Since I like to think my emotional maturity is greater than eight-year-olds excusing their playground bullying by yelling "He started it!" — or having their gang members do so for them — I'm obviously unsuited for contemporary political discourse. That said, I am completely unsurprised by the utter bullshit in both rhetoric and other reactions surrounding Mr Kirk's untimely and inappropriate demise.
It was an assassination, and worse yet a private-actor-on-private-actor one. Therefore it was wrong. That Kirk engaged in hate speech, that his organization did so, continues to do so, and will do so long into the future is just as irrelevant as a "justification" for the atrocity of assassinating a non-government actor as Hamas engaged/engages/will engage in hate speech has as "justification" for the atrocity of the Israeli response to the people of Gaza in the last two years. Put another way: There is no number of wrongs n that makes a right — and that's especially so when we've got unaccountable private actors doing the counting… or identifying what is "right."
The FCC chair can go perform unnatural acts upon himself with a splintered 2x4 for his threats and overreaction to a less-than-fully-informed comedian's speculation about the accused assassin; so can management at ABC. Kimmel's remarks were inappropriate… and entirely expected in the current media environment. The FCC chair going medieval in response because those remarks could have been interpreted as attacking an ideological group that said chair needs to at least placate violates said chair's oath of office. Hint: Comedians tend toward indecency in their remarks; that Mr Arouet had to spend a significant part of his life in exile is sufficient "precedent" regarding government misconduct in response.
None of which is to excuse Kirk, Turning Point, bigotry, or resurrection of the Know-Nothings rebranded as "MAGA." <SARCASM> Of course, you should expect that reaction from this blawg; its author is an intellectual. </SARCASM> An intellectual who despises hate speech, holds those who rely upon it to advance their (seldom entirely disclosed) agendas and self-interests not just in but beneath contempt… and who, having been professionally concerned with the consequences of active and partisan suppression of hate speech for decades, believes that the medium- and long-term effects of suppressing hate speech are worse (more often than not). So, Mr Carr: It appears that you want to add an eighth word to the seven that a misguided Supreme Court said you can't say on radio — at least when it's applied to someone other than the speaker.
Neither is it to excuse Kimmel's poor word choice (at best, if one believes him that his remarks on antisocial media were out of context) or readiness to use precisely the same mechanism as Mr Kirk did routinely: Equation of a disagreeable (even irrational) belief on one issue with membership in an unsavoury group (especially when that unsavoury group is far less than unified). There's a difference between being utterly disgusted with views and viewpoints, and attempting to excuse execution for thoughtcrime.
I therefore sentence both Mr Kimmel and Mr Carr — and, once I track them down (and their parents), the decisionmaker(s) at ABC — to thirty minutes' detention after school, during which they will write "I will not try to be Pyotr Rachkovsky in public" on the whiteboard. Unaided by any generative-AI or cut-and-paste function. Spelling counts, although I'm not going to require proper Cyrillic rendering of that proper name. And that's the end of it — the cricket paddle will be used only for striking cricket balls.