TWIB Notes: Kirk, Kimmel and the Kommissars of Speech
/This Week in Bullshit - TWIB NOTES
TWIB Notes this week is chock full of hot topics, but the main theme is freedom of speech. So…let’s get to it.
CHARLIE KIRK
Charlie Kirk, the Republican firebrand made famous for his on-site debates with college liberals, was assassinated on September 10, 2025 on the campus of Utah Valley University.
At the time of his killing Kirk was doing his thing…debating in public with less-than-intellectually-stellar liberals enraged by his political philosophy and their inability to navigate his debating style.
As someone who tries to spend as little time on social media as possible Charlie Kirk was not exactly someone I spent much time thinking about prior to his death.
I had seen a bunch of videos of him and he struck me as a talented political matador who would get coddled liberal fools into a frenzy by waving a red cape in front of them and then effortlessly dance around them as they furiously charged at him.
Watching Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck on video was a deeply unsettling thing. Watching many seemingly normal, regular liberal people react to Kirk’s death with unabashed glee was even more unsettling.
Look, I get that people were offended by the things Charlie Kirk said and believed…despite the fact that what he said and believed did not offend me…but what I don’t get is why people would cheer some dude who is not even in power, is not a politician, and controls next to nothing, getting killed in public.
The reaction to Kirk’s death, from lots of regular people and from the media, was disgusting. People cheering his slaughter are not just vile – but deeply sick. Why can’t we just disagree with someone politically and let that be enough? Do we really need to hurt them? To kill them? To spill blood? Good Lord.
The media response was even more ridiculous. I never watch cable news…the last time I did was when Trump was shot in the ear during the campaign, but watching CNN after Kirk’s assassination was a jaw-dropping experience.
The entirety of the coverage I watched on CNN was concern not over political violence and the killing of Kirk, but of the danger of how right-wingers responded. You would’ve thought that right-wingers being pissed that one of their own got gunned down were a major threat to civilization. When you contrast this with the “mostly peaceful protests” coverage of the George Floyd riots then you see how absurd and inane and totally tone-deaf it all is.
As for the actual assassination of Kirk I have a few thoughts…first off…I don’t know what happened…who shot what and from where and for what reason…but I do know this…the official story is, without question, absolute horseshit.
They’ve already come up with a new “magic bullet” theory and have exalted Charlie Kirk into a super-Saint with bones of steel that cannot let bullets pass through them and allowed him to save others while being killed himself…just absurd. The big question is - how does a guy get shot with a high-powered rifle and not have an exit wound? What the fuck is that all about?
Then there’s the indictment, which if you read it is riddled with inaccuracies and fallacies. And then there’s the unbelievable bullshit that is the text exchange from the alleged shooter to his alleged trans lover/roommate that feels like a fabrication from start to finish. And then there’s the “video coverage” where we see the alleged gunman but never with a gun and never in the place he was said to have done the shooting.
The bottom line regarding this assassination is that conspiracy theories will flourish around it (they already have) but they will only obfuscate the truth – which is most likely a very nasty conspiracy all its own.
Whatever comes out of this fucking pathetic and ridiculous FBI in the coming weeks and months, do yourself a favor and don’t believe a word of it.
JIMMY KIMMEL
Back in July I wrote a TWIB Notes column that touched upon the cancellation of the Stephen Colbert Late Night show at CBS and finished my discussion of that topic with the prediction “Colbert is not the last to get the boot…in fact, he’s only the first. Fallon, Meyers and Kimmel are dead men walking…and I have to say that unlike their comedy, that is something that makes me laugh.”
Well, well, well.
Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC after saying that right-wingers were doing everything they can to make it seem like Charlie Kirk’s killer wasn’t one of them….or something to that effect.
Kimmel has always been a mystery to me. I never once saw The Man Show, and have never once during its entire 22-year run watched a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live.
The few times I’ve seen Kimmel, liked when he hosts an awards show, I have found him to be aggressively unfunny. He is not only devoid of comic ability but he’s also blessed with the charisma of a fly on week old shit.
The left has been more horrified by the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel than they were by the killing of Charlie Kirk…which to be honest is the funniest Jimmy Kimmel related thing to ever happen.
Right-wingers, ever true to their values (wink-wink), are ecstatic over Kimmel’s suspension and hope it is a permanent firing.
The reality is that Kimmel is not, and never has been, a free speech warrior. He, like many liberals, is only interested in his speech being free, and those that disagree with him being silenced.
Right-wingers who were so outraged by woke cancel culture during the Biden years, have spent their first year back in power going full on right-wing woke and cancelling anyone and anything that is even remotely anti-Zionist. By the way…Democrats have not done a single thing to stop the Republican jihad against anti-Zionists, they have in fact, encouraged it.
Kimmel, of course, would never say a bad word about his paymasters so Israel is not a topic he would ever discuss…so there’s a good chance he gets his gig back after a hiatus (his suspension was lifted a few hours after this article was originally published).
But the truth is this…regardless of politics or anything like that, late night talk shows are going away. None of them make money and none of them are worth the cost. All of their ratings are in the toilet and none of them hold any cultural cache anymore.
The other day I happened to watch an old clip of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal having a half hour long cat fight on The Dick Cavett show some fifty-odd years ago.
The level of intellect, eloquence and the depth of that discussion was staggering compared to the toxically empty calories currently being fed to the public on cable news and late-night talk shows. Seeing American intellectuals like Vidal and Mailer go at each other was invigorating and depressing…invigorating because they were such sharp minds, and depressing because not only do we not have those types of debates anymore – we don’t even have intellectuals anymore.
