-election coalition building would be too late to impact the chief executive, the coalition must be built before the election. This combined with FPTP is what yields our two party system.
For example, imagine the US has an even 50/50 split between Democrats and Republicans. Now imagine the tension in the Democratic Party boils over and the party splits into Liberals and Progressives. Maybe some Republicans were really centrists, so they peel off to the center-left Liberal party. That might leave us with a breakdown of 45% Republicans, 35% Liberals, and 20% Progressives. This almost guarantees the president will be a Republican. Despite attracting a majority of voters, the Progressives and Liberals costs themselves a chance at winning by splitting. They would have a natural incentive to merge their parties again before the next presidential election. But if this was a parliamentary system, the Liberals and Progressives would now make up 55% of the parliament and they could successfully form a government together and choose a PM without having to actually merge parties.
The reason I blamed this entirely on FPTP in my original comment is because something like ranked choice voting is a much more reasonable change that the US could adopt. Shifting from a presidential system to a parliamentary system is an unlikely enough change that I didn't think it was worth mentioning.
That's a question that actually has some easy examples if you'd care to study parties like Sinn Fein or Fatah or the CCCP or... you get the point. American politics has largely been free of this sort of in-fighting (and other kinds of political violence), but a political movement's leaders or followers can be targeted because they're deemed not sufficiently radical or too radical or what have you, or they've fallen out of favor, or they've done something the membership cannot accept, or whatever.
Or, you know: maybe the person doing the "taking out" is just insane.
> They wouldn't, because that's not something that people do to other people they agree with.
Because that's just what a political party always is. A group of calm, rational people who are in total agreement on principles, goals and tactics and are entirely content with their place in the power structure. Ahem.
This fake news was wide spread and even leaked into Hacker News through at least dozens of comments. [3] People are still implicitly trying to promote this misinformation by flagging any comment that mentions it, and spinning Kimmel stating, "with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them" to mean anything other than what it does.
[1] - https://xcancel.com/CollinRugg/status/1966575444435890341
[2] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=groyper&...
[3] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I was not familiar with the term before either, but afaict it was based on the the shell casing engravings, halloween costumes etc, which I don't believe have been refuted [2]?
Not that this matters to the topic at hand as that isn't a claim Kimmel made either way, nor does it play into how tragic any murder is.
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/trending-politics/
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/17/how-charli...
People then simply unquestioningly repeated the claims, cited the same disinformation, and away we go - social media style. For instance here [2] it showed up in an Anandtech discussion, and I already linked to the claims making their way onto hacker news in dozens of posts as well. To say nothing of the cess pools that are Reddit, X, Facebook, etc.
[1] - https://xcancel.com/YourAnonCentral
[2] - https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/charlie-kirk-shot-in-th...
> Halloween photos showing Robinson riding on the back of an inflatable Donald Trump or dressed as a gopnik offshoot of Pepe the frog, the now-anachronistic alt-right meme that evolved into the groyper mascot.
> Groypers had hassled Kirk at public appearances over the years for what they saw as his insufficiently radical conservatism. (Fuentes has forcefully denied any connection to the shooting and told his followers he would “disavow” and “disown” any who “take up arms.”)
> But as the internet quickly pointed out, “Bella Ciao” is both an anti-fascist anthem from post-WWII Italy and a remixed track on a groyper Spotify playlist.
This would be misinformation if it would turn out to be false, but it would not be misinformation based on whether or not the shooter is leaning this way or that way or no way.
The source for the killer being a groyper is solely the disinformation account. The things you've mentioned are postfacto efforts to try to support the disinformation, in rather nonsensical ways I'd add. A Spotify playlist from some random guy, to try to create some 5d chess argument - also known as mental gymnastics, and Robinson riding around on a demeaned looking Trump doll 8 years ago? [1] If that's the best people can dig up, you should realize you're obviously being lied to.
[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15092455/Trump-cost...
No, the source is the string of corroborating incidents.
Sure, the two examples you bring up could be innocuous by themselves, but together with a "gopnik offshoot of Pepe the frog", his upbringing, and the fact that there are clearly fractures within the otherwise very top-down right-wing movement?
You're very adamant to dismiss any pieces of evidence as inconsequential (not as incorrect, mind you), yet resistant to provide any counter-factuals?
