Breaking Down Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel Disaster | Victor Davis Hanson

Victor, speaking of celebrities, Jimmy Kimmel, who's got a role in this kerfuffle, it's not a kerfuffle, it's an assassination attempt egged on by morons, your thoughts about Jimmy Kimmel's response? Well, I didn't, I mean, the worst part about it was not just what he said, I think everybody remembers that he set up a little skit and photoshopped himself at the dais of the White House correspondents as if he was Trump or somebody, and then they spliced shots of people that he doesn't like in the audience in unflattering ways, and you got the impression that they were actually there and listening to Jimmy Kimmel, which was kind of a dissimulation. And then he said that, look at beautiful Melania, she has, and she was smiling, the look of a soon-to-be bereaved widow, something to that say. In other words, Donald Trump will either die or be shot, and she'll be probably kind of ha-ha, bereaved, she'll be happy about it. And then when he got caught on it, then he lied and said, well, I was just thinking maybe because she's so much younger than Donald Trump, and he might die, it was just pathetic. So there's two issues, and that is, under the First Amendment, does he have a right to say that, as long as he doesn't threaten the life of the president, absolutely. Does Disney have a prerogative, yes, they can put him on there if they want, if they want to be that stupid, it's their choice. And do people have a choice to lobby to get him off, yes. There's nothing he did, unless he threatened the president, maybe he was implying that, but no more than, not as much as Madonna, I suppose. So he's a bore, he's talentless, he's a mean-spirited person, but he has a right to sound off, and people have a right to say, we don't want to buy, we want to go to Disneyland, we don't want to buy anything to do with Disney, we're done with you, because you're putting this guy on to get ratings, and the more he's on there, the more he's foul-mouthed, the more he hates Trump, and you all know that if anybody, anybody said 25% of what he had said about Barack Obama, he would be yanked with a cane in two seconds off the stage. You remember the clown in the Missouri State Fair, Jack? All he did was, he put an Obama mask on, it wasn't a racist blackface or anything, it was just Obama's face, and they immediately banned him for life, as I remember, from the fair, for life, and that was their prerogative, they wanted to do that, but we'll see. I think he does it because he thinks that he can't do anything, everything else he's tried, his ratings have gone down, at least they've gone down enough that they don't justify his obscene salary and the cost-of-benefit analysis. He's like Colbert, they lose $40 or $50 million, and they pay that guy $20 million or more, $30 million, and he can't make any money for them, so it's kind of like, well, we're left-wing and we want a left-wing expense, we can write it off or something, so it's the same thing with all these people. They have the right to say whatever they want, as long as they don't threaten the life of the president of the United States, but it's so boring in this book. Yeah, I have not watched late-night television, not that anyway, for years, and I did watch Johnny Carson, and it was just humor, and there was no sense with him of self-importance or self-satisfaction, smuggery. Yeah. He banned people. Anybody who came in and acted like he was a prima donna, he banned. And the other thing is, they asked him once, why don't you, in that period, it got very political during the Nixon years, and they asked him, they said, why don't you go out and, he said, why would I want to offend half my audience? That's what Michael Jordan said the same thing with Jordan, why don't you be political? And even Steve, is it Steve Kerr, the coach of the Warriors, who could not keep his mouth shut about politics and principles and ethics, and then people reminded him, oh yeah, you go over to China, and you play there, and you're part of the NBA investment, franchising Chinese teams, and they've got a million people in a slave labor camp, and that doesn't bother you, Mr. Morales? And I only mention that because the other day he came out, and he had an interview with a left-wing interviewer, and she was throwing these soft t-ball swings for him, you know, and he kind of said, I was really shocked, he said, you know, I'm kind of wrong what I did, I shouldn't get into politics, and the critics were right about the China thing. So I was surprised. So he got smart, is what I'm trying to say. And late night comedy is a joke now, they all, it just, they're not very talented, it's a small audience, you've got 500 channels to watch other than that, you've got streaming people, you've got, Gutfeld is out, he's got a much better ratings than these guys do.