It’s not about Kirk, or Kimmel, or Colbert

MLK told us to expect no solidarity from what he described as “the white moderate.” Today’s widespread indignation—from conservatives lamenting an assassination, as well as liberals responding to the cancellation of comedians, proves his point.

Comedy filling in for journalism

I love Stephen Colbert. Both he, and Jimmy Kimmel, demonstrate the best facets of culture and entertainment. They’re hysterically funny, incisive, and adversarially critical of power, more or less in the way that journalists are supposed to be.

They embody both comedy and journalism, in an era when institutional journalism has abandoned its core principles to instead serve power. In that respect, Colbert and Kimmel—and other political comedians like Sammy Obeid, Ronny Chieng, and Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa—stand in the timeless shoes of pioneers including Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor.

And just to be clear, I don’t mean that journalism was compromised only in the recent past, in the months since media institutions began overtly bending their writing to kiss the behind of a leader with a frail ego. Long before that, corporate news outlets reduced themselves to propaganda by building cults of personality around dynasty politicians while shamelessly promoting every war-for-profit over the past three generations.

Whether the Pentagon or predatory billionaires, the press in the U.S. has usually served someone powerful. Rarely have professional journalists reflected the supposed values of their own profession, such as transparency and accountability.

So it makes some sense that people have a soft spot for comedians. The best among them do the doubly hard work of telling the truth, while offering the humor and sarcasm that enable many listeners who might otherwise shy away to instead confront reality.

Look up, for God’s sake

Watching calls for corporate boycotts explode on social media in the wake of ABC and parent company Disney “indefinitely suspending” Kimmel’s show left me wondering: where have all these people been all this time?

Why are so many more Americans moved to care about wealthy comedians losing their corporate platforms than children being murdered en masse with American weapons every day?

Don’t care about Palestinians?

How about the Black student and white homeless man lynched in Mississippi this week? It’s revealing that journalists have been so dramatically less willing to report on their deaths than Charlie Kirk’s.

What about when Obama decided to vaporize a 16-year old born in Denver based on his father’s speech?

By all means, call out Trump’s drone strikes targeting alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers. But why were so many of today’s suddenly outraged voices all-too-willing to defer to Obama’s drone strikes that murdered innocent people by the dozens over a decade ago?

Democrats supporting Republican policies

Democrats paved the path for Trump, in at least two ways.

Most recently, Democrats played key roles in putting Trump in office—not once, but twice.

But starting long before that, Democrats in Washington worked with Republicans relentlessly over the past generation to empower the executive branch and diminish the power of checks & balances. Despite the rancor of partisan gridlock, serving the executive branch and degrading the constitutional separation of powers was the one thing on which otherwise warring policymakers in Washington often agreed.

Few policy arenas demonstrate this pattern better than immigration.

Long before Trump deployed his ICE goon squads in cities across the country, it was President Obama who earned the title “deporter in chief” from the immigrant rights community. And that was not the only way in which Obama laid the foundation for Trump’s authoritarianism.

For over a decade, I (and many others) advocated for stronger checks & balances on executive power run amok. Responding to issues including mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, torture with impunity, offensive war, constitutional warmaking authority, and government secrecy, I wrote articles, organized direct action, led non-profit grassroots lobbying campaigns, litigated, recorded an album, ran for federal office, won a primary, and learned the hard way that most Americans can’t see more than an inch beyond their own interests.

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I sounded the alarm in every way conceivable, including in a keynote address at a law symposium in Chicago in 2011. The resulting article makes clear that, while we today face an unprecedented degree of insecurity and mendacity in the executive branch, the structural issues enabling the Trump administration’s assault on America have been in place for many years.

And it’s not like I was whispering in a vacuum, either. When I ran for office to remove the Democratic Party’s leader from Congress, national publications featured my concerns about civil liberties. The Intercept interviewed me at some length on a podcast observing the depth and range of my advocacy work and policy agenda. Rolling Stone gave me the microphone on Veterans Day. Many other outlets with substantial audiences featured my concerns.

Yet still, even professional journalists couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, or even support a public debate after I won a congressional primary to challenge a leading Democrat and finally force attention to these long overlooked issues.

It’s great to see Americans finally getting active—but the choice among issues that seems to be animating the liberal center forces me to roll my eyes and shake my fist at the sky. Even these seemingly well-intentioned people seem to be moved neither by history, nor by writing (that even they acknowledge as canonical), nor by empathy, nor by anything beyond a knee-jerk reaction to a co-opted news cycle.

Spare some outrage

I really do hope that everyone participating in a media boycott responding to the cancellation of a comedian might also be moved to lift a finger for basic human rights in Gaza.

I wrote a song in 2016 inspired by the long history of solidarity between Palestine and Black America, given their shared struggles in the face of predatory policing, among other things.

If “the white moderate” about whom MLK warned us had heeded the voices—and painfully revealing experiences—of voices from either of those communities, we could have avoided the worst of the unfolding future.

However late in the proverbial game it may be to finally begin acknowledging the warnings we have all been given, late is certainly better than never. One hopes that enough time remains for today’s newly radicalized liberals to make a difference before the predicted results of their previous deference drives us all to early graves—or, in the meantime, transforms America into the all-white country of the right wing’s dreams.