In a recent monologue on Jimmy Kimmel livethe host spoke at length about a handful of his employees fainting in front of Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Kimmel laughed as he read texts from staffers about how attractive they found Magnione, then played news footage of a Utah man who drove his car through a dealership’s front window automobile after he refused to reimburse him for what he considered to be a lemon. Kimmel noted that the Utah man, lacking chiseled abs and a defined jawline, hasn’t gotten the same reaction from his employees or anyone else currently dealing with Luigi’s fumes. The joke about its writers’ penchant for attractive people seemed very secondary to the larger point: Any CEO who profits from health care is an enemy who deserves no sympathy if someone takes him down.
On the one hand, it’s not surprising that Kimmel is more interested in signaling to his viewers that he advocates good left-wing views than in being genuinely funny. Most late-night talk show hosts have been doing this for years, ever since Jon Stewart perfected the joke-posing-as-comedy advocacy model on his first broadcast with The daily show. On the other hand, it is a little strange that Kimmel would assert himself as a bold defender of the moral order, given his early career on screen is laden with bits of immorality – serial blackface and sexual exploitation pranks, to name just a few examples.
As a former creep turned left-wing scold, Kimmel is similar to reformed shock jock Howard Stern, who has also spent recent years lashing out at Support for Trump Or COVID-skeptic
conservatives. For decades, Stern never met a degenerate he didn’t want to introduce or a person with special needs he didn’t treat like a circus freak. His brand was doing everything to generate ratings. Now he says he doesn’t care if his left-defined support for purity and truth cost him half his audience.
Why would these men take the risk of drawing attention to their sordid past by setting themselves up as the new decency police? Why not entrust this task to another court jester, who may have one or two skeletons in his closet but who doesn’t have dozens scattered around his living room? I think for both men the answer is clear: This is what happens when a prodigal son doesn’t know the way home.
In 2017, Kimmel’s son is born with a congenital heart defect. The same year, Stern endured
a cancer scare. Over the next few years, both men took increasingly political and caustic turns, their versions of the wayward son coming to his senses after lusting after pig droppings. Just as the parable’s main character realized the folly of using his father’s treasure to buy the approval of fickle and evil friends, Kimmel and Stern seem to have realized that building a career out of women in bikinis and d Lazy insinuations brought them nothing lasting or honorable. Like the prodigal son, both men wanted to find a way to fill their bellies with an inheritance better than that offered to them by prostitutes and drunkards. But unlike the prodigal son, Kimmel and Stern didn’t know the way.
The prodigal son planned to go back to his father and say to him, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son, let me be one of your servants.” » But both Kimmel and Stern found themselves stumbling around, taking up every left-wing cause they could find, abortion, universal health care, sexism, Asset, Asset,
And more Trumpand saying, “I support the right thing!” Once I was not worthy of it, but now I am! Look how willing I am to sacrifice an audience for the cause! Look how I use my platform to speak out against bad things! Now I have done something significant that entitles me to be honored. Please let me remember this and not my transgressions from the early 2000s.”
While it would be easy to condemn these men for such ugly and self-righteous behavior, sadness is perhaps a better response than anger. Woke religion is brutal. Instead of one straight path back to the arms of God, he offers you a thousand winding and twisting roads, all leading nowhere in particular, roads that you are told could eventually lead to absolution, but which are much more likely to lead to more. condemnation if the Holy Crowd decides that it has more to gain from devouring you than from embracing you. Follow them long enough and you’ll find yourself struggling, running through the desert, not so subtly celebrating the murder of an innocent man or laughing at the deaths of opponents of the COVID vaccine.
They would find a much better way in Christ. The journey home brought the prodigal son back into the arms of a father who immediately clothed him in the robe that erased his sins from existence. In the same way, the blood of Christ gave Kimmel and Stern the right to emerge from their years of filth and humiliation and into the arms of a God who will no longer remember their sins, ‘a God who will not force them to show it. how much they hate some neighbors before He gives them His love. The blood of Christ has paved the way for the God who will not change His mind about them halfway home, a God who is already waiting to embrace them, a God who is not content for them to be servants but who wants them like sons. Imagine what joy they would find if they left the chaos of woke religion and found the true path home.