A former colleague of late far-right activist Charlie Kirk has torn into Jimmy Kimmel for what he says was an insufficient show of contrition upon the late-night host’s return to TV.
“An apology,” was what producer of the late Kirk’s podcast Andrew Kolvet told Fox he would like to have heard from Kimmel. The host was suspended last week in the wake of a backlash to what were seen as insensitive comments about the Kirk’s killing.
At a time when Kirk shooting suspect Tyler Robinson’s potential motives remained subject to intense public speculation, Kimmel accused “the MAGA gang” of “desperately trying to characterize” Robinson as “anything other than one of them.”
Kimmel did not claim in his comments last week that Robinson was right-wing.
“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,” he said.
Kimmel also said of Trump that “this is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody he called a friend; this is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Kolvet, for one, was having absolutely none of it on Tuesday night.
“When somebody like Jimmy Kimmel says that the shooter of Charlie was MAGA, what he is really saying is it’s okay to lie about conservatives, that their lives don’t matter,” he claimed, adding it also meant “that his agenda, his political agenda and cultural agenda, is more important than the life of my friend who was just taken from us and robbed from us.”
Kimmel’s suspension is understood to have followed after Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr threatened action against ABC, which hosts his show, for allegedly permitting the late-night host to willfully mislead audiences as to what may have motivated Robinson.
Amid intense political and public backlash from both sides of the aisle, and after what the network insisted were “thoughtful conversations” with Kimmel in the days that followed, ABC made the decision to reinstate the host Monday, when he addressed the controversy in his opening monologue.
Kimmel said then that “it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” and “I don’t think there’s anything funny about it,” adding he had “posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed sending love to his family and asking for compassion and I meant it.”
Kolvet appears to have been completely fuming even before his Wednesday Fox appearance, posting to X that morning: “Yes, Jimmy got emotional. So what. He’s emotional for himself because he almost torched his entire career.”
“What he’s really saying is that he still thinks it’s fair game to slander conservatives. He would rather advance his own political and cultural agenda than confront the truth,” he went on. “The truth is that his own side has been fanning the flames of political assassination for years. The truth is that someone on the left picked up a gun and murdered someone on the right who advocated for peaceful debate.”
