In this episode, we delve into the intricacies of accountability and public apologies in the light of recent comments made by Jimmy Kimmel. Our hosts discuss the media’s perception of apologies, reflecting on the powerful impact of rhetoric in political and social spheres. From the casual dismissal of public criticism to the conversations about the refusal to apologize, our episode provides a comprehensive look at how public figures navigate the tightrope of responsibility and public perception.
00:00:06 Discussion on Apologies and Accountability
00:14:08 Personal Reflections and the Need for a Break
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s all he had to do. You beat me to it. He couldn’t do it. No, he couldn’t do it. You were right. And having found fault with the crocodile tears and the hand-wringing, somebody on Twitter observed to me… Well, you know, no matter what he said, this is what you’re going to say. And I don’t reply to people a lot. But I said, look, if he had come out and said, I really am sorry. What I did was wrong. What I said was wrong. I was wrong to malign millions of Americans. I was wrong to misrepresent the motives of the shooter. I’m sorry. And I need to really watch when my comedy steps across that line. I really, really regret it. If he said that, I’d be the first to accept it.
SPEAKER 01 :
But you were the one who said it was never going to happen. Correct. And I was listening before you this morning, I was listening a little bit to Chris Tagal, and it’s fascinating to me how casual we are with not… acknowledging the decision not to apologize. In other words, refusing to apologize for something is motivated by something, right? If you refuse to apologize, and we’ve both been in positions like this our whole lives, where something happens in the workplace or in a personal relationship, and look, You either have the opportunity or the option to apologize, or you don’t, right? It’s one or the other. And if you choose not to, because Jimmy Kimmel knows that what he said was absolutely 100% provably false. He knows that. He knows that what he said, and that was the only beef with Jimmy Kimmel. Obviously, nobody’s complaining about the way he bags on Trump and conservatives all this time. He does it every night. It’s his act. So at the very least, when you smear MAGA and you smear more than half the country and you lie about the motivation of the killer, then you’ve got to own it. You’ve got to say you’re sorry. Now, Chris DeGaulle, I was so intrigued by this. He’s a good guy. I love him. He’s a very spiritual guy. He said… Well, it’s about as close as you probably would get to an apology. And I was thinking in the car when I heard that, yeah, like being a little bit pregnant? You either apologize or you don’t. That’s correct. You either say those two little words. And because the headline right now in the New York Times, Kimmel didn’t apologize.
SPEAKER 02 :
The headline of the Daily Beast. Thank goodness, at least the Daily Beast said what?
SPEAKER 01 :
But they’re proud of him for not apologizing. Don’t misunderstand that. The Daily Beast gets a little more graphic with what the Times was saying. Kimmel refuses to bend a knee to Donald Trump. That’s the whole takeaway. And Kimmel must have thought, if I apologize, I will be accused of bending a knee to Donald Trump. And that’s the way, because this thing got all conflated and it got turned to, look, the Brendan Carr didn’t do anybody any favors.
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly right, because therein lies the problem. That’s the problem. Our side was not on its best behavior, and I don’t mean you, and I don’t mean me. And it’s funny, you almost put an asterisk by Trump. He’s going to do performative blather every once in a while, and I kind of love it, and there’s stuff you know he’s not going to do. And there was never going to be a license pulled from anybody. Not from anybody. But this Brendan Carr, he’s a problem. And Ted Cruz is absolutely right to torch him. This guy, not so long ago, could be found talking about the virtues of free speech. And now he’s talking about, you know, hey, we can do this the easy way or do it the hard way.
SPEAKER 01 :
Come on, dude. Dumb thing to say. Well, Ted Cruz was right. Yes, he was. Dumb thing to do. Stupid thing to do. Dangerous as hell. to quote Ted, Senator Cruz, and it is. You don’t want to go down this road.
SPEAKER 02 :
Because it’ll blow back on us. The conservatives run the FCC now. Give me a Democrat president and a liberal FCC, and they’re coming after you and me. And they’ll use Kimmel as a presence.
SPEAKER 01 :
But we gave them an out. Brendan Carr, in his conversation with Benny Johnson, that they keep playing over and over and over again, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Come on. Really? You’re the FCC commissioner. I mean, you start talking like that. Look, Republicans are not always going to be in control. And they’ll come after us. And incidentally, there’s a bigger point, a much bigger point that has to be made. Incidentally, there’s breaking news out of your neck of the woods. Shots fired at the Texas ICE facility in Dallas. So let’s keep an eye on that. Lord knows there’s a massive police response. It’s in Dallas. It’s the ICE facility there. Hey, dare I say, is it premature to say more left wing violence?
