For a week now, late-night television has been riding the ripples of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative political activist killed in broad daylight at a rally in Utah. You already know that Tyler Robinson (whom friends reportedly described as “terminally online”) has been charged with Kirk’s murder. The world felt particularly topsy-turvy, particularly parallel universe, as, in the wake of the shocking videos of the shooting, the shooter’s bullet casings were discovered with the ominously irreverent “Hey fascist! Catch!” and “If you read this you are gay LMAO” etched onto them. We’ve all been cast adrift in the cognitive dissonance between the visceral seriousness of the crime and the abject flippancy of the shooter, the brutality of the shooting and the memes reacting to Kirk’s bigoted views.
Jimmy Kimmel has been suspended indefinitely from his show after claiming on Monday that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” (according to his parents, Robinson had over the past year started to lean left, though his text messages reportedly suggested that his father supported Trump) and making a startlingly benign joke about Trump’s reaction to questions about Kirk on the White House lawn. In more topsy-turviness, President Trump went on to describe Kimmel’s suspension as “great news for America,” when really it feels like the opposite: the free speech so lauded by the right being abruptly curtailed when it’s exercised by the left.
We’re back, once again, to talking about what it’s okay to say out loud. Comedians like Jean Smart, Wanda Sykes, and Ben Stiller are with us, grappling with Kimmel’s sidelining, while commentators like Fox’s Brian Kilmeade call for mentally ill homeless people to be killed. (He later apologized.) The discrepancy, outside of political ideology, is startling.
It’s understandable that the literal silencing of a man whose words were so discriminatory—I refuse, frankly, to regurgitate Kirk’s bile here—has sent commentators great and small (the president, the everyday X user), on both sides of the political divide, spiraling downward and reenergizing debates about the First Amendment. As passing comments by the left are weaponized in this war of politics, however, we seem to be in an airless common-sense vacuum.
It seems incredibly, ludicrously obvious to say that killing people you disagree with is wrong. It also seems incredibly obvious that silencing a comedian whose job is to comment on current affairs is a bad thing too. These are apolitical, rational ideas that are being irrationally used to stoke tensions between the factions and score political points.
I don’t know what will happen with Kimmel—he’ll either return to late-night or he won’t—but make no mistake, the suspension of his show serves as a warning to all of us in this political climate: to speak out against those in power is to be silenced.