As execrable as Jimmy Kimmel’s September 15 monologue on the Charlie Kirk assassination was, perhaps even sicker is his current dishonest defense of his original falsities. Wrapping himself in the First Amendment does not erase the harm he continues to cause willfully and deceptively.

A few preliminary points are in order. The First Amendment protects American citizens from any law abridging their free speech rights. It does not protect any citizen from rebuke—including private employment discipline—for undesirable speech. And there is nothing wrong with the government encouraging certain speech content. We all have the “right,” for instance, to make racist or homophobic remarks. But the government can legitimately campaign to discourage such in the public interest. Billions in tax dollars have been spent to encourage politically correct DEI language and to discourage anti-vax communication, legitimately so even if these projects are objectionable to many.

Luckily for Kimmel, FCC chair Brendan Carr may have slipped his toe across the First Amendment line by threatening ABC with regulatory punishment, only weakly implicating the FCC’s mission of public safety and national security. Station owners Sinclair and Nexstar, without prompting, would have sanctioned Kimmel in any case, and, more likely than not, so would ABC’s majority owner, Disney. So, while Kimmel can claim governmental involvement in suppression, it was marginal at best.

Free speech is not to be equated with intelligent or beneficial speech. Nazis are free to march through largely Jewish Skokie, Illinois, but the Nazi ideology thus communicated is nonetheless horrid.

And of course, we all know that the right to free speech cannot justify falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That was arguably and in substance what Kimmel was doing, hoping to provoke an emotional response in his young, critically unsophisticated audience.

We would all like to think that mere talk, however imbecilic, is not dangerous, but we all know better. Typical of the post-shooting commentary was an article by the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka observing that Tyler Robinson and Charlie Kirk were “both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement at all costs.”

Putting aside this transparent effort to impart an inapt “both sides” blame, the heart of the article is true: there are battalions of sick puppies, mostly young men, lost on the internet, anxious, depressed, and lacking touch with reality. They are vulnerable to exploitation, to say the least.

While apt sentiments such as Chayka’s have been bandied about as a form of progressive defense of yet another act of leftist violence, they serve to convict Kimmel as a cynical arsonist knowingly playing with fire near dynamite. Let’s examine his words, his motives, and his later defense of them.

Kimmel spoke on the evening of September 15, five days after Kirk’s assassination and four days after Robinson was identified. Even before his identification, it had been known earlier that bullet casings said, “Hey, fascist, CATCH!” and the lyrics to “Ciao Bella,” a known anti-fascist song, were well publicized as such in the shooting aftermath.

Since Kirk was known as a MAGA conservative (a/k/a “fascist” in the progressive lexicon), the shooter’s motives were clearly anti-MAGA. By Saturday, September 13, it was widely reported by CNN and other outlets that Robinson had been increasingly political and hated Kirk. An unidentified coworker of Robinson’s was reported as describing Robinson as “not too fond of Trump or Charlie.” It was also reported that Robinson’s family had characterized him as becoming pro “trans rights” while dating a trans-identifying male roommate.

By the evening of September 15, Kimmel and his production staff had enjoyed a luxurious amount of time, including the entire weekend, to fully digest the information largely developed by September 12. Kimmel, we now know, fully intended to focus his opening monologue on the Kirk assassination. He could have attempted some witty reprise of the otherwise anodyne “both sides” or “take down the temperature” platitudes, reminding all that violence is not an answer. But the smirking Kimmel had to let his young lefty audience know he was far cooler than that.

Kimmel knew that he had long since lost virtually all Trump supporters as viewers due to his relentless nastiness toward the President. So, he knew that what remained of his audience would gobble up uncritically any anti-MAGA diatribe he might offer.

Kimmel also knew that the country had just recently seen political assassination attempts by younger men who were overwhelmingly anti-conservative leftists.

Minnesota Senator Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was shot by a man with “No Kings” flyers in his car, who was disturbed that Hortman had voted with Republicans to narrowly exclude male adult illegals from Medicaid.

The young man arsonist who burned Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home (and would have beaten him with a hammer if he were home) was angry at Shapiro’s moderate pro-Israel, anti-Hamas stance.