SPEAKER 02 :
And the first thing that occurs to me is Gavin Newsom yesterday or day before or whatever it was, I guess, the day before passing this tough guy law that in California, the ICE people have to unmask. The reason the ICE people are masked is. is because lunatic lefties have characterized them as Gestapo, as Nazis, and one of these guys is going to get killed.
SPEAKER 01 :
And finally, even The Atlantic did a report yesterday. The Atlantic is a far left-leaning propaganda arm, right? They said, ooh, statistically now, left-wing violence is exceeding right-wing violence. In the last 10 years, there are now more acts of political violence committed by the left than Look, Democrats have to grapple with this, and they don’t know how, because you’re right. Gavin Newsom falls on his face every time. They do performative, sort of perfunctory, well, violence is bad, but they don’t condemn the actual political violence. Yeah. So if indeed, and boy, this does look like a huge story coming out of Dallas right now. And let’s hope nobody’s been hurt or killed. But all we’ve got right now that I’m getting. Shots fired at the ICE facility in Dallas. Yep. In Dallas. And boy, I’m seeing video images, a huge police presence there. So we’re going to see, that’s probably going to be the story of the day as the morning progresses. But they’re going to have to figure out how to tamp down this awful, awful violence. And let’s be honest, it starts with the rhetoric. How do you not acknowledge when you’re unmasking ICE agents and you’re calling Republicans tyrants and dictators and fascists, you’re surprised when violence erupts?
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly. And that slows. It doesn’t suffocate, but it slows my optimism. You and I, if there’s anything we share, it’s this constant upbeat, happy warrior optimism, of course, about our country and our love of country and our prayerful wish for things to get better. And especially in this aftermath after Charlie Kirk and with the incredible – memorial service on Sunday, there’s a real strong feeling that something special is at hand. But that’s about people, when I say on our side, I don’t just mean our Republican tribe or our conservative tribe or even our group of people who are believers, but I mean the people who are prone to be friendly to that kind of messaging. I feel great about that, and it energizes us, I think, for the midterms. But America’s not going to get better. Unless our fellow countrymen on the left look hard in the mirror and say, we’ve got to stop. Not stop believing in the crazy things we believe. We’re always going to have differences. But we’ve got to stop with the rhetoric. We’ve got to stop with the violence. We’ve got to stop with the ugliness. We’ve got to stop tearing up our families because Uncle Fred voted for Trump. We’ve got to stop the viciousness and the venom. And until they do that, it is hard for the country to get better.
SPEAKER 01 :
And boy, do I hope we can climb that steep hill. There’s a massive breaking news story that’s unfolding in real time now out of Dallas that speaks exactly to what you and I are talking about because now Fox 4 is reporting that the suspect, armed with a rifle, was a sniper on the roof. There are at least three people in critical condition. There are multiple people shot. The suspect reportedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head as agents approached. So we got a person. Look, you can connect the dots. We’ll see how this plays out. According to Jimmy Kimmel last night, these incidents are all isolated and they’re just disturbed people. Oh, of course.
SPEAKER 02 :
And if you heard me smear half of America, you misunderstood me.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s on you. You’re too stupid to know what I was talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we continually call ICE—when AOC and every prominent Democrat, including Gavin Newsom, calls AOC Nazis and stormtroopers, and now we’re surprised somebody climbed up on a roof outside the Texas ICE facility and took a bunch of people out? Oh, boy! Who would have ever seen that coming? And until these Democrats own this rhetoric— Mark, we know it’s going to keep happening. Correct. And look, it’s going to keep happening. I’m going to put the 800-pound elephant out in the room here. We all have targets on our back. After Charlie was killed, you understand we’re talking about one of our colleagues being assassinated. Somebody you and I knew. Somebody you and I had a relationship with. Somebody you and I worked with. Somebody, I’ve been in green rooms with Charlie for years, and this is not a distant thing. I was thinking about this last night. Do you know anybody personally until Charlie who’s been killed? No. I’ve never in my life, I’ve never. This is the first time, but isn’t, in a way, you and I have a real charmed existence. Of course. But isn’t that fascinating that in my 65 years, I’ve never known anybody well who’s been killed. I’ve known people in the media or in the news. This was that’s why it’s so personal for us, Mark. We knew him. We loved him. We worked with him. He texted us. We know we you know, we had a relationship with him. And now we lift up Erica and these babies. But but look, we’re all I got an event Friday night. And Larry Elder and I are going to be in a room in Sarasota with hundreds of people. You don’t think that the company is saying, well, we’re going to make sure nobody can walk in there with a gun. And so now everybody walking in there is going to be wanted and go through the magnetometers and all that because we have to. And isn’t that pathetic?
