Jimmy Kimmel is an obnoxious, ignorant, privileged elitist. And I’ll defend his right not to be “cancelled” as strongly as I would anyone else.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s so, so tempting to just sit back and enjoy a good laugh as the king of the late-night wokesters gets his own smug arse held to the fire. We’ve endured far more bullshit and Kimmel-Cries than any workin’ men should have to put up with.
But that doesn’t matter. The fact that the Cancel-Culture mobs are coming for one of their own should in fact be a cause for alarm rather than schadenfreude.
An uncomfortable interview with actress Megan Fox on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has resurfaced following reports of the embattled host allegedly saying the N-word on a past Christmas album and donning blackface in old “Man Show” sketches.
During the interview with Fox, Kimmel approvingly laughs when the actress recalled director Michael Bay allegedly sexualizing her when she was just 15 years old.
Firstly, I don’t care in the least about blackface or saying “nigger” (it’s a word, we’re adults – just say it, if you must). Kimmel is a comedian. Comedians are transgressive by nature. The basic unit of comedy is shock. If only mouthing approved platitudes was comedy, then Hannah Gadsby would be funny. Jimmy Kimmel has nothing more to apologise for than Mel Brooks dressed as Hitler and rapping, “Don’t be dumb, be a smartie, c’mon and join the Nazi Party!”
As for the exchange with Fox, well – so what? There are far worse people doing far worse things, without repercussion. Even running for President.
On Monday, Kimmel, who consistently preaches left-wing politics and smears the president as racist, was pummeled in the press over reports that he allegedly used the “N-word” multiple times in a song for a Christmas album recorded in 1996.
Ironically, as noted by The Daily Wire, “Kimmel previously pressed actor Tom Arnold to release an alleged ‘N-word’ tape of President Donald Trump, which has not materialized.”
Additionally, Kimmel’s past blackface appearances have gained renewed attention. “Kimmel, as a co-host of the ‘The Man Show,’ performed a recurring skit that included him dressed in blackface as then-NBA star Karl Malone,” The Hill reported over the weekend. “Videos and photos of the skits on the show, which ran from 1999-2004, have been circulating online recently with calls for Kimmel to apologize.”
Yes, Kimmel is a hypocrite as well as a towering asshole, but…so what? Even assholes have the right to free speech. And he absolutely should not apologise.
In fact, it’s the people we regard as assholes who we should do the most to defend. Many people think Alex Jones is an asshole – does that mean he doesn’t deserve his free speech rights?
More to the point, we should recognise what this sudden mob attack on Kimmel represents – and it’s not funny.
Cast your mind to the Stalinist show trials. As exemplified in the infamous “The Commissar Vanishes” photograph, the denunciations started with the innocents, but they didn’t stop there. Purges and Terrors have a sinister momentum. Once they’re done with the low-hanging fruit, they reach ever higher. Robespierre ended up on his own bloody guillotine. Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin’s bloody henchman, presided over thousands of arrests and executions. Then, they came for him: in 1940, Yezhov, along with many others responsible for prosecuting the Terror, tortured into confessing, and shot.
This is where we’re at, in the New Cultural Revolution. Having purged everyone else, the mob are now coming for their own. In recent weeks and months, previous darlings of the left, from Ellen to J. K. Rowling, have fallen to the howling online mobs. Kimmel is just the latest.
They have to be stopped somewhere. Defending even the least-defensible, like Jimmy Kimmel, is not just a matter of principle. It’s a matter of survival – if they’re not stopped, soon there’ll be nothing left.
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