THURSDAY: Professor Richardson took some grief!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2025

Kimmel got suspended: Does Jimmy Kimmel read Heather Cox Richardson's very popular, extremely Blue Substack?

We'll tell you why we ask:

On Monday night, Kimmel made a somewhat peculiar statement as part of his opening monologue. The comment produced a lot of pushback, leading to the suspension of his late night show.

This morning, reading the New York Times, we finally found someone who heard that comment the same way we did. That person was David French. This is what he said:

The Dangers of the Charlie Kirk Aftermath

[...]

The onslaught against dissenting speech never stops. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was interviewed on the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast and appeared to threaten fines or revoke broadcast licenses over what he called “news distortion” and specifically mentioned—of all people—Jimmy Kimmel. Hours after Carr’s statements, ABC pulled Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”

Kimmel had gotten something wrong on his late-night TV show. In his monologue, he said, “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.”

The best available evidence indicates that the shooter was not MAGA at all. But a late-night comic’s mistakes are not a cause for the federal government to bully a network into canceling his show. (Plus, as the attack on Kimmel demonstrates, the second part of Kimmel’s statement was correct.)

Set aside what Carr and ABC did. That's not our topic for today. Let's focus instead on what Kimmel said. 

French heard his remark the same way we did. Last night, watching Anderson Cooper, we were surprised to see a lockstep inability to imagine that there could be any imaginable problem with the accuracy of what Kimmel had said.

Everyone thought the remark made perfect sense. No one saw any imaginable problem.

We thought Kimmel's comment conveyed a fairly clear impression that Tyler Richardson was a MAGA man.  French interpreted the comment that same way. No one even imagined any such thing as we watched CNN.

It's always possible that something surprising will turn out to be true in the end. That said, it's hard to know how someone still would have thought that as of Monday night—would have been willing to go on network TV and say what Kimmel seemed to have said.

Why did Kimmel say what he did? That takes us to this report in Mediaite about what Heather Cox Richardson said:

...Substack’s Most Popular Author Torched Over False Claim About Charlie Kirk’s Assassin

Heather Cox Richardson, Substack’s most popular individual author, is being raked over the coals online over a false claim she made about Tyler Robinson, 22-year-old arrested for allegedly assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week.

In a post over the weekend, Richardson wrote the following:

"But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

"Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been “radicalized” in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media."

But there is presently no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Robinson is a far-right extremist who was upset Kirk didn’t advocate a more strident conservatism. To the contrary, Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) revealed on Saturday that “It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person [Robinson] who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.” The next day, Cox verified Fox News reporting that Robinson was dating a transgender individual whom he lived with.

And so on from there.

In our view, that assessment by Governor Cox is just a somewhat fuzzy allegation at this point. As far as we know, no one has demonstrated what the "leftist ideology" in question was, or where Tyler Richardson had allegedly been "indoctrinated" by it.

There may have been no such "ideology" or "indoctrination" at all. Still:

This is the Substack post by Professor Richardson from which that quotation is drawn. It seems to have been posted on Saturday, September 13 or on Sunday, September 14. 

It's hard to know why Professor Richardson would have been so sure that the shooter was a man of "the far right" at that rather late date. But Kimmel's comment seems to be drawn, live and direct, from that same general formulation.

The comment got Professor Richardson subjected to a fair amount of pushback and ridicule. It now has Kimmel suspended. Our question would be this:

Why did Professor Richardson seem to think it was clear that Tyler Richardson (no relation) hailed from the MAGA ranks, or from ranks even farther to the right?  We don't have the slightest idea, but motivated thinking—submission to tribal Storyline—is a problem in Blue America too.

In fact, whenever tribal war breaks out, true belief in preferred Storyline becomes a problem everywhere—all through our human ranks.

Richardson's Substack is very Blue. It can be a place to go for reassurance about the accuracy of Blue American tribal beliefs.

Does Kimmel read that popular Substack? We know of no way to decide.