The Monsters of Late Night: Jimmy Kimmel and His Wife, Molly McNearney

How to handle losing friends and family over politics

A letter from a reader, as follows:

I so look forward to your newsletters. I wish I could be a paying subscriber, but life did not turn out like I had planned. I just want to thank you for giving us hope through your experience, your revelations, your perspective and your insight. I am always looking for little nuggets in your writing to help me deal with and perhaps talk to my niece, who I helped raise and was very close to. She has moved away from her family to a blue state and rarely communicates with us. Suffering severely from TDS, she says it’s too painful to have us in her life.

You don’t need to respond to me. I’m sharing this in hopes that you might write sometime about how you have handled the losses of your loved ones, things you have told them, if you think it is even possible to lead them to the truth or make them question the Lie of the Left.

There are a lot of us out here.

First off, thank you. I understand times are tough. I’m glad that I can give something of worth to you anyway, and that I give you hope. Most of all, I’m glad that as someone from the Left, I can help ease a little of the pain of what I helped cause all those years ago when I voted Blue No Matter Who.

It is all too common a theme that runs through so many letters I receive, that many of you have lost friends or family over Trump, and my writing gives you hope that one day those loved ones will come back into their lives. Eventually, they probably will. When they do, make sure they understand that what they did was wrong.

There is a sickness on the Left, a disease. It’s worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome. It goes deeper than that. They believe they are doing their moral duty because “it’s about values.”

That is exactly what Molly McNearney, Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, explained recently on a podcast, a clip that has now gone viral. She freely admits that she cut off ties with her family after begging them not to vote for Trump. “It’s about values,” she says.

So what’s the answer, Molly? Firing squad? Gulags? Never speak to your family again because of how they voted?

“My husband is out there fighting Trump every day,” she says. Fighting Trump? On Late Night? No, Molly. Your husband is not fighting Trump. He’s dishing out the nightly dose of hate that people like you so badly crave. He’s preaching to the choir.

Here they are, the happy couple. They’ve amassed a fortune, $50 million, so says the internet. Aren’t they the lucky ones? Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel dumps on half the country that will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes, every single night, and Molly bats her eyes adoringly.

We haven’t seen the people with all of the power shun an entire group of people and claim it was about “values” since the Jim Crow South. Values, they said, and they convinced themselves that it was true. They condemn an entire group of people in ways that justify everything that comes next. How could they live with themselves otherwise?

This is casual dehumanization, and they think nothing of it. They have a media ecosystem that backs up what they believe, so why should they think any differently?

Jimmy Kimmel, the head of the beast, has attempted to justify his unending obsession with trashing Trump and mocking his supporters by calling Trump the villain in the 1980s high school movie. We know that isn’t true because we know Jimmy’s the bully.

I remember when I realized we weren’t the good guys anymore. As a Democrat, I watched all of the memes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and I thought, How could anyone be so mean? Of course, I was only seeing a small part of what represented the Right, which is all most people on the Left see.

After Trump won, I watched our side do the same thing and then justify it by calling out Trump’s apparent evils. But it wasn’t only Trump. Remember how Michelle Wolf mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders?

That was a turning point for me. I’d never seen my side so openly hostile and cruel. When I criticized her on Facebook, my friends didn’t just dismiss it. They supported it. I realized a line had been crossed and there was no going back, at least for me.

Eventually, I knew I couldn’t keep going along with it, and I’d have to start speaking out. I pleaded with them not to become the monsters. I told them they had to humanize the other half of the country, but even that meant so many of my friends put up a wall, and that was that.

I don’t just hear from so many of you on this Substack. I hear from people on TikTok, too. Here is a video I made that went viral, or at least, it did really well compared to how my videos usually do. It has over 20K views because what I said resonated with so many of them: don’t lose friends and family over politics. Excuse the casual vibe, it’s sort of the TikTok way.

How do I handle those friends I’ve lost? I’m lucky in that my immediate family can tolerate me as long as we don’t talk politics. My best friends - I have only two or three - are also in that same camp.

There isn’t much you can do except understand why they’ve gotten to this point. It’s to do with the media, their social media feedback loops, and how hard it is to lose power when you’re used to having all of it.

The other day, I saw a woman wearing a NO Kings t-shirt walking through my very white, very liberal town. I didn’t give her a dirty look or try to rip the shirt off or tell her she’s a bad person. I actually felt pity for her and her limited worldview.

Maybe that’s the answer. Not to become so consumed by hate that you become the monster. That’s what Nietzsche thought, anyway.

The more you can hold onto your humanity, the better. That’s how I see it. I can’t change them, that’s for sure. I can’t make them do what I did, come out of the feedback loop and the media bubble to find out what is true and what isn’t. Since they won’t do that, they will be like Molly McNearney. Angry all the time.

Just be glad you’re not one of them.