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;

More Spaghetti on the Wall

This, discovered by @plankysmith.bsky.social, took me aback. What? Who makes fun of weeping police officers? Why would he do something like that? We all have our issues with NYPD, but that just sounds gratuitously mean. Leave the poor guy alone, you know. Who knows what he might have been through, what violence he might have witnessed, what pain he might have been forced to inflict, what sufferings he might have endured in his private life? A policeman's lot is not a happy one! (Happy one!) As a general rule.

And it's not like the Zohran we've come to know and love! Funny, but never cruel, and more likely to laugh at himself than some defenseless third party. What's up with this?

And then the other thing was that nobody seemed to know,  or even to be interested. Planky, and Roy Edroso, mocked the story from a literary standpoint, as it well deserved, but the Bluesky commentators mostly seemed to be most interested in denouncing Politico's morals and those of its right-wing German owner, which was understandable, but not very informative, while at the ci-devant Twitter, they just denounced Zohran, and nobody was wondering what had happened:

And finally, long story short, Mamdani's original tweet, to which Politico helpfully linked, didn't seem very informative either:

Umm what pic.twitter.com/DhIcZxOQRb

— Timbo (@TimboNotes) July 29, 2025

At least until you looked at the timestamp, which was pretty clarifying. Mikey had observed the troubled officer shortly before noon on November 7, 2020; Zohran offered his gnomic comment just an hour later. What was November 7, 2020? Four days after the 2020 election, and the day enough of the absentee ballots had been counted that the media outlets were able to call it for Joe Biden, which they did around 11:30 AM.

In other words, that cop wasn't upset because he'd seen somebody getting shot, or had to make a difficult arrest, or gotten a breakup text from a girlfriend, he was overcome with grief because he had just learned that Trump had lost. Or that's how Mikey evidently saw it. And how is that not funny? And how is Zohran's remark "mocking a crying cop"? (Whoever the cop was, it's totally unlikely he ever saw the tweets, let alone had his feelings hurt.) If you were scrolling a lot that afternoon you'd get what it was about, but by the next morning its meaningfulness had to be reconstructed out of the metadata, as I just did. I still don't really know myself what Zohran exactly meant, either, I may as well admit.

There's a lesson there, I think, on the current media climate: that it's not just vicious, but also profoundly stupid. Axel Springer Politico's purpose, no doubt, is to make trouble for Mamdani, not even necessarily to get Andrew Cuomo or whomever elected, just to make things difficult for the Democratic nominee, maybe focusing on trouble with the NYPD, which is kind of a given for a New York mayor of the progressive or left variety, given how right-wing the cops are especially in the upper echelons—remember how fraught the relationship was with de Blasio. I wouldn't be surprised if Politico was explicitly dredging the data for examples: feeding Mamdani's Twitter feed into the chatbot and asking it to find instances of him disrespecting the police, and this is what it came up with.

But they didn't have any clear idea what it might actually mean,  and weren't curious enough to try to find out. They didn't quote it in the article, or describe it to any degree, just linked it and hoped for the best, that the right people would accept that it was a real scandal without looking into it too closely, and that's pretty much what they got—though it's less a proper scandal than more spaghetti on the wall. But you can't learn anything from it if you don't look at it a little more closely, and that wall is getting really fithy. It's just more moral denunciation, all the damn time.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

 

Newsletter: Summer of 2024

This looks like the development I've been imagining for the last five months among the Israeli public, as the hostages become more and more salient and the need for revenge less and less so. It's evidently connected to the video released a little over a week ago by Hamas of the American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin (Hersh was my dad's Yiddish name, as it happens), in which he denounced Netanyahu for abandoning the hostages and made the claim that 70 of the hostages have been killed, so far, by Israeli bombs, which may well be true (I've expected from the start that IDF would kill more hostages than Hamas would), even though the video is plainly released for propaganda purposes, and it seems that a lot of Israelis believe it.

The really curious thing is it seems to be where the Hamas leadership is at too, asking for a permanent ceasefire and release of many prisoners in Israel in return for release of hostages held in Gaza. The odd man out is Binyamin Netanyahu, who can't accept the permanent ceasefire, which would prevent IDF from killing everybody in the Hamas leadership.

I know, I know, Hamas is bad (but "you don't make peace with your friends," as a wise man once said, "you make it with very unsavory enemies"). At the same time, if you think about it, you can understand why they might be reluctant to get killed. That's definitely not the most evil thing about them. It's even kind of normal. 

