Jimmy Kimmel came back to his show after a suspension and made it clear he had no intention of apologizing. That matters because the left had spent days pretending his removal was some First Amendment casualty.
The controversy started the Monday after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and Kimmel used his return to blame politics instead of owning the reckless rhetoric he traffics in. He said, “The MAGA gang (is) 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’s posture was defiant, not remorseful, and the network’s quick forgiveness says more about corporate tolerance for partisan hosts than it does about accountability. Conservative viewers saw a pattern familiar to them: celebrities get a slap on the wrist while ordinary citizens face social and legal consequences for less.
When pressed, Kimmel insisted he “was not just unapologetic, he was defiant.” He insisted he didn’t mean “to blame any specific group” and that “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.”
He went on to say, “Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions. It was a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make …”
Read plainly, that is a non-apology wrapped in performance art. If a host makes sweeping, loaded statements about political opponents and an attack follows, viewers are right to expect a clearer break from that rhetoric than what we got.
The reflex to defend a media figure while casting blame outward is part of a broader cultural blind spot. You can believe in free speech and still call for responsibility when speech stokes anger and division.
That brings Van Jones into the story, and his role deserves scrutiny too. His public mea culpa after Charlie Kirk’s death reads like a neat little narrative tidy enough to clear his conscience without addressing a larger pattern.
Jones wrote: “The day before he was horrifically murdered, Charlie Kirk sent me a direct message on X. He and I had been sparring publicly over the killing of a Ukrainian refugee and its relationship to race. He said the gruesome killing of a White woman by a Black man was motivated solely by anti-White hatred. I denounced those comments on CNN as unfounded. He went on TV and denounced MY denunciation. Then he unleashed a firehose of tweets, challenging my argument.”
Jones then described outreach from Kirk: “Then — in the middle of all this — Charlie Kirk reached out. He invited me to come on his show to talk with him. He wrote: ‘Hey, Van, I mean it, I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.’”
And Jones concluded, “So it was not hard for me to condemn his murder — immediately, without qualification and in unconditional terms.” Those are proper words to condemn violence, but they are not the same as accountability for rhetoric that so often paints half the country as morally corrupt.
Let’s be clear. Condemning murder is the minimum we expect from decent people, and Jones met that bar after a tragic event. But words that denounce are thin compensation if you have spent years demonizing opponents as racists or fascists without nuance.
Jones has a record of casting political opponents and their voters as the root of American evil. On election night in 2016 he said, “This was a white-lash against a changing country. It was a white-lash against a black president in part, and that’s the part where the pain comes.”
That kind of rhetoric matters because it shapes narratives that many accept without question. When millions are told they are driven by bigotry, it polarizes and delegitimizes entire swaths of Americans.
Kimmel will not apologize in any meaningful way, and Disney’s tolerance for his posture shows where the cultural priorities lie. But maybe Van Jones will take a step further than a straightforward condemnation and reckon with how his commentary contributed to a poisonous climate.
Republicans should demand equal standards: public figures on the left must be held to the same standards of accountability we apply to conservatives. If civility is the aim, then consistency is the only path to it.