Ultimately, whether Kimmel stays or goes is utterly irrelevant….which brings us to…
THE KOMMISSARS OF SPEECH
What makes the Kimmel case so interesting is that the allegation is that the government, at the behest of Trump himself, pressured ABC to suspend/cancel Kimmel. That action is, obviously, in direct violation of the First Amendment which guarantees the right to freedom of speech – and is remarkably similar to what the Biden administration did with social media companies in trying to silence dissent and debate over Covid policies and vaccines. Hmmmm.
But here’s the rub in the free speech debate…the debate over free speech is long over and free speech has most certainly lost.
For years we have been reduced to free speech debates in this country amounting to little more than “free speech for me but not for thee!”. So we get liberals wanting to cancel people who say things they don’t like, or in the case of Covid – people who don’t get vaccinated, and then we get right-wingers (notice I don’t call them conservatives because they conserve nothing but their own hypocrisy) doing the exact same thing – trying to ban flag burning, anti-Zionism, protests etc.
The truth is that freedom of speech was killed long ago. This past year we had a big furor because Trump was pissed at 60 Minutes and Paramount caved to the pressure in order to get a merger approved. But since we are so historically illiterate in this country no one seemed to remember this drama played out before with very similar results…back in the 1990’s when 60 Minutes refused to air a story that was highly critical of Big Tobacco for fear of lawsuits and loss of ad revenue. They made an excellent movie about that incident called The Insider…you should go watch it if you’ve never seen it – Michael Mann directed it and it stars Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
60 Minutes has, for the last quarter century at least, but nothing but an intel community and military industrial complex mouthpiece that spews the most vacant and vapid of propaganda imaginable…it has been co-opted and is now a nefarious and insidious media machine that routinely deceives and divides.
Remember when the liberal New York Times were used as a propaganda weapon by the Bush administration in deceiving the populace regarding the threat from Iraq? I do.
I also remember when the liberal New York Times held a story about the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance of Americans for over a year until after Bush’s re-election. I also remember when the liberal New York Times refused to use the word torture and instead used the word “enhanced interrogation” at the behest of the Bush administration. I remember those things…but I am apparently in the minority.
Back in my day liberals dedicated to the value of free speech were rightly horrified when Big Tobacco silenced 60 Minutes, and when the Bush administration set-up “free speech zones” for protestors…the name of which more than implies that there are places in America where free speech is not allowed, and used Judith Miller as a pro-war propagandist.
But many of these same liberals were as silent as the grave while Saint Obama used the Espionage Act more times than every other president combined to prosecute whistleblowers and reporters.
These same liberals stayed silent when, under Obama, Edward Snowden was forced from his country after revealing the illegal surveillance state we all lived under. And were just as silent when, under Obama and Biden, Julian Assange was imprisoned for the crime of revealing the war crimes of the American government.
Freedom of speech was long a lynchpin of the liberal movement, but because many liberals who love freedom of speech stayed silent when Obama gutted our right to it, they then were conditioned to more easily sell out their values and ideals regarding speech in favor of genuflecting to the woke mob when it rose to prominence. Quickly over the span of less than a decade - freedom of speech was gone and in its place was the banner of being against “hate speech” – literally and figuratively. Liberal disdain for freedom of speech disintegrated so quickly and thoroughly that even the ACLU has disavowed it in purpose and practice.
“Hate speech” (which is ironic considering it can be interpreted as meaning to hate – speech) became the favorite talking point of liberals everywhere…and I warned that labelling things hate speech, and wanting to ban hate speech, would lead to the destruction of free speech – but liberals didn’t care that they, as I told them, would eventually be hoisted on their own petard…or as I called it – foisted on their own retard!
Right-wingers have long made no bones about their desire to curb freedom of speech, but then freaked out when woke liberals wanted to curb right-wing speech.
And so, the cycle will continue on and on forever until some douchebag centrist (maybe Pete Buttigieg!!) comes along and Obama-style makes a compromise that in order to clamp down on hate speech and political violence we will do away with freedom of speech altogether. It’ll be just like the healthcare debate where a public option is never discussed and the big business republican option is the only option – thanks Obama!
To tie this up in a very messy bow, woke liberals have made the argument that hate speech is violence, and when speech is violence then it is logical to use actual physical violence to silence it…and thus we get Charlie Kirk not just being murdered, but his killing being celebrated.
I have long written on this subject (and will link some of those articles below), most notably about the argument from liberals in the wake of Trump’s first election about the efficacy of “punching Nazis”. Of course, the problems with punching Nazis are numerous…like who gets to decide who is a Nazi? And what if someone decides you’re a Nazi? And are Nazi’s allowed to defend themselves…and more so…can Nazi’s – like liberals punching – proactively defend themselves? And finally…punching people you label Nazis will only escalate into ultimately shooting people you label Nazis – people like Charlie Kirk.
Speech is not and never will be violence…violence is violence…and the only people who claim speech is violence are the ones who haven’t been punched in the face.
The bottom line is this, current free speech debate is a farce because both the left and the right have long ago sold out their ideals regarding speech and instead have used their power to silence their enemies.
The war for freedom of speech, and frankly the war for any of our “freedoms” is long over…and we all lost. The aristocratic oligarchy and intelligence and military industrial complex and globalist corporatocracy have won and now keep us as slaves in what is essentially an open-air surveillance state prison.
So fuck Jimmy Kimmel, and fuck 60 Minutes, and fuck the mainstream media and fuck social media and fuck our politicians and fuck the myopic fools who bought into the two-party system and all of its homicidal lies.
And fuck all of us while we’re at it…because we are just as much to blame for this disaster as anybody.
Charlie Kirk is dead and Jimmy Kimmel is out of a job…and the cold hard reality is that there are going to be many more who face a similar fate….and don’t kid yourself…there’s nothing we can do about it.
Links-
Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine
The Tragedy of Charlottesville
©2025