The Zinger That Wasn't

 

Some effort to award young Doocy a point over the new White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday, in her official debut, on the part of this RealClear reporter:

I don't know whether the story is going to have any legs or not, but in the first place, everybody but billionaires and MMTers recognizes that raising taxes is a way to reduce inflation—inflation is when there's too much money circulating, and taxation pulls the money out of circulation. Though its effectiveness must depend on who or what is getting taxed, and what possible side effects it might have; some Bloomberg idiot at WaPo writes, for instance, that it can cause an overtime rejection crisis among the fed-up workers

For the Record: Why It's Complicated With The New York Times

 

Drawing by Jack Ohman, April 2020.

Got into a Twitter dustup with Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, not exactly a dustup from the technical standpoint, and I still yield to no one in my perverse fondness for Maggie, but this concern for whether Biden is holding press conferences or not is bogus. Baker and Haberman don't even perform for press conferences—no camera around when they're doing their questioning...

At this point in office, Trump had sold you guys about 500 idiotic bald lies and stream-of-consciousness revelations of his personality disorder which you dutifully printed as if they were normal. What he said should have gotten him instantly impeached but instead got you clicks.

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) March 14, 2021

Yes They Did

Updated with Bush funeral reference 12:30 PM

"Donald, Donald, I am so disappoint." Photo by Reuters/Marcos Brindicci via MSN.

I told you.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held what the White House described as “informal” conversations at the G20 summit in Argentina. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Saturday that the two spoke at a cultural dinner for leaders and their wives and husbands at the famed Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires Friday night.

Huckabee Sanders did not disclose the content of their conversation, but in a press conference later Saturday Putin revealed that Trump had questioned him about Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. 

“I answered his questions about the incident in the Black Sea. He has his position. I have my own. We stayed in our own positions,” Putin told reporters, according to the Associated Press. (Newsweek)

Russia's seizure of two Ukrainian naval ships and a tugboat and 24 crew members who are still in dentention a week later was an "outrageous violation of Ukrainian sovereignty," as Ambassador Haley said, on behalf of and with instructions from "the highest level at the American government" (that "at" is pretty weird English). But not so outrageous you can't have a chat with an old friend you have so much in common with, right?

For the Record: Tricks and Treats

The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, original stage production, 1928, via Wikipedia.

I was kind of annoyed to see this glib comment from Jon Stewart:

Narcissism? Stewart doesn't think there's legitimate fear when Trump's rousing his rally crowds against them? "Enemy of the people"?

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 31, 2018

I understand the broad set of points here, that Trump doesn't really hate the press but adores and feeds on it, and his attacks and threats on Twitter and at rallies are all merely WWE pro wrestling trash talk. Indeed, everything he does is theater in his mind, or he doesn't make a distinction between reality and show at all, and it's hard to say he has a serious intention of anything, ever. When he joined the club of nuts claiming that Mr. Soros was the mastermind of a conspiracy to send an army to invade the United States from the south I don't think he meant anything by that either, but it really did inspire a guy to slaughter a lot of people at prayer. People who listen to Trump aren't as cute and silly as he is.

Insult to Injury

Via Dreamstime.

15 months into Mueller, I'm utterly certain Mike Schmidt doesn't understand the breadth and depth of the conspiracy investigation, the threat it poses to his credibility as a journo writing only about obstruction over and over. https://t.co/41CEmv60jP

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 12, 2018

One of my pet peeves is people saying, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," with the general Watergate reference, as if to suggest committing primary crimes isn't as reprehensible as hiding them, when that's not what they mean, I assume, to say: they mean, I assume, that the coverup is where the detective or the prosecutor is going to catch them, in the part of the crime that's necessarily partly in public—desperate work to conceal the crimes of the Nixon administration is what ended up laying the crimes open to discovery.

But it just occurred to me that for somebody in Michael Schmidt's position—

(he's the Times reporter who broke the story in 2015 that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had improperly used a private server for her unclassified email when she was in the Obama administration and followed through with an astonishing relentlessness while policy went undiscussed in his paper's coverage of the campaign,

The New York Times coverage of the email controversy was notoriously extensive; according to a Columbia Journalism Review analysis, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta)." (Wikipedia)

focusing a national frenzy over an imaginable coverup for which there was no imaginable underlying crime at all)

—maybe the coverup really is literally worse than the initial crime, in that crimes merely injure society, whereas coverups are aimed at insulting the august media, a case of contempt of press.

Comedy

"Mother Nature is a woman because she’s trying to kill us in the most passive aggressive way possible. She’s like, ‘What? I raised the temperature a little. Maybe I wouldn’t have if you had taken out the recycling like I asked.’”

OK, so I love Michelle Wolf. Let's just come right out and say it. I think she's the best thing on the current iteration of the Daily Show—I like the whole thing fine, and I'm especially fond of Roy Wood Jr., but I think Michelle Wolf is truly gifted, funny, and original, deeply daring on subjects of sex and race, with a range from Gracie Allen ditzy to Stephen Colbert brutal, sometimes within the compass of a single clause, and always with that that Pennsylvania bray and  lunatic smile, like an overmedicated ten-year-old narrating the school pageant.