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s pathetic and it’s resonant because Charlie Kirk got killed for the precise beliefs you and I have. Correct. About politics and about faith and for expressing them.
SPEAKER 01 :
And for doing exactly what you and I do. Yep. I mean, he happened to go to a college campus. We talk into a microphone. You know, I mean, it’s the same thing. We share our beliefs with people. We do it in good faith. We never want to be dishonest. We welcome dissent. His whole thing was prove me wrong. They hated him because of how effective he was. Maybe my only hope is I’m not that effective. Absolutely.
SPEAKER 02 :
Mike is not that big a deal. Let us proclaim your show not that effective. You’re not a real resonating communicator. You’re not worth the time.
SPEAKER 01 :
Man, oh, man. Dinesh D’Souza and I spent time together this weekend in Phoenix as well as, of course, Larry. Dinesh has a new movie out that’s really exciting, the Dragon’s Prophecy film. It’s really interesting about Israel. It’s a really interesting movie. We’re going to get Dinesh on the show today. We’ll talk to him. But I also want to get his thoughts on he and Debbie’s experience in Phoenix with us.
SPEAKER 02 :
And Dinesh out there all the time, all these powerful, effective voices. Hey, in our last couple of minutes, two Trump stories. Number one, what do you think of the U.N. sabotaging him with the escalator and the teleprompter?
SPEAKER 01 :
There’s nothing better than a teleprompter malfunctioning over a 15-minute speech that turns him into 55 minutes of unleashed.
SPEAKER 02 :
Freestyle unplugged Trump just reaming. Your countries are going to hell. They’re going to hell.
SPEAKER 01 :
I mean, and you can hear everybody likes him. They’re all clapping for him. I mean, he’s even liked in that environment. They ought to take the U.N. and turn it into affordable housing. They ought to turn it into the mass of most. I have such disdain for the U.N. My anger is. And watching them and the stupid, well, it was a mechanical. No, it wasn’t. They were bragging about it before he got there.
SPEAKER 02 :
They said, let’s make the escalator fail.
SPEAKER 01 :
I would have liked to. Somebody could have gotten hurt there, man. What do you think would have happened if Melania and Trump fell down and got hurt? Or worse. Happy then? Well, sure, they would have loved that. But the teleprompter sabotage was perfect. I loved every bit of that. Let me be clear. I loathe the United Nations. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I hate everything it represents. I wish we would pull the plug on it. I don’t know why we have to be involved with it. They are scoundrels. And I was infuriated. But good for him. Good on him. Just going riffing for 55.
SPEAKER 02 :
In the final 60 seconds, Putin has sufficiently frosted Trump that Trump now speaks of Europe, Europe, getting behind Ukraine enough where Ukraine actually wins the war. Wow. I don’t know how that’s going to happen.
SPEAKER 01 :
I don’t either.
SPEAKER 02 :
I don’t see Ukraine winning any war anytime soon. Me neither. But as long as it’s not American blood and treasure, pfft. Knock yourself out.
SPEAKER 01 :
I wonder how Gavin Newsom, now that this story is unfolding in Dallas there at the Texas Ice Facility, I wonder how Gavin Newsom is going to respond to this story.
SPEAKER 02 :
Invoking North Korea and a police state.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. His priority is to expose the ice agents so that they can get doxxed and their families can get harmed. You happy, Gavin Newsom? Hey, look at the Dallas story, Gavin Newsom. Tell us how you feel about that man, oh man.
SPEAKER 02 :
I need a vacation. Where can I go? You can’t go anywhere.
SPEAKER 01 :
I gotta go somewhere. No, I told my kid last night, I was talking to Micah, I said, I need a break. I need the Mark Davis deal, because every other week you’re gone somewhere, so can I go somewhere? I want to go to the hill country. I just gotta put my feet up, unplug, because look, I’m melting down here. I’m good and fired up.
SPEAKER 02 :
But melting down Mike is some of your best radio. So you’ve got to navigate that a little bit because we love you. I’m going to buy my own Waymo. I want my own self-driving car. Oh, my gosh. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow. I heard your Waymo story. I’m this close to ready to do it. Tomorrow. Will you take my first ride with me so that we can die together? I’ll sit in the front. You can sit in the back.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you can weep, and you can cry like Jimmy Kimmel.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll be on the floorboards. My tears will be real.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, his are fake. His are crocodile tears, but you’ll be really scared. Oh, we’re going to die. I love you. Happy Wednesday. That is Mike Gallagher.
SPEAKER 02 :
He is ready to go. 10 o’clock right here on 660 AM, The Answer.
