What is the kind of speech that promotes violence? 
The First Amendment protects a wide range of speech. That doesn&#8217;t mean there shouldn&#8217;t be social consequences for what someone says. So what kind of speech deserves social consequences? 
Jimmy Kimmel is America&#8217;s poster child for all idiotic political discourse. Long ago, Jimmy Kimmel ditched comedy in favor of smug lectures and fake tears. He&#8217;s not funny. He&#8217;s not clever. He&#8217;s just an annoying left-wing agitprop creator. 
But when Jimmy Kimmel and his ilk on the Left and in the legacy media start pushing genuinely conspiratorial speech, their rhetoric is no longer just about bad jokes on television.
Should he be on the unemployment line?
Let’s discuss three basic standards when it comes to political speech in the United States.
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First: the illegal. There actually is illegal political speech in the United States. If you say, “I want to go kill the president of the United States,” that&#8217;s illegal. It&#8217;s either incitement or it&#8217;s an active threat. It came out of your mouth. It may be a form of speech, but it is also an active threat. 
Under the Brandenburg test, incitement is any speech that is intended to and likely to incite imminent lawless action. 
If I say, “You should go kill the president,” I&#8217;d probably have to say for it to be an illegal incitement, “I want you to go kill the president right now.”
If I said that  — (obviously I&#8217;m using this as an example. No one should ever do political violence) — in that particular scenario, that would be incitement. 
Second: Typical inflammatory rhetoric. This would be stuff like “Fight, fight, fight” or the Sarah Palin map of districts that targeted particular congressional districts. One of the targeted districts happened to be Gabby Giffords&#8217; district. The Left tried to claim that because of that map, somebody tried to shoot Gabby Giffords. That&#8217;s silly.
When people say, “We need to go to war with the Democrats,” or “We need to go to war with the Republicans,” is that going to lead to actual violence? No, because that sort of rhetoric is pretty typical of normal inflammatory rhetoric in politics. And we should not conflate that with incitement. 
Third: The permission structure for violence. We have been talking about that a lot over the past couple of years. That stuff is truly dangerous. This is the conspiracism, the justification of violence. This is how you get crazy people to believe the president is a pedophile, meaning a threat to children, a rapist, meaning a threat to women, and a traitor, meaning a threat to the country, and in charge of all of the systems of power, and therefore can only be stopped through violence.
But conflating these things leads to confusion that leads to inaction. If you try to lump together “We should go fight the Democrats” or “We should go fight the Republicans” with “The Democrats are pedophiles attacking children at a pizzeria,” or “The president of the United States is running a pedophile grooming gang,” those are not at all the same. Treating them as the same leads to inaction and an inability to agree on what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. 
When you create insane theories about people being corrupt and evil and using their power in corrupt and evil ways, and those conspiracy theories suggest those people are a threat to you, it is not a gigantic surprise when somebody attempts to assassinate the president. 
I think Jimmy Kimmel is awful. Kimmel has been terrible at his job for years. I think that he has surrendered laughter in favor of applause from his left-wing friends.
If Jimmy Kimmel were to get fired, after he said before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Melania Trump had &#8220;the glow of an expectant widow,&#8221; I would shed zero tears. 
Zero. I think that he is a propagandist. I do not think that he is funny. I think that he has betrayed his audience in surrendering humor in favor of left-wing agitprop. 
But, in this particular situation, I will say, I think that if Jimmy Kimmel were to be fired over his comments about Melania, it would be like arresting Al Capone for tax evasion. You&#8217;re hitting him with the wrong charge.
I think that Melania has every rationale for being furious at Jimmy Kimmel for being a scumbag. 
I also think what Jimmy Kimmel was joking about was the idea — which is egregious enough — that Melania hates the president, would be happy if he were dead, and could inherit his wealth — was disgusting, but was not, in fact, a call to violence. 
Kimmel defended his joke by saying it was a joke about their age difference, adding, “I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend, and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house. And also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do, and I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.”
His defense is actually worse than the original joke, which was tasteless. First of all, suggesting that Melania having stressful weekends is akin to somebody trying to kill her husband is insane and ridiculous. And for a person who tries to brand himself as Captain Empathy, Kimmel lacks true empathy in any realistic sense. And then, of course, he turned, swiveled, and clocked the president for his political rhetoric.
It is amazing how our world has changed. The kind of hatred that has become commonplace in our politics is so clear. Back in 1981, somebody tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, a few days before the Oscars. And Johnny Carson, who was then the dominant late-night host — and a Democrat— was hosting the Oscars.
He said, “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I&#8217;m sure that all of you here, and most of you watching tonight, understand why we delayed this program for 24 hours because of the incredible events of yesterday. That old adage, ‘the show must go on,&#8217; seemed relatively unimportant. The Academy, ABC television, and all of us connected with the show felt, because of the uncertain outcome as of this time yesterday, it would have been inappropriate to stage a celebration. But the news today is very good, as you know. The president is in excellent condition. At last reports, he&#8217;s been conducting business.”
The audience applauded.
Do you think that you&#8217;d get anything like that from Hollywood today if the president had been shot in the chest? 
I think that Kimmel&#8217;s jokes are terrible. I think they&#8217;re unfunny. I don&#8217;t even believe his woke politics. This is a dude who used to do “The Man Show” with Adam Carolla, in which women bounced around on trampolines without bras.
Do I believe the new woke Jimmy Kimmel? I don&#8217;t, but again, bad jokes, tastelessness, being bad at his job, that&#8217;s not the reason why Jimmy Kimmel should have been fired long ago.
If you want to talk about the kinds of rhetoric that lead people to try to kill the president, the answer is not his joke about Melania or making light of the idea of the president passing away or something of that ilk. That is not what leads to violence. 
What leads to violence is pretty obvious: the actual conspiracism.
Jimmy Kimmel has spent years calling the president a pedophile. He has accused him of being involved with Epstein. That is also what is in the actual shooter&#8217;s manifesto. 
Kimmel has said, “He&#8217;s coming after our right to vote. He&#8217;s protecting pedophiles and won&#8217;t explain it. He&#8217;s lining the pockets of billionaires, all while neglecting the sick, the poor, the hungry, in the name of Jesus, by the way.”
Also: “When your best friend was a pedophile and you&#8217;re losing bigly in the swing states with an election coming up, what do you do? I&#8217;ll tell you what you do. You fire the weapons of mass destruction. And that would mean he&#8217;d have to come up with another distraction from the war. And if you do need that, Mr. President, I got a good one for you; you know what would distract us from the war? Release the unreleased Trump Epstein files.”
Also, to Trump: “Thank you for watching. I&#8217;m surprised &#8230; . Isn&#8217;t it past your jail time?”
Also: “And by the way, if Trump wants to send a rapist somewhere, he can just jump on a bus himself, you know.”
It was Jimmy Kimmel calling Trump a cover-up artist for pedophilia and a rapist, and all the rest — that is the permission structure for the violence. 
So should Jimmy Kimmel lose his job?
If we&#8217;re going to talk specifically about the kinds of rhetoric that need to be called out, that should have social consequences, conspiracism, anti-evidence idiocy that imputes evil to an opponent without evidence: That&#8217;s the kind of stuff that&#8217;s bad. 
I&#8217;m not blaming Melania for being deeply upset with that joke from last week, because obviously, if you hear that joke and time flattens and then somebody tries to shoot your husband, you should be beyond furious.
But the kind of rhetoric that we all should be fighting is the rhetoric that encourages conspiratorial thinking.

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