Nobody would, in a million years, reasonably think 'Ah hah - this must mean he's actually a groyper.' Stuff like this is exactly why Trump won the popular vote, something no Republican had done in 20 years. There is an increasingly rampant level of mental illness in the liberal camp regularly paired alongside outright denials of reality, and child-like efforts to gaslight.
A few more assassinations other degrees of political stupidity and we'll be well on our way to a one-party country. And I say this as somebody who has never once voted Republican, and until recently I would have readily identified as liberal. But now? It's starting to feel like a tainted term. My views haven't changed, but the distribution of views amongst self described liberals have, and I do not want to be associated with this madness.
If you have sufficient evidence to make reasonable conclusion, which is negated by newer evidence. It is not misinformation.
Misinformation would be if you know something is not true and you twist facts around and present speculation in a factual manner to imply that it is true.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52988-donald-trum...
Even The Atlantic has had to admit that this is stupid and they can't work out why anyone believes it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/charlie-ki...
> "The evidence that Robinson was a “Groyper”—a member of an online further-right-than-thou movement that had harassed Kirk and President Donald Trump—was paltry. Why did anyone believe that idea to begin with? Already it bore the marks of an incipient conspiracy theory, a soothing nugget of esoteric knowledge, suppressed for political purposes. Many of those suckered in were victims of their own motivated reasoning. It hurts to admit that a movement you like has produced a bad person, and it hurts even more to admit that bitter truth to a gloating member of a movement you hate."
They're soothing themselves. Nobody on the right is "gloating" over Kirk being killed. This really happened because leftists have deliberately tried to confuse everyone about the truth. On their safe space Bluesky they even admit to it:
https://substack.com/@mrandyngo/note/c-157561235
> "Anyway probably for the best if everyone asserts he's a Groyper whether he is or not. The narrative really does matter more than the truth in this case"
> "Lying to flood the news is good actually"
> "Spending the last week repeating that the killer was one of the right's own may have helped take the wind out of their sails. Regardless of whether that ends up being true it was rhetorically useful in the interim. Now you can pivot. Nobody is going to care what your last position was."
These tactics work. The internet has filled up with leftists who genuinely believe Kirk was killed for not being right wing enough, and anyone who tries to talk them back to reality gets answers like "I won't read any right wing sources". It's a self-created filter bubble of madness.
Where? The rest of your post as connection to this topic hinges on this claim, yet it isn't supported.
Which is repeating the lie that Robinson is right wing. 100% false. He deserved to be fired for saying this, because it is delusional misinformation.
What he said is a critique on the "MAGA Gang"'s handling of the murder, in that they are less concerned with doing anything productive and more concerned with "scoring political points".
Whether or not "this kid" is one of them or not is inconsequential to the statement, and that sentence does not claim so.
This is not the case for cable licensees, which goes a long way towards explaining why ABC/NBC/CBS/etc have all remained relatively sane in an era where it's clearly become most profitable to pick a side, pander, and confirm their every possible bias. This is because e.g. Fox News or MSNBC can get away with far more than ABC. And this is probably simply an example of something that you cannot get away with on public broadcasts.
Deciding to try to 'joke' about a domestic political assassination, for which countless people are still grieving was dumb. Stating, "We hit some new lows with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them." was very dumb. I think the only issue that makes this debatable for people is the radicalized nature of politics.
If this had been a white wing extremist who murdered a liberal guy who made a living posting public (and atypically respectful) debates, and Kimmel was then mocking it in a similar way, while further implying that killer himself was a Progressive or whatever, then obviously nobody, and I include conservatives there, would see any issues with him being canned.
-----
The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,” a Nexstar spokesman said.
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Immediately following his monologues there advertisers and affiliates contacted and were complaining to Disney. The FCC was, if anything, just the final nail in the coffin.
Sick of people racing to chirp that we're nowhere to be found. I'm too detached to doomscroll. Just saw the news now.
Honestly, I'm tired of all of the snide remarks from both teams acting like you’re not equally guilty of opportunistically showing up for free speech.
And you have the balls to make comments like this as I'm already dealing with the fact Jimmy Kimmel should have been canceled years ago for literally any other reason. At least when I'm defending detestable speech the number of people pretending it's meritorious is tiny. But now I have to hear his comedy praised? Fuck my life.
Yeah, a trans person asking you use their desired pronouns presents the same threat to free speech as the FCC threatening people over jokes. The reason for the "snide remarks" is that people like you are still drawing false equivalencies between "both teams".
