WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2025
Interpretation is hard: Did Al Gore ever say that he invented the Internet?
We'd say no, he did not.
While being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, he made a remark which was widely paraphrased that way, though not until a few days later. He made the statement in question only once, and when people began to paraphrase it in the manner described, he instantly said that that wasn't what he had literally said, nor was it what he had meant.
Too late! At the time, he was a target of the mainstream press—the last person they could attack after their war against Bill Clinton had failed. (The impeachment of Clinton had failed only a few weeks earlier.)
For years, Gore was assailed for having said that he "invented he Internet"—and yes, the word "invented" even slipped inside quotation marks, even though the pleasing word had never passed Gore's lips.
That's the way our mainstream press corps was functioning as of March 1999. Those of us in Blue America were so dumb that we widely let it go.
As a group, we the humans aren't enormously sharp, nor are we obsessively honest or fair. We tend to stick to reciting our tribal storylines. That leads us to an unresolved question:
What did Jimmy Fallin say last Monday night about the 22-year-old man who murdered the late Charlie Kirk?
What did Jimmy Fallin say? More to the point, what did he mean by what he said? What did he seem to mean?
It's easy to transcribe what he actually said. These are the words he said:
FALLIN (9/15/25): 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.
Those are the words he actually said. It was a rather jumbled locution, which leads us to the ultimate question:
When he said those forty words, what did he seem to mean?
He plainly said that we'd "hit come new lows," but what "new lows" did he have in mind? His jumbled presentation makes his meaning a bit unclear, but let's pare his statement down to this:
"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..."
According to Fallin, "the MAGA gang" had been "desperately trying" to say that Tyler Robinson wasn't "one of them." To our ear, that formulation seemed to suggest that Robinson actually was "one of them"—that the new low involved the desperate attempts by the MAGA gang to pretend that he actually wasn't.
Could someone have interpreted that presentation differently? In a world where reams of major journalists insisted, for years, that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, almost any interpretation—almost any paraphrase of some remark—fits within the borders of what a tribal group can imagine.
As to what Fallin actually meant—as to what he may have thought he was saying—there's no perfect way to tell. But it's the job of a major public figure to make his meaning reasonably clear, especially about an important matter like this.
At the very least, Fallin failed to do that last Monday night. Also, there was this:
Fallin's remark that night didn't come out of nowhere. Inevitably, an instant battleground had formed, with warring tribal groups presenting different claims about Robinson's motive and tribal membership.
Some people on "the left" were explicitly saying or suggesting that Robinson hailed from the right of the MAGA movement. As we noted last Thursday, Professor Heather Cox Richardson had explicitly posted this on her widely read Substack over the weekend preceding Fallin's remarks:
RICHARDSON (9/13/25 or 9/14/25): [I]n 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.
We have no idea why Professor Richardson would have made so explicit a claim. That said, there's little doubt about what she was asserting—and as far as we know, no particular evidence has ever emerged to show that her assessment was accurate.
The following Monday, along came Fallin! He seemed to offer a jumbled version of what the professor had said—or so it seemed to us.
Sad! Even as late as last night, America's two major tribes still couldn't agree on what Fallin had actually said—rather, on what he appeared to have meant.
We would guess that he might have thought, when he went on stage last Monday night. that Robinson actually was a figure of the right. To our ear, it sounded like that was most likely what he believed when he fashioned his statement.
Or then again, possibly not! That said, matters like these are important. Last night, in his opening monologue, Fallin apologized for a possible pair of lesser offenses. But last Monday, did he actually think, and mean to say, that Tyler Robinson was a figure of the right?
There's no perfect way to know. But it's obvious why members of the Red American tribe might think that's what he meant.
In the end, who was—who is—Tyler Robinson? What was the ideation behind the murder he committed?
At some point, the answer may become more clear. For now, we'd be inclined to assume the accuracy of something Amy Cox Barrett said, as reported by Mediaite last week:
That was horrific...I mean, for the father of two young children and a husband to be murdered in cold blood was a tragedy and certainly sobering for the nation.
And I think it is a sign of a culture that has– where political discourse has soured beyond control and something that we need to really pull back. I mean, obviously, well, I assume that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk was mentally ill. But nonetheless, you know, to create a culture in which political discourse can lead to political violence is unacceptable in the United States.
As far as we know, Robinson had never been diagnosed with a serious mental illness (with a serious "mental disorder"). But the fact that some such disorder hadn't been diagnosed doesn't mean that it didn't exist.
A tiny percentage of the two major tribes engage in murders of this type. The vast majority of the members of each tribe, Red and Blue, have never engaged in any such conduct.
Inevitably, Greg Gutfeld was playing the fool with respect to this question on the Fox News Channel last night. There's nothing that won't be said on programs like Gutfeld! and The Five—while the rest of the tribal stooges politely wait for their chance to agree.
What makes Gutfeld behave as he does? We'd call him "unrecognizable." We don't think we've ever seen a person that strange on TV. Speaking as someone who taught fifth grade for seven years, we know he could do better.
(Also, everyone is now said to be gay on The Five and on the Gutfeld! show. They open the garbage can each night and that's what slithers out.)
That said, interpretation is hard! We humans aren't especially good at the practice, nor are we always obsessively honest. We do tend to be eager to repeat the memorized claims of our tribes.
Schorr (almost) gets it right: At Mediaite, Isaac Schorr seems to think that Fallin was faking last night. This is the headline on his opinion piece:
The Left Should Be Embarrassed by Jimmy Kimmel
In our view, Schorr is perhaps a bit too sure about what Fallin must have meant last Monday night.
As Freud once insisted, Sometimes a jumbled presentation is just a jumbled presentation. Someone should maybe ask Fallin, at some point, what he actually believed about Tyler Robinson as of last Monday night.
Or then again, maybe not! Climate change and vaccine chaos may be more important, not to mention crazy flips concerning a former darling like Vladimir Putin, who is suddenly no longer great.
