The Kirk assassination whitewash

www.americanthinker.com

Andrew Kolvet, Charlie Kirk’s longtime ally, captured the essence of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension: if a conservative is killed, the soothsayers of the progressive celebrity class will “whitewash” it. That is the grim permission structure Kimmel’s falsehood created.

That’s the core of the Kimmel scandal—and it must be repeated far and wide. This is not a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. I am a strong proponent of free speech—and so was Charlie Kirk.

Yet many of Kimmel’s partisans are framing this hullabaloo as precisely that, defending a host whose key demo last month was only about 129,000 viewers—roughly the size of Columbia, Missouri.

Kimmel didn’t just lie. He whitewashed the assassination of a man targeted for exercising his religious and political voice by falsely blaming the victim’s allies for it. That is blaming the victim on a whole new—and perverse—level. 

And now his defenders cloak him in the false banner of “free speech” while ignoring that Kirk was killed for his speech. It is Kafkaesque.

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.

In that sentence, Kimmel effectively branded the assassin as part of MAGA and smeared Kirk’s supporters as liars for denying it. Yet authorities had already disclosed that the alleged killer followed a leftist ideology.

The lie was implicit but unmistakable: Kimmel whitewashed the murderer, softened him into a “kid,” and pinned the crime on Kirk’s allies instead.

None of this was comedy. It was deliberate disinformation, disguised as entertainment—a malicious hoax about a heinous crime that descended into group libel against the “MAGA gang.” The pejorative “gang” label was no accident either.

It’s bad enough when a culture excuses political murder. It’s worse when it smears the victim’s allies with the blame. That’s a culture staring into the abyss.

All credible signs of the assassin’s motive—at the time of Kimmel’s broadside and now—pointed left, not right. Matthew Dowd, once on speed dial for MSNBC, tried this same inversion parlor trick and was swiftly terminated.

Kimmel’s hoax was even more dangerous: misleading, scripted, and broadcast as undisputed fact the motive for a political assassination—on a program still marketed as comedy.

Make no mistake: the alleged assassin was consumed with hatred for Kirk’s conservative and religious voice. Kimmel smeared millions of Americans anyway, whitewashing the killer while blaming the victim’s movement.

That’s a ritualized false-flag narrative—without precedent in American broadcast history until this moment. And it’s a new kind of false flag: not staged in advance to frame an opponent but concocted afterward to blame the victim’s supporters and invert responsibility.

Now imagine if, in the 1960s, Johnny Carson had suggested that President Kennedy’s own supporters engineered his assassination, that the civil rights movement bore responsibility for Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, or that Senator Robert Kennedy was felled by his own campaign team.

Each would have been a vicious lie, maligning the victims’ supporters. Would Carson have lasted another day on The Tonight Show? Of course not. But Carson would never have uttered such poison.

And if he had, NBC would have hustled him out of 30 Rock before sunrise—and not even Ed McMahon, Doc Severinsen, or Skitch Henderson would have lifted a finger for him.

With no internet and no podcast market, Carson would have been banished, never to return to his perch.

Simply put, Kimmel’s peremptory blaming of the victim’s supporters—and his concealment of the true source of the violence—was more than false. It set the stage for further political violence.

When the overwhelming fallout forced Disney to bench him indefinitely, the usual suspects predictably cried “censorship.” But broadcaster discipline is not tyranny. The First Amendment restrains Congress, not networks. Kimmel is free to find another stage—but he isn’t free to force Disney to bankroll his arrogance.

How many of Kimmel’s acolytes rushed to defend conservative voices when they were deplatformed, demonetized, or slapped with disclaimers? How many defended a sitting U.S. president when he was banned from Twitter and Facebook? Virtually none. And those platforms—unlike broadcasters using the public airwaves—operate with almost no federal oversight.

Here’s the deeper danger: the hyperbole itself. Pretending that disciplining a late-night host is “fascism” trivializes the word and radicalizes the culture. 

That same fevered exaggeration helped create the climate that took Charlie Kirk’s life—because of his conservative and religious views.

The travesty isn’t Kimmel losing a show. It’s the signal he sent. Andrew Kolvet said it best: that was the permission slip Kimmel handed to would-be killers. And Kolvet nailed the second point too—Jimmy Kimmel is no martyr. Charlie Kirk is.

Whitewashing Kirk’s murder, flipping blame, and flipping martyrdom don’t just mock America. They hand assassins cover.

And it marks a perilous moment for the American republic.

Charlton Allen is an attorney, former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission, and founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc. He is editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast.  X: @CharltonAllenNC

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