🚨Breaking News: ABC Will Fire Jimmy Kimmel, According to Rob Schneider🚨
Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air, doubling down on a joke about the First Lady becoming a widow.
The First Lady was sitting in the Washington Hilton when a man with guns and knives tried to force his way into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The Secret Service moved fast and rushed the Trumps out of the building. The suspect has been charged with the attempted assassination of the President.
That comes after Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman put a bullet through the President’s ear. It comes after West Palm Beach, where a man with a rifle was caught waiting for him at his golf course. It comes after a documented pattern of threats no modern American president has faced.
Days before the gunman showed up at the Hilton, Jimmy Kimmel stood on a Disney-owned stage and looked into a camera and told the First Lady of the United States that she had the glow of an “expectant widow.”
He chose that word on purpose. The line was scripted in a written sketch, approved by producers, and broadcast on ABC.
When the country found out, after the bullets had already flown at the Hilton, Mr. Kimmel had a choice. He could have looked into that same camera and said the words every decent person was waiting to hear. "I went too far. I am sorry. Especially now."
He went on television and called it a “light roast.” He told us we didn’t get the joke. He told us it was about an age difference. He told us we should “come together and be best.”
That is the phrase Melania Trump used to ask a coarsening country to be kinder to one another, especially to children. He took that phrase, after mocking her as a widow-in-waiting, and threw it back in her face.
That is contempt dressed up as comedy.
Look at the moment we are in. A man tried to shoot the President of the United States. Another was caught waiting to shoot him. A third tried to force his way into a room where the President and First Lady were sitting.
In a country with that record on the books, in the news, in living memory, a major network paid a comedian to joke about the President’s wife collecting widow’s benefits.
Think about what that took. There was a meeting where someone pitched the line. There was a writer who typed it. There was a producer who read it and didn’t pull it. There was a standards-and-practices lawyer at Disney who let it through.
Every one of those people made a choice. Every one of those people decided that joking about the death of a sitting President, in front of his wife, was funny enough to put on the air.
It was already ugly when it was written. It became something the country should not forgive once the gunman showed up at the Hilton.
And when Mr. Kimmel had every chance in the world to say one decent thing, he chose to mock her again.
There is a word for what is happening in our public life, and the word is incitement. I am talking about the cultural meaning of incitement, the drip of a thousand small permissions that tell unstable men that the President is not a man, that his wife is not a woman, that their lives are not lives.
They are characters in a show, and the show would be better if they were gone.
Most people who hear that drip do nothing. They roll their eyes and change the channel.
But not every person hears it the same way.
Somewhere out there, in a basement or a parked car or a rented room, there is always someone listening for permission. The men with the rifles do not invent their hatred from nothing. They harvest it from the air the rest of us breathe.
Jimmy Kimmel does not pull triggers, ABC does not pull triggers, and Disney does not pull triggers. THEY POISON THE AIR. And when a man with a gun shows up at the door, they go on television and tell the rest of us that we are the ones who can’t take a joke.
There may finally be a price for it. Rob Schneider posted that Jimmy Kimmel’s contract with Disney/ABC ends April 30th, and that Kimmel won’t make it that long. Schneider says Disney will fire Kimmel tomorrow morning.
We will see if Disney has the spine to do it. The pressure is on the new CEO to decide what kind of network ABC is going to be.
I have watched American politics for a long time. I have watched men I disagreed with sit in the Oval Office and I have watched their wives stand beside them. I have never heard an American comedian wish a First Lady widowed on national television.
Not Carson, not Hope, not Letterman, not Leno, not even the meanest of the cable comics who came up in the Bush years.
A line has been crossed, and the people who crossed it are pretending the line was never there.
Three armed men, one President, one wife, a joke about her widowhood, a non-apology, and a network that may finally be running out of excuses.
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