Jimmy Kimmel speaks onstage during the 98th Oscars at Dolby Theatre on March 15, 2026, in Hollywood, California. He has again become a target of Donald Trump after the violence at the WHCD.

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This weekend brought yet another disturbing act of political violence. Each time, we hope it’s the last, but hovering over the act is the knowledge that it won’t be the last and the fear that it won’t be the worst.

At least, that’s how many of us feel about the tragic shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. The trolls and point-scorers feel differently. Because how that opening sentence should really read is, “Yet another disturbing act of political violence, yet another round of recriminations about whose speech was responsible and who should be shut down as a result.”

In this case, the bogeyman is a familiar one: Jimmy Kimmel, who, as both Melania Trump and Donald Trump argued Monday, should be taken off the air (again) for a joke he made last week about the potential future death of Donald Trump.

But I’d argue that eyerolling another MAGA attempt to exploit a tragedy is, while an entirely fair reaction, not the full or accurate one either. It’s possible for the right to be acting in bad faith and for the left to downplay the role of demonization and violence-normalization, not with one late-night host’s misinterpreted joke — Kimmel’s quip was, as my colleague Tony Maglio notes, essentially an old-person punchline and is being taken profoundly out of context — but a different, deeper culture of demonization. When perhaps the most popular voice on the left, Hasan Piker, tosses out thoughts like “My favorite flag? Hizbollah…it’s got an AK on it and a fucking hand holding it up” and “Empires never die quietly, and we must end the American empire,” the latter of which he didn’t even restrict to his trolling livestream but told a Yale student group this month, it becomes harder to say violence-coded provocation is just a right-wing thing.

Conservatives’ playbook of using a horrific incident as an excuse to shut down the speech they don’t like — it would have been news if the White House didn’t try to capitalize on the violence at the Hilton — is by now well-known. Less known, and more uncomfortable, is how some Democrats tend to go silent on the role normalization can play in these tragedies too. The lesson of incidents like the WHCD shooting is that the real devil isn’t the other side — it’s the framing of sides to begin with.

This is a monumental and often impossible moment for media companies, when the corporate leaders who control them have been put under unprecedented government pressure even as the rhetoric from all quarters rises to unheard-of levels. We have moved from comedians commenting on current events to becoming part of them, from entertainers anointing politicians to evolving into their antagonists. Many of us believe that taking Kimmel off the air is wrong in the specific, given who else throughout the Internet hasn’t been de-platformed for saying far worse, and troubling in the cosmic, given the suppressive benchmark this could set for the future. Using corporate tools to stop comedians from making jokes is second only in its Orwellian nightmarishness to using government tools to do the same.

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And yet to say that those speakers have no reason to consider their words is to ignore both today’s realities and common sense. Anyone with a platform can influence the culture — the platforms wouldn’t be so coveted if they weren’t. When leading Democratic candidates throw caution to the wind and throw around the term fascism, comparing Donald Trump to the men who caused genocide in Europe, it gets harder to say that only one side is upping the rhetoric. When a Saturday Night Live comic says, “I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean — what’s the worst that could happen?,” as Michael Che recently did, then it’s totally reasonable to react with, “Yeah, he shouldn’t have said that” (and also, “Surely, there was a better joke about Trump going to the Kennedy Center?”). And if you’re a Democrat shrugging it off with, “Eh, it’s just a punchline,” imagine your reaction to near-misses on Barac

Canceling Kimmel Isn't the Answer. But He Is Part of a Bigger Problem