When Speech is Illegal

 

Screenshot via South China Morning Post, October 2013,

The last time I had occasion to devote real time to thinking about the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was almost 12 years ago,  when he was in trouble not for something he said on his show, but for his failure to respond to something a small child said, in a segment aired during the government shutdown of October 2013, which he called Kid's Table:

The offending remark came while Kimmel was talking to a group of children, ages 5 and 6, about the United States government’s debt, much of which is held by China.

“America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion,” Kimmel told the children. “How should we pay them back?”

“Shoot cannons all the way over and kill everyone in China,” one boy said.

Or in this case, as he said afterwards, "Kid's Table, the Lord of the Flies edition". It was widely felt, in the Asian American community anyway, that he should at the very least have distanced himself from this bloodthirsty proposal in the followup, which was not quite what he did:

“Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Kimmel said.

He then posed the question: “Should we allow the Chinese to live?”

While one boy said, “No,” most of the children said, “Yes.”

“If we don’t allow them to live, then they’ll try to kill us,” a girl said.

Normalizing the concept of permanent ineradicable hostility between the races. I don't know anything about the races of the kindergartners on the show, but I hope none of them were East Asian in origin—you can imagine how it would have gone if one of them was, how that child would have felt about the discussion, and then you can go on to understand that there were certainly people of East Asian origin watching the show at home.

Protests in Chinatown, protests in my own half-Chinese family, protests from the Chinese embassy, protests from my H-1B Chinese work colleague with the PhD from Urbana-Champaign, not normally in unison with the CPC, who got me to sign a petition, and ABC's swift damage control and Kimmel's apology, which was not too gracious ("I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement"), though I can see his point. A reviewer for KTAR radio in Phoenix said it was "poignant and hilarious" (just bumped into that one). Anyway that was the end to the controversy as far as I knew. Now I seem to be the only one who remembers it, though I did have to google to remember what it was about, and I may never have known that, because I find I'm seriously shocked by it now. Or could I really have thought it was OK back then? Could I have been resensitized by the explosion of anti-Chinese racism that came with the pandemic so that I now experience it in a different way? No reported pressure of any kind from the federal government, though, ABC seems to have been able to deal with it on a purely business basis.

I thought it would be helpful to have an example of a situation that Kimmel definitely handled badly before we go on to the case on which there is some disagreement.

His response to the September 10 killing of Kirk, in any case, wasn't at all "denigrating the memory of Charlie Kirk", as Stephen Bannon put it; he denounced the murder, as everyone should, and refrained from speaking ill of the victim. What aroused the criticism was what he said about Republican politicians, not involved in the murder one way or the other, but rushing to exploit the murder, starting with Donald Trump, who released a video on the night of September 10, before a suspect had even been identified, blaming it on the "radical left" and unnamed "organizations" that supposedly fund it;

“For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country....My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” he said. 

Along with Christopher Rufo even faster out of the gate, and JD Vance, and Elon Musk, who tweeted, "The left is the party of murder".Doing what they always do at such moments, which is to try to seize control of the narrative before anybody has a clear idea of what happened, which had developed by the 15th into a full-court press

even as a killer was named, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of a gun-loving Republican family in rural Utah, and a host of emerging evidence seemed to be pointing to his being the very opposite of left, the kind of overly online far-right "groyper" who would think that Charlie Kirk was too liberal—and it was to this whole tension that Kimmel was referring in his monologue on the evening of the 15th, when he accused MAGA of

“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.”

Except, unfortunately for Kimmel, there was already evidence he wasn't aware of adding yet another twist—the guy Robinson was sharing an apartment with was in fact a former guy, so to speak,  a trans woman in the throes of transition, and she and Robinson were lovers. He had confessed the murder to her, before he turned himself in, in a sequence of texts she turned over to police, and this new information was serving the rightists as a new hook to hang their preferred story from. 

I imagine they did this with an unspoken assumption that a man who has a trans girlfriend must be leftist, or "woke", ipso facto—that's at best a ridiculous oversimplification when you say it straight out, but they never do say such things straight out—and then took this as proof that Robinson was indeed a leftist just as they had hoped, and mounted the anti-Kimmel crusade on that basis, that Kimmel was hiding this key information (which he actually didn't have). But it's not unreasonable to think Robinson's desire to kill Kirk had something to with Kirk's rigidly antitrans views: you can certainly read the texts that way ("I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out”), though you can't really make it add up to Robinson being a leftist in any doctrinaire sense, and the federal investigation has come up completely dry in its effort to find leftist connections in that kind of sense.

I'm seeing the story at the moment as a genuine Aristotelian tragedy, of a hero with a fatal flaw. Like Sophocles's Ajax, Tyler's flaw is that however brave and athletic he may be he is too impulsive for this world, when he decides to demonstrate the heroic character of his love with a singularly terrible decision, by killing Kirk the transphobe, as if this could somehow help her, which of course instead of pleasing her fills her with endless horror and fear (if you have trouble seeing it as a tragedy, the way to do it is to look at it from her point of view, as the one person who behaves with decency throughout, and sees her life almost as ruined as her boyfriend's; also, the newspapers keep relentlessly misgendering her—no, wait, I have to say that Kirk's widow at the memorial service, publicly forgiving the killer as Christian faith requires, was another one who set a good example, in sharp contrast to the self-described Christian Trump, who confessed, "I hate my opponents and I don't want the best for them, I'm sorry," but he sounded pretty cheerful, not sorry, about it).

But Kimmel certainly wasn't lying; the worst you can say is that he was speaking with insufficient information, and he was basically right about that thing Republicans always do. And I think it should be clear that Trump's case against Kimmel, as presented to ABC by FCC chairman Brandon Carr ("we can do this the easy way or the hard way"), is just as criminal as it sounded, and had nothing to do with his alleged grief over Kirk; it's the things Kimmel says about him that narcissist Trump can't stand, and he's been complaining bitterly about him for years, in his social media, and Carr was acting on his instructions, though we'll never see any evidence of that (as Michael Cohen and others have told us many times, he doesn't normally give explicit orders when he wants his henchmen to commit a crime). 

Trump's all-fronts assault on press and speech freedom, the lawsuits and the threats against mergers and broadcast licenses and the social media howls of the type of claiming it is illegal for a newspaper to criticize the president in more than a particular percentage of its stories about him (the number he offered was 97%, suggesting he was making it up anyway) don't reflect any legal view, only the narcissism: he is entitled to say whatever he wants even after he's had a judgment of defamation entered against him, and everybody else has to shut up when he wills it. But the fixes wangled by the henchmen like Carr may end up as precedents that persist for a very long time. None of this stuff should be happening.