Charlie Kirk now being compared to McCarthy/McCarthyism.

[Jedi Guy]

21. Having seen the clip of Dowd's words it absolutely came across as blaming Kirk for his own murder.

Or saying he deserved it, had it coming, however you want to phrase it. I'm not shedding any tears for him. What he said was idiotic and MSNBC decided they didn't want to deal with the fallout, a decision they're fully within their rights to make. No one has a right to be a TV analyst. Dowd opened his mouth and stepped right in on live TV.

I'm not familiar with Kimmel's comments so I can't weigh in on that, but it's 1000% government overreach for the FCC to threaten ABC and demand Kimmel be taken off the air. I just don't think it rises to the level of McCarthyism, which is how I've seen it described elsewhere. To be frank, McCarthyism involves a level of forethought and organization that I just don't believe the Trump administration is capable of. They're a chaotic mess on a good day.

To be clear, no one "of note" (for want of a better term) on the left has openly celebrated Kirk's murder to the best of my knowledge. The people I'm referring to are randos who thought it was a good idea to post their celebrations on TikTok and are now finding out that employers might not want to be associated with such things. Too bad, so sad.

The right has worked overtime to characterize the reaction of "the left" as celebratory, which is wrong. "The left" isn't a monolith any more than "the right" is. It would, however, be accurate to say that some on the left have celebrated Kirk's murder. Human behavior being the outlandish freakshow it usually is, you can almost always find some people in a group engaging in damn near any behavior if you look hard enough. The issue here is no one had to look particularly hard since the smoothbrains blasted their glee onto the internet for all the world to see.