Late Nite of the Long Knives for Liberals

Former POTUS Barack Obama tweeted about the firing of late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel:

This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 19, 2025

Obama followed that tweet with one linking to a recent NY Times op-ed by Never-Trumper Republican David French. Adding insult to injury, Obama followed up with a link to an excerpt from a Frederick Douglas speech.

People were quick to respond with links to French’s previous tweets celebrating the deplatforming of Donald Trump in 2020.

Historian of the American right, Corey Robin had an excellent retort to Obama on Facebook:

I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say, as Obama did yesterday, and as he did multiple times throughout his presidency, that we need to be able to talk across the divide, we need to acknowledge our similarities despite our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my sensibility or way of thinking, but it runs deep in our political tradition, so it’s not surprising that people turn to it in moments like these.

People like Obama usually point to Lincoln, particularly his First and Second Inaugurals (or least the conciliatory part of the Second), as their model and exemplar for their interventions.

But Lincoln actually is an instructive case for a quite different reason. And that is that despite starting his career issuing bromides like these, he came to understand, as time went on, a quite different relationship between words and deeds, between toleration and power, between reconciliation and reality.

From a very young age—specifically, when he was 28 years old, long before he came to national prominence—Lincoln had an uncanny sense that the growing violence in Jacksonian America was  caught up in the question of slavery and abolition. In 1838, he delivered a fascinating address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, where he meditated on the growing predilection for violence, both political and apolitical, in the country, and offered cautionary words about where things were headed. Despite his keen understanding of the roots of the violence and its direction, the best counsel he could offer was that all Americans needed to recommit themselves to the rule of law and the Constitution. Otherwise, he warned, some Napoleon type would come along and do one of two terrible things: free all the enslaved or enslave all the free. Despite his own opposition to slavery, in other words, Lincoln’s recommendation at this point was for people to gird their loins of lawfulness against abolitionists and enslavers. Both sides do it; we, the good, in the middle, must not.

What made Lincoln great was not that early speech, though it’s interesting in all sorts of ways that I can’t do justice to here. Nor was it his later giving into some bloodthirsty militarism during the Civil War, though there are moments of holy violence in his Second Inaugural that still send shivers up my spine and that I cannot read aloud with my throat seizing up and my voice cracking.

No, what made Lincoln great was that he understood that, in the end, there would be no establishment of the rule of law until justice had been served and slavery abolished. There could be no refusal of violence that would stick, that would sound like anything but the blandest sanctimony, until the underlying social violence—the combination of the Negro Question and the Labor Question—was resolved, through concerted action by the state.

What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so empty and formulaic is that they are completely severed from any sort of action or larger awareness, any attempt to get at the underlying social and economic roots of the problem. 

Robin gets at Obama’s moral vacuity and communicates what made Lincoln different than today’s loathsome liberals.

But Robin’s post avoids the very same glaring issue that the liberals upset about Kimmel’s firing are ducking: Gaza.

My immediate reaction was summed up by anti-Zionist Jew, Alon Mizrahi, commenting on Kimmel and his firing, not Obama’s response:

Jimmy Kimmel could have been fired for being a man and a human being, speaking out against a genocide and all the horrors of Gaza and paying a price with his head up high. Instead, he’s being kicked in the ass for some idiocy no one will even remember.

There is zero dignity in American public life. Zero. This is a big reason why Zionists took them over this easily. They may have a lot, but they are forever worthless.

Professional clueless centrist Matt Yglesias has been similarly castigated by Palestinian activists for willfully ignoring the murder of journalists in Gaza and the relentless bipartisan attack on the free speech rights of anti-genocide protestors. Some choice examples:

There were two vigils for journalists killed by Israel here in DC, where Matt lives, last month – and he did not show up to support those. There will be more protests later this month when Netanyahu visits – Matt won’t be at those either. https://t.co/G7XjUlbdXK pic.twitter.com/n03UTlhEu5

— Hamid Bendaas 🇩🇿🇵🇸🇮🇷 (@HBendaas) September 17, 2025

do you think it might have something to do with the previous administration criminalizing those protests, expelling students, disbanding student groups, and targetting administrations for not cracking down harshly enough?

— Communist Dog Tail (@pointblaek) September 18, 2025

Meanwhile, Yglesias’ former partner at Vox dot com, Ezra Klein, is doing his very best to restore the centrist-conservative alliance that dominated the post-9/11 GWOT Bush-Cheney years.

First, Ezra wrote a hagiography of Charlie Kirk that avoided quoting its subject a single time. Then he followed up with a long and friendly interview with Ben Shapiro, the man taking over Kirk’s organization, entitled “We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another.”

Which is a pretty elegant way of announcing he is on board with the current right-wing moral panic and assault on speech.

American centrism has well and truly exposed itself as utterly bankrupt in every sense. Now that it is clear the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris project has lost to Trumpism, craven careerists like Klein (or Gavin Newsom or Disney’s board) only know one thing to do, surrender and get back to attacking the left.

The problem for centrists is that once the right has fully taken over, there is no more need for them.

Even being a Democrat in good standing with AIPAC won’t save you from your angry constituents as freshman New Jersey US Rep. Nellie Pou is learning:

Republicans believe Pou, who succeeded Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. after Pascrell died last August, is the most vulnerable House Democrat in New Jersey, and have targeted her over her votes against GOP spending bills and for her opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Progressive activists, meanwhile, are criticizing her for joining other Congress members on a recent trip to Israel paid for by a pro-Israel lobbying group.

…

Pou’s vulnerability was exposed last November when she won her election by a relatively small margin. Pou defeated Republican Billy Prempeh by five points. The last time Pascrell sought reelection in a presidential election year, he defeated Prempeh by 34 points.

At a time when Rasmussen believes laying low would be the safest way for Pou to keep her seat, he said her trip to Israel made her an even bigger target.

…

The 9th District, which includes parts of Bergen, Hudson, and Passaic counties, has historically been a solidly Democratic one. But Trump won the district by about one point (in 2020, Biden won it by nearly 20 points), a win fueled in part by support from Latino voters. The district is 41% Hispanic…

The ground is falling out from under the useless, bought-and-paid-for centrists nationwide.

As the Ramones once sang, Glad to See You Go Go.

Jimmy Kimmel was never funny anyway; his humor revealed no larger truths, and he won’t be missed. We’re not talking about Lenny Bruce here, or even Jon Stewart.

I’ll mention that Trump had openly targeted Kimmel since he took down Stephen Colbert and that the Kirk kerfluffle was only a pretext, but it’s a small point, to be noted and no more.

Americans lost our free speech rights when the Biden administration started cracking down on anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and Trump finished the job when the deportations started.