Earlier this week, comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered his monologue, as he does at the beginning of every episode of his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He focused on the reaction to the assassination of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, and claimed that "the MAGA gang" was "desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them."
In addition to not being very funny, the observation rested on a false assumption—that the presumed killer, 22-year-old Utah man Tyler Robinson, is a conservative. Incorrect notions about the suspect's political tribe have remained enduringly popular in liberal media circles; one of the top mainstream liberal Substack writers, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote earlier this week that the motive of the alleged shooter "remains unclear." This is simply not true: Interviews with Robinson's friends and family members, as well as text messages between Robinson and his roommate—his transgender romantic partner—paint a clear portrait of a man who found Kirk's conservative views "harmful." It's fine to leave room for new details that further elucidates or complicates this picture, but for now the totality of the available information suggests an essentially left-wing motivation.
While Kimmel is a comedian rather than a newscaster, given how paranoid the mainstream media is about the spread of so-called misinformation, the criticism of Kimmel on this subject was well-deserved. And I had been planning to criticize him in this newsletter all week.
