.webp)
I occasionally see an opening monologue or a segment of a late night talk show on YouTube, but I no longer have broadcast or cable TV to watch regularly. I caught up with the Jimmy Kimmel cancellation after it happened, and with that in mind, I watched his last monologue to see what the fuss was about. Now I know. And it was not about Charlie Kirk or the reaction to his murder.
Steven Colbert's monologues are often political and these days very anti-Chaos but he frequently takes topical subjects and flies off into the absurd, deriving much of his humor that way. Kimmel gets his humor ready made from the absurdity of what Chaos and his minions say and do. His monologue on Wednesday was mostly incisive and devastating and relentless. But the most galling aspect of it for Chaos and his minions and MAGA and its Mafia is the studio audience, which is with Kimmel all the way, cheering him and jeering Chaos.
It's one thing for someone gleefully pointing to the naked emperor but doing so to a live audience loudly approving is too much. (This is also true of Colbert's audience.) It is all too galling.
Of course it had to be pretty galling for President Clinton to be the butt of jokes every night during the Lewinsky saga, but he did not demand those comedians be fired, nor did he aim a weaponized FCC at them. Because doing this is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment, and undermines one of the most basic elements of American democracy. You cannot use government power to censor speech.
A violation of the Constitution is a matter for the courts, specifically the Supreme Court. "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts," wrote Justice Robert Jackson for the majority in a landmark 1943 decision.
"There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority," Jackson wrote.
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
To the point, it is against the law, and not what the addled Chaos says, that criticizing him is against the law. Not even this Supreme Court can ignore this--or if it does, we are truly lost. So it must be put to that test.
This matter should be brought before the courts in any number of ways, and soon. The danger this signals demands it--for in many ways it is likely not over. (For subscribers of the New York Times, this piece outlines some of that, and this one looks at the specifics of the Kimmel situation and the rhetoric surrounding it .)
Some of the ways the law can be used to address this situation, especially with the corporations involved, are suggested by Steve Schmidt in this Jim Acosta podcast. I don't always agree with Schmidt or his analyses, but I resonate with nearly everything he said in this segment, including the responsibility of those fostering cancel culture who gave the Chaos minions their vocabulary to justify what they're doing now in this regard.
In the short term, many more people will have seen and heard Kimmel's monologues than ever tuned into his show, and I imagine the audience was and will continue to be larger for Jon Stewart's hilarious satirical response, so well acted that it deserves an Emmy. In the longer term--by which I mean past this weekend--the impact will depend on meaningful attention being applied to this dangerous breach and what it represents and what Chaos and his minions are attempting. The law can be long but it can be loud.
No comments:
Post a Comment