Jimmy Kimmel went on television and told his audience that Melania Trump looked like an "expectant widow." Days later, a man charged a Secret Service checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in what law enforcement is calling the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump in under two years. It was, by one count, the tenth attempt on the president's life since he entered politics.
Connect those dots yourself.
Nobody is saying Jimmy Kimmel told a gunman to go to Washington. That's not the argument. The argument is simpler — and the left knows it, because they invented the vocabulary for it.
For years, liberal academics and media commentators pushed the concept of "stochastic terrorism" — the idea that rhetoric, even without explicit calls to violence, creates a probabilistic field where some listener will eventually act. They applied it to conservative talk radio, to rallies, to a president whose tone they found menacing. The logic was: words shape behavior, and people with platforms bear responsibility for what their audiences do.
That logic is correct. It's just supposed to apply to everybody.
Here is what the last four days looked like in America.
On Saturday night, Cole Tomas Allen charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He was stopped. The president survived. This is no longer unusual — Fox News published a timeline Tuesday tallying ten known attacks on Trump's life going back to 2016. Ten.
Think about what that number means. It means that since one man ran for president on a platform that half the country hated, at least ten separate individuals have decided to try to kill him. Not defeat him. Not protest him. Kill him.
And within 48 hours of the latest attempt, here is what happened.
Rep. Jerry Nadler — a sitting member of Congress, a man sworn to uphold the Constitution — posted that Trump is "America's chief insurrectionist." Not in isolation. Not as a considered analysis. As a response to news that someone had just tried to assassinate the man he was calling an insurrectionist.
Former Rep. Katie Porter — Harvard law degree, former professor — sent out a profanity-laced fundraising email. Less than two days after the attack. The email reportedly used expletives and framed the moment as a political opportunity.
A teacher — someone responsible for children — was placed on leave after posting "Make Americans Great Assassins Again." Placed on leave. Not fired. Placed on leave.
Meanwhile, George Clooney appeared at a gala event and defended Kimmel. He compared the widow joke to something the White House press secretary said. As if those are equivalent. As if joking that the first lady will soon be grieving her husband is the same category of thing as a press briefing.
And ABC? Silence. The Daily Wire pressed the network for a comment about Kimmel's widow joke — made days before another attempt on her husband's life. Crickets. A billion-dollar media company, holder of public broadcast licenses, couldn't find three sentences.
The FCC noticed.
The Federal Communications Commission has initiated a review of Disney and ABC's broadcast licenses. The formal rationale involves DEI-related discrimination concerns. Those are real. But the timing tells the rest of the story. This network holds licenses that belong, ultimately, to the American public. The FCC is asking whether that public is being well-served.
Some people will call this government pressure on the press. Fine. Ask those same people where they were during the FBI's meetings with Facebook about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. Ask about the coordinated effort to classify that story as disinformation before votes were cast. The rules have always applied differently to different people. That's the point.
Here's the calculation the media class is making, consciously or not: Trump is the enemy of civilization, and people who believe that don't have to follow the same rules as everyone else. When you're fighting fascism, normal limits don't apply. The "resistance" gets to be different.
Some people listening to that take it seriously.
Ask yourself this: why, after ten attempts on this man's life, are prominent Democrats and Hollywood celebrities still saying the kind of things that they themselves once argued created the climate for violence? Why does the same logic that got a sitting president banned from social media not apply to a late-night host who joked about his wife's widowhood before a gunman showed up?
Nobody will say this plainly: a segment of the governing class in America has decided that some targets are legitimate. That some political violence is understandable, or at least excusable, if the target is the right one. That's what ten assassination attempts and a Congress member calling the target an insurrectionist — after the attempt — tell you.
The FCC is asking about broadcast licenses. That's a narrow question. The broader one is this: how long does a country hold together when the people running its institutions treat some of its citizens as enemies to be eliminated rather than opponents to be defeated?
The widow joke isn't the problem. It's the symptom. The disease is the belief that some men are so dangerous they deserve what's coming to them.
Kimmel is still on the air. ABC is still silent. The teacher is on leave — not fired. Nadler is still in Congress.
Don't look away from that.
