The newly Christened “Charie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck” is barrelling along at breakneck pace. I need this post just to catch up:
- Attorney General Pam Bondi idiotically stated that “hate speech” was not protected by the First Amendment. Ethics Alarms negligently didn’t flag this immediately as Ethics Duncery, and I am abashed. I just am not surprised when Bondi shows us what she is: a legal hack, an unqualified and incompetent AG, and in the running for the worst Trump Cabinet appointment. Should she be fired for directly undermining the Trump/MAGA/conservative position on freedom of speech? Of course; she should never have been appointed in the first place. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the U.S. Attorney General understand the Bill of Rights and all the SCOTUS cases establishing that “hate speech” is just speech, and completely covered by the First Amendment. What a disgrace Bondi is. Ugh.
- Then there is Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Party leader in the Senate, lawyer (once upon a time) and utter hypocrite. Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension is unfair and cowardly, but there is nothing preventing an employer from firing or suspending an employee who makes a statement in public that the organization decides is detrimental to business, But Schumer wrote on “X”:
“America is meant to be a bastion of free speech. Everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel. This is about protecting democracy. This must go to court.”
Roseanne Barr tweeted back derisive laughter, as well she might. She was fired from her hit sitcom for an offensive, arguably racist tweet, though what she said was, again, protected speech. I don’t care enough about Schumer to check and see if he expressed outrage at Roseanne’s tweet, but he certainly didn’t say that she had a case in court, which she definitely did not, just like Kimmel.
- Ann Althouse, taking her cue from Matt Walsh, theorizes that those”touching” texts between Kirk assassin Robinson and his lover/partner was scripted and contrived to show that his roommate was completely innocent of complicity in the murder. I hadn’t read the texts before, but I haven’t seen such transparent fakery in an exchange since Roger Clemens secretly taped his trainer who had sworn that the pitcher used steroids and tried to maneuver him into contradicting his testimony.
- Over at TechDirt there is a provocative contrarian essay about the “Debate me bro” tactic that the author says Kirk disingenuously mastered. He writes in part…
The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.
This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality. Many of the ideas promoted in these viral “debates” have already been thoroughly debunked and rejected by that marketplace—but the “debate me bro” format resurrects them as if they’re still worth serious consideration.
But who decides what is a “legitimate” point of view worth debating?
Ethics Alarms 
Chuck Schumer wrote:
“America is meant to be a bastion of free speech. Everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel. This is about protecting democracy. This must go to court.”
I suppose Kimmel could go to a court and claim the Federal government “jawboned” FCC licensees into getting him fired.
I am not sure if that would fly, but it’s at least marginally plausible. Of course, the affiliate networks who suspended his show independent of CBS’ input might shoot that right down.
But my larger point is that I would not mind at all if such a hypothetical case made it to the Supreme Court for a ruling on the merits. This is exactly the kind of thing Biden’s government did to social media companies, and at least one appeals court found their actions unconstitutional. A definitive ruling on the limits of such actions would be welcome to me, regardless of who the plaintiff is.
I think it’s the polarization and demonization ethics trainwreck kicked off by the Democrats during Bush II’s second term and accelerated by Obama.
That’s all.
Good point. Someone on reddit yesterday asked if previous Republicans had been demonized the way Trump has been. While certainly not as unhinged as Trump, they certainly were called dictators, theocrats and dangers to democracy.
The Republican in office or on the campaign being a wannabee tyrant has been a broken rec….CD on repe…buffering audio….for 25 years.
Absolutely. And it’s the Dem playbook going forward from here on out. Every Republican presidential candidate and president will be slimed much the same as Trump has. The Trump treatment will not be an outlier from which the Dems will retreat. It will be standard operation procedure. They’re already doubtless ginning up talking points attacking Vance, Rubio, Haley, Stefanik and all the rest as existential threats to democracy, blah, blah, blah.
The tweet linked below by Roseanne to Barack Obama is on the ball. The problem for Democrats is that they are estopped from complaining about cancel culture, as cancel culture is a phenomenon of the left. Barack Obama engaged in it himself against Roseanne. So Schumer has no ethical ground for his complaints about the FCC.
The left promotes laws against hate speech when they are in power. So again the left has no ethical ground to complain about Pam Bondi’s stance on hate speech. Only conservatives who have always been principled on the First Amendment have the right to complain.
She certainly has a point.
The unfortunate thing is that the FCC guy ever said anything in the first place. When you opponents are busy shooting themselves in the head, the smart thing to do is to step back and watch.
His actions accomplished nothing but give the Democrats talking points to deflect from their own actions.
I would love for something like this to end up at the Supreme Court — go ahead Shumer, make my day. Let’s get a definitive ruling on its constitutionality. I don’t think it was constitutional when Biden did it, and the same when Trump does it.
Bondi? The FCC guy? You’re supposed to be smart. Don’t force us to recognize your stupidity.
As I am not a lawyer, I will link to an article from the Federalist that argues that FCC is perfectly operating within its rules.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/17/jimmy-kimmel-blatantly-broke-fcc-rules-and-brendan-carr-was-right-to-notice/
The Jimmy Kimmel Show cost ABC 100M a year. The FCC gave them the perfect excuse to boot Jimmy Kimmel. So assume that Chuck Schumer win the 1A case. That still does not mean that ABC will rehire Jimmy Kimmel. And as a bonus we get stronger 1A protections. So bring it on.
