Jimmy Kimmel recently stated that his show lost 30 percent of its Republican viewers over his politically charged statements on healthcare and gun control and still claims that he would “do it again in a heartbeat.”
“As a talk show host, that’s not ideal,” he said on a CBS News Sunday Morning interview.
However, despite the loss of Republican viewership, Kimmel received the highest-rated and most-watched week since the show’s debut in the first week of October. He also received praise from those on the left who agreed with him on his political talking points, including Bill Carter of CNN Money who declared Kimmel “America’s Conscience.”
Carter criticized those on the right for condemning Kimmel’s healthcare and gun control messages on social media after the late night host nearly lost his son and the Las Vegas massacre happened.
“Welcome to politics in the Trump era,” Carter said.
While those on the left continue to praise Kimmel’s political messages, conservatives commentators, such as Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire, see Kimmel’s messages as only adding to the political divide in the country.
Shapiro delivered a video message taking offense to Kimmel’s seeming proposition that conservative lawmakers and pro-gun advocates don’t care about the victims who died from criminal shootings.
In response to Kimmel’s suggestion that American lawmakers and pro-Second Amendment citizens continue to allow mass shootings to happen, Shapiro handedly laid into the talk show host:
You want to know why the country is not unified? It’s because of stuff like this.
It’s not because we disagree on policy. We’ve been disagreeing about policy forever. It’s because there are certain people in the American public discourse who feel it necessary to impute bad motives to people who disagree and that’s what Kimmel’s doing here.
Doesn’t matter that you were fervently praying for the victims, doesn’t matter that you were donating your time or your blood. None of that matters if you disagree with Jimmy Kimmel, what you’ve done today is insufficient. You must pay. You will burn in the fiery bowels of Jimmy Kimmel’s hell. Just gross.
Shapiro also stated:
Jimmy Kimmel should be asked to provide the evidence for his suppositions rather than the evidence for his emotions.
In light of Kimmel losing such a large chunk of Republican viewership, he and all other public figures might want to seriously take Shapiro’s evidence-based approach into consideration. However, considering Kimmel's suggestion that losing viewers who criticize his political viewpoints is not a "good riddance," but simply a "riddance," the future of factually-grounded political dialogue looks bleak.