This is a good point because a business choosing not to employ somebody is the exact same thing as the government mandating that a private company not employ somebody. Similarly, gummy bears and grizzly bears are the same thing: bears
I don’t appreciate this attack on my freedom of expression. “Freedom of speech” means saying whatever I want and I am free from anybody forming any negative opinions about me or what I said. Any even perceived undesired consequence for how I express myself is an assault on my first amendment rights
It seems like we’re in full agreement here. Like the only way I could imagine that we’re at odds is if you just decided unprompted to share your opinions about gender in the Jimmy Kimmel thread and used “free speech”, again completely unprompted, as a shorthand to express your irritation at the fact that there exists some people that don’t agree with you.
That would be pretty silly though. Obviously you were sharing a single example that’s part of a larger and logically consistent definition of free speech (which we agree about), because it would be pretty bad faith to assume that you saw the Jimmy Kimmel thread and thought “Nobody is even discussing my take on pronouns on this page. I’d better get on fixing that”
It is sadly a matter of when not if.
The federal government quelling speech is a very different thing than facing consequences for your speech in a private relationship.
The defense of choice everyone.
According to sites like https://televisionstats.com/s/jimmy-kimmel-live he wasn't even in the top 500 TV shows
Band of Brothers a show from 24 years ago still gets more viewers that Jimmy get's now.
https://globalnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/trump-the-l...
I've heard this before, but where did this originate? Did Jimmy just make it up or was he quoting some source? I heard the same thing but from people I interact with that this guy was crazy right wing nazi and killed Kirk because Kirk wasn't hard-line enough. But then the bullets said "Catch, fascist" which is kind of odd. Like, are fascists calling each other "fascists" as a meme, or was the killer signing his name like "catch, <signed by> fascist".
Ok, fine, but then "Bella ciao" is an anti-Nazi and anti-fascist Italian folk song (at least according to wikipedia) [1], so, we got a hard right winger, mentioning killing fascists and listening to Bella ciao killing someone like Charlie Kirk. There was "notices bulges" comment which I didn't get. But given just those two clues and having to guess the affiliation of the shooter, not sure how people arrived at "this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them [maga gang]".
He was raised in a die-hard Trump Christian family. He allegedly had some LGBT friends too, and got angry at Kirk's rhetoric against them as a group. Which, if you knew Kirk before his murder, framing LGBT people as degenerate and dangerous freaks of natures was kind of his bread and butter. This doesn't justify the killing, but certainly explains it.
I'm sure more will come of it, but I doubt there's much of interest in here. What's more important are the reactions of public figures, and so far, none on the right have called for de-escalation.
I am wondering how did Jimmy know what his leanings where? It didn't seem like a guess. The language was pretty definite.
I guess someone found his gun ownership views online. I mean besides using a gun to shoot Kirk, which I don't think anyone needs to hold any ideological leanings to acquire a weapon in US. For instance, if I hear of shootings in Chicago overnight, I am not thinking "it's those 2nd amendment nuts again".
> Typical of a young Utah white guy, I'd say.
I'd agree but only if it wasn't shooting someone like Kirk. If some unknown John Doe was killed somewhere in Utah I can see making a guess that it's probably some maga trumper person doing it. And it would still be a wild guess. Here it seems there was more than a wild guess. And common sense would dictate the guess should have been the opposite -- it's someone opposed to Kirk and maga and all that stuff not for it. And it should been emphasized it's a just a wild guess until it becomes more obvious.
/s
Second, look how Trump is pressuring the networks to get rid of other media personalities who are unfavorable to him:
> “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “That leaves Jimmy (Fallon) and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”
We have a serious problem.
Just kidding! He's a humorless scold who thought he could lie about Kirk's murder with impunity : it was viewer disgust and an advertiser revolt that drove the decision at ABC. It's FAFO time, Jimbo.
> This is what happens, when Marxists don’t get their way. [0]
This is objectively much worse than what Kimmel said. Yet, no repercussions.
When Charlie Kirk, an influential figure, is assassinated:
> I have introduced a resolution condemning the assassination of Charlie Kirk, commemorating his outstanding patriotism and achievements.
> I look forward to the Senate uniting to honor Charlie, his family, and his courageous legacy. [1]
Both incidents are obviously horrific, and should be condemned, but our elected officials ought to be held to a better standard than a late night talk host, and we as a society should hold our elected officials accountable to such behavior.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/republican-s...
bummer.
Of course not.
The walls of our echo chamber are made out of titanium.
FollowingTheDao•4mo ago