So in the first place I can't imagine why the White House Correspondents' Association offered her the gig at all, if only because she's so unpredictable. This is somebody who can start off sounding scholarly, though silly, on the Second Amendment, and veer into what seems like an approbation of "slave sex" before you know it. Did they watch any of her work? Or did they just Google "woman under 40 because #MeToo", the way Jared Kushner discovered Trump's expert on the China trade, the unspeakable Peter Navarro?

So if you think the routine wasn't her best work, I'm OK with that. I really think she's at her best in short bits with a straight man like Trevor, and I think she was creatively inhibited by the rigorous form of the thing, with its mandatory one-liners for each of 40 or 50 of the more famous guests.

Colbert in 2006 managed to break that thing, in a way that can never be repeated. Just watched it again for the first time in quite a while, and found myself unexpectedly very moved at the bit toward the end in his "audition tape" for the press secretary's job, where the late Helen Thomas chases him out of the White House demanding to be told why the US invaded Iraq. That's surely one of the greatest pieces of television in the history of the technology. But just don't blame Michelle Wolf, OK?

Strategy

Headline at a news site I generally kind of like:

Is that right, now? Turns out Trumpy actually has a strategy, and one key statistic explains it?

Sadly, no:

Why would the president consider meddling in those primaries and pursuing policies that will further alienate a majority of the country? Because the base is all he has left....

It’s too early to know how Trump’s historic unpopularity will impact the 2018 midterm elections or the president’s re-election bid. But it has become clear that his core supporters — the 25% of Americans who are with him to the end — are increasingly the only group that supports Trump’s agenda.

It's exactly the opposite; the key statistic is the number of voters who will stick with him if he has no strategy whatever, if he's just being his helter-skelter self.

Trump hasn't "adopted a strategy", ever, though his minions may at one time or another try to do it for him, with the knowledge that he's not likely to cooperate very effectively. That's the minions' job, while his is to be the Leader. He will continue to seek out opportunities to make himself feel good, whether tooting around a golf course or fulminating in a stadium. The latter makes him feel great! And the 25% don't care what he does, though they love the fulmination. They don't love him for his strategy, they love him for appearing not to have one, and I wish the press would try to understand that the fans are right about that, he really doesn't.

Spicey Meatball

Melissa McCarthy, via Death and Taxes.

You know what I'd like Sean Spicer to do? I'd like him to show up on national television to tell everybody in the world that taxpayers were paying him substantial sums of money to tell the American people lies so incredible he could hardly keep a straight face, and that rather than being ashamed of this abuse of the public trust he actually thought it was kind of funny.

Oh wait, that's what he did.

The narrative of what a terrible thing Colbert and the Emmy producers did in having Spicey on the show, participating in the mockery of his character, is being led by folks like Chris Cillizza

Hollywood validated -- and celebrated --lying last nighthttps://t.co/y5E992y4bR pic.twitter.com/nacydFKyEo

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) September 18, 2017

and Frank Bruni—

The Wolf Who Whispered Boy

Update: Hi, Mike's readers! Thanks always, Batocchio!

Image by MaryLou11Ans via Blingee.

Liberal Bothsiderist New York Times columnist Frank Bruni on Thursday, working out a way to blame Democrats for the Trump phenomenon, in concert with well-known illiberal observer and totally not concern troll Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

Did Democrats cry wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now?

That’s a question being asked with increasing frequency, though mostly in conservative circles and publications. An essay by Jonah Goldberg in National Review in late July had this headline: “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.”

Bruni is saddened by the way Democrats demonized decent and god-fearing John McCain and Willard Mitt Romney in previous elections, which may have had horrible consequences for our nation, because the voting population, having seen how deeply unfair Democrats were to McCain and Romney, must think the Trump is no more dishonorable than those men were:

Rant

It's been 263 days since Hillary Clinton last held a press conference. That's a dangerous precedent. https://t.co/6iBmBoFJvd

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 24, 2016

And it's been 11,482 days since the American people learned anything worth knowing from one of these masked kabuki events in which some of the nation's least informed journalists demonstrate their "toughness" and "savvy" by asking a president or presidential candidate essentially the same questions they'd be asking Carmelo Anthony at the half (either "How do you feel about the last 45 minutes?" or "What secret thing do you plan to do during the next 45 minutes that you would never tell me but I'm asking it anyway?"). No, I just made that number up.

Sani ol-Molk, Anoushirvan Khan and the courtiers, 19th century. Via Iran Chamber.