The Democrats do not look good to make the talking point about the First Amendment. First, they are hypocrites. Free speech for me but not for thee. Second, they are angrier about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension than Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
The problem with the pro-firing case are the second and third clause in the regulation:
Saying something incorrect isn’t evnough. Even if the person knows it’s incorrect, there has to be clear “public harm” cased by the statement, and they had to have known it would cause harm. What direct public harm was caused by Kimmel’s statement? I don’t think making people mad cuts it.
Here is how it all went down. The Benny Johnson show contacted the FCC, and then the ball started rolling….
“The FCC regulates this license, so my team immediately booked the FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on The Benny Show. Chairman Carr put Disney on notice that they were going to have to defend Kimmel’s sick lies about Charlie’s death before the FCC. We made them defend the indefensible. Make them eat it. Then my team contacted ABC, Disney and local station owners all day. This is key. ABC creates the programming BUT privately owned local affiliates choose to broadcast the programming — or not. They have the power.”
Thank you. It seems to have escaped a whole swath of our citizens that the WHOLE POINT of the speech clause in the First Amendment is to protect speech that many find offensive. And yes, including offensive to YOU (addressing those wringing their hands because they only want to protect speech that is offensive to the “other side” — whatever and whomever they imagine that to be). Inoffensive speech requires little protection…
Fortunately it has not escaped the Supreme Court, at least not recently.
There were some cases, though, around WWI and II that were troubling.
But he was an employee fired by his employer. The First Amendment isn’t even germane to this episode. I’m mystified as to how Kimmel is any different than Colin Kaepernick who should have been fired by his employers for all the kneeling crap.
Hi Old Bill I think maybe your comment ended up in the wrong place?
I was responding to JM’s OP which is in support of the first amendment and calls out Pam Bondi’s idiocy. I agree.
There are some subthreads in the commenting that discuss Kimmel and the FCC — is one of those what you meant to respond to?
https://babylonbee.com/news/pam-bondi-honors-charlie-kirks-legacy-by-doing-exact-opposite-of-charlie-kirk
Pam Bondi needs to be fired. She does not properly understand the duties of her office. Her communication strategy is a total disaster. She needs to stay away from Fox News and the podcast circuit, and have the DOJ lead actual investigations regarding a) Russian collusion hoax b) autopen scandal c) Antifa. At this moment she has a legacy of zero.
She now has three strikes against her:
Trump needs an AG who is a dog that bites. Pam Bondi is all bark but no bite. And she barks at the wrong time.
>> Over at TechDirt there is a provocative contrarian essay about
>> the “Debate me bro” tactic that the author says Kirk
>> disingenuously mastered. He writes in part…
(rest deleted)
I went to that essay and read it and found it worthwhile. It raises some valid points–is the “debate me bro” style of argumentation valid and productive, with a good-faith effort to exchange ideas? Or, on the other hand, does it largely exist to produce brief clips that can be used in the production of short, click-bait-ish snippets to get clicks and engagement statistics, and to aid in fund-raising for Turning Point.
The problem is also in part the need to produce a spectacle to hold the attention of an audience.
Personally it’s not my style of argumentation. Additionally, it’s not clear that it’s especially effective in changing minds or raising the level of debate.
(Really, I’ve changed my mind about many things over the years. It seems to take place very slowly, almost glacially, without much conscious awareness of what’s happening. C’est bizarre!)
The essay at TechDirt has a link to a YouTube channel run by someone named Stephen Woodford who provides in-depth analysis of some Charlie Kirk debates.
= – = – = – =
It seems like we’re reached a point where we cannot accept a third party summary of any influencer or public intellectual from someone who disagrees. Maybe that’s always been the case.
Jordan Peterson, for example, has hundreds of hours of video online. Third party summaries of Peterson’s claims often have little in common with what Peterson says when you investigate his lectures directly. Is Peterson outrageous? Don’t accept the opinions of his partisan opponents when they summarize him.
Wesley Yang has a witty essay at TabletMag dated 28 May 2018 on this exact issue. It’s funny. I’m not inserting the link so this comment doesn’t get held for moderation because of “too many links.” The title is “The shocking truth about Jordan Peterson.”
We may very well discover that the same thing is true of Charlie Kirk. It’s likely that the people who most hate him don’t really know what Kirk said, they just think they know what he said based on partisan summaries.
= – = – = – = – =
I sometimes wonder if reading comprehension and listening comprehension are both in a steep decline, and that the problem of understanding is deeper than partisan animosity.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
My impression is that there is a lot of AI generated content simulating the voice of Jordan Peterson, with Jordan Peterson named in the title. In other words, fake.
You are correct but it’s deeper than that.
The AI generated content is new.–let’s say in the last 2 years. Be generous and say that AI generated content came out in in January of 2023, which would be 31 months ago.
Forward Magazine, the old Jewish liberal magazine (originally a Yiddish publication, methinks) had an article that is paradigmatic of the clickbait trend.
It is titled
“Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?”
the date of that article was May 11 2018.
Forward still has the article up.
Quillette has an expose of the article and how horrible and incompetent it is.
The willingness of journalists to accuse people of saying things they never said, and spawn a whole article discussing it, is not an artifact of AI.
The Quillette article has details.
https://quillette.com/2018/05/13/libel-jordan-peterson-forward-story-journalistic-failure/
No but AI has the possibility to create deep fake content. An AI generator that allows users to upload or use the voice and appearance of a celebrity could have somebody present a message that appears to be spoken by Jordan Peterson. This is highly unethical, and grounds for a lawsuit. For that reason many AI generators have limitations on what content can be generated.
Thanks for your reply.
The use of AI to produce deep fake content is, in its possibilities, terrifying!
Is this the Ken White from PopeHat we all used to respect?