A young man tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his anti-abortion decision. A young trans killer shot several schoolchildren in Minnesota. Of course, two men, one very young, tried to assassinate President Trump. These are just a few examples of our powder-keg political climate.

Certainly, men in this demographic, so easily stirred to violence, were part of Kimmel’s audience demographic, which, in the main, is strongly anti-MAGA.

So, we can infer that Kimmel once again sought to be the hero of the Left by his cynical snark passed off as cool wit. One suspects Kimmel thought that, if he could characterize the shooting in an anti-MAGA way, he could create a viral narrative that at once acquitted the Left and indicted MAGA. But despite the unambiguous information about Robinson, Kimmel and his producer knowingly decided upon a time-tested strategy: lying.

Here is Kimmel’s duly considered statement: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” He then added that Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death was like “a four-year-old mourning a goldfish.”

Kimmel made these statements knowing that this was anything but a MAGA shooter and, indeed, knew that Robinson strongly detested anything MAGA. So, Kimmel was intentionally lying to inflame hatred against a group of people who had just seen one of their opinion leaders assassinated. Kimmel knew that the general “MAGA” reaction in the prior five days had been sad and restrained and avoided any attempt to “score points,” other than, it must be added, some blunt, brief remarks from President Trump. In fact, Trump did not dwell on the shooting, pivoting to other subjects like the White House ballroom under construction. So on this sensitive subject, Kimmel accused Trump of both politicizing the shooting of his friend and not grieving about it enough.

In addition to objectively false statements, Kimmel deliberately encouraged a cold lack of sympathy for Kirk’s family while trying to stoke anti-MAGA flames, which he knew needed but little spark. Notably, the recent attempt to assassinate ICE agents featured bullet casings with messages inscribed. Copycat?

With Kimmel now back on the air, how did he defend himself? With rank dishonesty. His Wikipedia page, clearly edited by his office, stated disingenuously that when he spoke, he had not yet received the FBI’s recitation of Robinson’s background: “When Kimmel made this comment, the FBI had not mentioned the shooter Tyler Robinson’s ‘background, political leanings, or a possible motive…’” The page failed to mention that he had plenty of information otherwise, reported on virtually every internet news site. No, this defense of lack of background knowledge won’t wash.

Kimmel blamed “outrage stoked by social media influencers and right-wing media…” In other words, it was not his rank, dishonesty, and insensitivity that caused a negative reaction; it was …the right wing! Kimmel thereby implies that his remarks otherwise were perfectly fine.

His motives were pure, he tearfully recounted on his comeback show: “Nor was it my intention to blame any particular group.” Funny, it seemed like he had blamed MAGA, and if so, isn’t this a carefully calculated lie? He added, “I don’t think the shooter represented anyone.” But isn’t MAGA representation precisely what he had claimed? Does he show remorse that he is lying about what he had said?

He then said, “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.” Sorry, Jimmy, but that is precisely what you were doing.

And then Kimmel turned on Trump for wanting to fire him and his staff, losing their livelihood, “because he can’t take a joke.” Huh? Which is it: was Kimmel intending a joke, or was he not in any way “making light” of a death?

Kimmel had previously noted that his remarks needed no apology and were “grossly mischaracterized by a certain group of people.” Thus, the blame for his controversial comments, he was contending, should be shifted from him to those terrible MAGA people trying to distort them. In short, Kimmel stuck with his lies and doubled down on them in defense.

Many legacy media sites have tried indirectly to justify Kirk’s killing by calling him a “right-wing provocateur,” even though it was clear that Kirk sought to elicit cool, rational debate and not emotional and inflammatory reaction.

The type of “provocateur” who all decent people should denounce, and from whom an apology should be demanded, is exemplified by none other than Jimmy Kimmel, a cynical influencer who “stokes” hate and division.

By defending his original insensitive lies with more insensitive lies, the only rational conclusion is that there is no good defense to what he originally did and that he is not remorseful. By refusing to apologize and then lying some more, he compounded his earlier stomach-turning, dishonest nastiness.

We can only hope that Brendan Carr muzzles himself for a significant time and that, after full examination and consideration, Disney will banish this dishonest man from the airwaves.

John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism, and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.