Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Actually, just wanted to send it back with a couple of small updates to more accurately reflect chronology:

Dems’ Manufactured Outrage Over Jimmy Kimmel Doesn’t Stand Up to Scrutiny

Democrats can’t defend Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd tried that — claiming that cold-blooded murder was a predictable response to “awful words” — and was immediately fired.

They can’t defend their own side’s reaction to it either.

As Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out while guest-hosting Kirk’s show, surveys show that the left is far more supportive of political violence than the right. The proof is all over social media, where posts mocking and celebrating the murder regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of likes.

But after weeks of flailing, they’ve finally settled on a messaging strategy: the real problem is not that a deranged liberal shot a 31-year-old husband and father through the throat because he was “tired of his hatred” or that millions of Democrat voters think this was a laudable act.

It’s that Republicans might use this tragedy to censor free speech.

That narrative crystallized a couple of weeks ago when ABC announced it would take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air indefinitely over the host’s comments about the shooting. On Monday, they announced he’s coming back — likely due to the hundreds of Kimmel supporters who took to the streets, demanding his reinstatement.

Matt Stoller, research director at the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project — a group that spends most of its time railing against American companies rather than defending American liberties — posted that Trumpian populists’ “conception of liberty is inconsistent with the American tradition.” In another post, Stoller accused Trump of “explicit censorship” and “authoritarian power grabs.”

Former President Barack Obama has published at least five X posts about Kimmel’s suspension, but just one about Kirk’s murder. He even attempted to equate the two, writing that “freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel.”

It’s easy to see why Democrats are going with this strategy. They want their own free-speech martyr to rally around. If they can blame Kimmel’s suspension on pressure from the administration, they can shift the focus from left-wing derangement to right-wing censorship.

Obama already tried to do this when he claimed that the Washington Post fired columnist Karen Attiah due to “government coercion,” when the paper actually fired her for posting a fake Charlie Kirk quote in violation of the Post’s social media standards. The government was not involved. Obama just lied and hoped his followers wouldn’t notice.

Democrats’ framing of Kimmel’s suspension as an existential threat to the First Amendment simply doesn’t hold up.

Kimmel was not suspended for mocking Trump (though he did plenty of that). He was suspended for implying that Kirk’s killer was right-wing, even though Tyler Robinson’s leftist tendencies were by that point an undisputed matter of public record.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.

The words themselves aren’t false per se, but they carry the unmissable implication that Robinson was, in fact, “ one of them” — a theory that was and remains widespread among the echo-chamber liberals who still watch Kimmel’s show.

If Johnny Carson had delivered a monologue in 1968 insinuating that Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin was a black militant, he’d have been fired without any need for pressure from the Johnson administration.

MSNBC fired Brian Williams in 2015 because he lied about his experiences in Iraq, not because the FCC was breathing down their necks.

In Kimmel’s case, his comments were probably nothing more than a pretext to suspend the obnoxious host as a first step to getting rid of a guy who makes $15 million a year and delivers abysmal ratings.

Democrats’ outrage here is fake, just like AELP’s claim that opposing Kimmel somehow threatens democracy. Both are smokescreens designed to distract from the real story — a prominent conservative gunned down while the left cheered.

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Julio Rivera

Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, the Editorial Director for Reactionary Times and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on cybersecurity and politics, has been published by websites including The Hill, Real Clear Politics, Townhall and American Thinker.

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