But enough about me, let's talk about NSA. Are they watching me?

Another MacRitchie monkey. From the Singapore photoblog JustCapture.

Little did I imagine, when I suggested on Friday that They Might Not Be Watching Us, how soon and explosively it was going to turn out that a bunch of American writers disagree with me, as laid out in a new report from the distinguished and beloved PEN America under the title

Chilling 

EffECts:

NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor

which finds that

Hardly shocking

Man Bites Dog. From Mr. Smash Goes to Washington.

From Karoli at Crooks & Liars:

If you're Al Gore and you own 20 percent of Current TV, and Current TV is sold to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar's royal family, and Qatar's royal family also profits from oil trading, have you sold out the cause of global warming?

That's the question Howie Kurtz brought up on Reliable Sources this morning. I think it's a manufactured issue, but Dana Milbank begs to differ, saying "[H]e's been a big spokesman on global warming, a principled man and now he is this big, fat target." Continuing his rant, Milbank said Gore is "worth $300 million more than Mitt Romney and basically he's seen as a guy now who enriched himself, rather than advancing his cause --opening up to the criticism of people like this global warming denier."

The Blaze writer Amy Holmes was predictably banal in her response, claiming Gore has "been telling the rest of the world to, you know, restrain and constrain our spending while he personally is becoming a wealthier man through, you know, his attack on Mother Nature."

I don't think that Holmes is banal, I think she's a lunatic. When did Gore tell us to constrain our spending? When did he attack Mother Nature? Does she think it's patronizing or sexist to suggest that Mother Nature can't handle a few greenhouse gases on her own, is that it? No, I didn't think so either. She's making it up out of who knows what kind of fantasies. And that "restrain and constrain" is authentic Palinese.

Milbank is an extraordinary little bitch, there's no other way of putting it, if only for the repetition of metaphorical "big" and "fat" so he can middle-school taunt Gore without violating the Village Code. In the same way he and Kurtz manage to slime Gore without legally slandering him, by conversational indirection and the dextrous use of Cokie's Law.

Kurtz just asks if there's something wrong with being an advocate for the environment and selling a cable channel to the Emir of Qatar, but doesn't allege anything in particular. Gore, of course, publicly wishes people would use less hydrocarbon fuel, ostensibly in order to save our planet for future generations of humans and other animals, and plants too (but who knows what he's really after, bwahahaha?). The Emir makes money off of people using more hydrocarbons. Isn't it odd?

Milbank explains: what's wrong with it, actually, is that Gore has made himself a "target". He is now "open to criticism"—meaning, I suppose, that they're talking about it where Cokie Roberts has her hair done. Milbank is criticizing Gore not out of any idea that Gore has done something actually wrong but simply because criticizing him is possible. And fun, naturally, if you're Dana.

Bodhi, the debonair dog. From Daily Beast.

There is something rather bad that Gore might conceivably have done: he might have sold the channel to Al Jazeera in the full knowledge that Al Jazeera was going to use it to propagandize in favor of burning more carbon. Except, you know, that they don't. In fact Al Jazeera is notable for the high quality of its environmental coverage, far better than any US channel, and the Emirate aims to generate 16% of its electricity from solar power by 2018 (the US would be pleased to make 10% by 2025). And it was Qatar that sponsored last year's big climate change conference (though even when they're in New York Al Jazeera still gives them more air time than US network TV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or even C-Span).

Do Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank ever ask about Fox News being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is an owner of Genie Oil & Gas and American Shale Oil LLC (with Dick Cheney!)? Or how Fox Business News doesn't mention Murdoch's name when it is touting the Genie Venture?

Fox Business host Stuart Varney declared, "The next big oil power in the middle east, Israel? Can you believe that? Well, it may be the case because of shale oil. Israel's got a lot of it, and we're covering it."

And Murdoch has after all been running a criminal enterprise in England for years ("It's really chilling, though hardly shocking,"  said Kurtz, that NewsCorp was spying on the personal communications of Tom Watson, MP). And Fox News says that the global temperature basically hasn't changed since the Ice Age, etc., etc., openly encouraging people to stop worrying about it. Isn't Murdoch a "target"?

",Jewish owned press" have been sternly criticised, suggesting link to Jewish reporters.Don't see this, but apologise unreservedly.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) November 18, 2012

Kurtz boldly said, "The wording is too cryptic to know for what exactly he's apologizing."

Isn't Murdoch "open to criticism"? I guess he is. But then I guess if you accused Murdoch of advancing his financial interests through his control over the editorial operations of his newspapers and television stations that would be quite different from suggesting that Al Gore sold his business somehow corruptly. Saying such things about Murdoch would be "hardly shocking".

Dana Milbank calls Nico Pitney a dick. From Gawker.