My guess is that longtime Beltway politico Matthew Dowd still doesn’t get what all the fuss was about that cost him his MSNBC gig. In his mind, he was just doing what MSNBC pundits are paid to do: take a breaking tragedy, blame it on a conservative, and connect dots that don’t exist.
When the news first broke yesterday morning that Charlie Kirk had been shot, Dowd followed anchor Katy Tur’s lead that Kirk was a “divisive” and “polarizing” figure and even floated the possibility Kirk might have been shot by his own supporters. Then Dowd went further, suggesting Kirk was a victim of the very hatred he allegedly sowed — implying the activist had been served his just desserts.
Here’s Dowd in his own words:
I emphasize what you just emphasized, we don’t know any full details of this. We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, so we have no idea about this. But following up with what was just said, he’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech, or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts, lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.
Dowd’s comments instantly went viral in the conservative media universe, but they also offended people who had no particular love for Kirk’s politics. Kirk was only 31, married, and left behind two young children — facts that made Dowd’s speculation grotesque to many Americans. MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler clearly felt the heat, because at 4:01 p.m. she issued a statement apologizing for Dowd’s remarks, calling them “inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable.”
“We apologize for (Dowd’s) statements, as has he,” Kutler said. “There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.”
Three hours later, Deadline broke the story that Dowd was no longer with MSNBC. The entertainment trade didn’t clarify whether he was fired or had resigned, but the swiftness of the exit spoke for itself.
For all his supposed political savvy, Dowd was clueless about how beloved Kirk was among a big swath of Americans. They didn’t see him as “divisive” but as someone willing to stand up to the political and media elites. Obama, Biden, and Gavin Newsom — hardly Kirk’s ideological allies — all had the political good sense to issue swift statements condemning the violence. Even Maria Shriver, Dowd’s longtime girlfriend (reportedly on the cusp of marrying him), felt compelled to issue a statement distancing herself from her paramour. When your own fiancée publicly throws you under the bus, you know you’ve miscalculated.
Dowd too offered up the obligatory apology — the insincere kind that always begins with “my thoughts and prayers are with the family…” before pivoting to damage control. He insisted he never intended to blame Kirk for the attack, but the walk-back rang hollow. A political leopard doesn’t change his spots, especially not in a matter of hours.
Predictably, readers of The Daily Beast — a trashy leftist publication with minimal credibility – supported Dowd in the comments section about his ousting, framing him as a martyr censored for expressing a controversial opinion.
“Matthew Dowd is right. Speech has impact. If Charlie Kirk stopped his inflammatory speech he wouldn’t have been targeted. I for one do not mourn Kirk’s death,” posted cyndeefuller48.
Notably, Dowd’s speculation that Kirk might have been shot by a celebratory supporter had no basis in fact. Kirk made his name debating college students, not encouraging his followers to fire guns in the air. Dowd wanted to paint Kirk’s base as armed yahoos, and in doing so he deliberately peddled a false narrative.
Peddling false narratives happens to be MSNBC’s stock-in-trade. The network’s business model is to keep its audience — median age 71 — in a permanent state of agitation. It’s practically elder-abuse infotainment. Depression, high blood pressure, and anxiety plague older Americans, and MSNBC keeps its aging audience hooked by convincing them that its anchors and commentators are all that’s standing in the way of Donald Trump staging a coup and forever destroying democracy. That helps explain the endless commercials for supplements, insurance, and other products catering to seniors.
Rachel Maddow, the network’s $25 million-a-year star, once beat a $10 million defamation lawsuit from One America News when a judge ruled that a “reasonable viewer” would know she was just offering opinion – not facts — when she called conservative OAN “paid Russian propaganda.”
Former anchor Joy Reid, a race baiting former political consultant, declared after a Texas judge blocked an FDA abortion pill that she “couldn’t imagine anything closer to slavery.” She also floated that Trump’s injuries in an assassination attempt might have been caused by flying glass and has previously compared the president to Hitler, as have many other commentators on the left.
This is standard MSNBC practice: anyone outside its worldview gets branded with a slur — “racist,” “sexist,” “Islamophobic,” “alt-right,” or the network’s favorite catch-all, “Trump supporter.” These labels aren’t journalism; they’re dog whistles, signals to viewers that the person being discussed is irredeemably bad.
Katy Tur and Dowd both sneered that Kirk was “polarizing” and “divisive.” Yet Kirk built a following by showing up on hostile college campuses, calmly debating students who often couldn’t string a coherent argument together.
The accompanying clip shows Kirk patiently dismantling a student’s claim that Israel allowed Hamas to massacre its citizens as a pretext for wiping out Gaza — a conspiracy theory so vile and absurd and worthy of Alex Jones. Kirk engaged without raising his voice, while the student eventually sputtered and fell silent. Dowd’s caricature of Kirk as a dangerous hate-peddler didn’t square with the reality his followers saw.
Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s politics, his assassination unleashed a torrent of anger among Americans fed up with corporate media’s sneering put-downs, groupthink mandates, and cancel-culture double standards.
MSNBC has fueled much of that anger.
Jeffrey Carter, an accomplished investor who helped transform the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a University of Chicago alum, wrote on Substack that Kirk’s murder possibly marked the beginning of an ominous trend. He noted attempts on Trump’s life, polls showing nearly half of respondents said they’d be okay with Elon Musk being assassinated, and concluded: “I fear that there is a central plan to pick off different Republicans in order to make them fearful and stop speaking out.”
Carter made his letter to the president of his alma mater public, demanding Dowd’s resignation from his fellowship at the school’s Institute of Politics. That’s the boomerang of cancel culture: for years progressives weaponized it against conservatives, but Dowd may have sparked one of the first high-profile cases where the blowback runs the other way.
Dowd wasn’t fired for violating MSNBC’s norms. He was fired for exposing them. He did what MSNBC does every night — demonize conservatives — but he picked a target whose death made the demonization indefensible, and whose followers were strong and angry enough to force a backlash.
And here’s a valuable lesson for Trump haters: conservative media outlets like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit produce little original journalism. Their lifeblood is aggregating clips from MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times — and other mainstream media outlets they and their readers despise.
MSNBC fancies itself Trump’s greatest antagonist. In reality, it’s his secret weapon. No one has done more to keep Trump’s base angry, engaged, and growing than MSNBC. Every monologue about “fascism,” every Hitler comparison, every hysterical chyron gets clipped, amplified, and turned into recruiting material in conservative media for the very movement MSNBC claims to oppose. Fox News regularly doubles MSNBC’s primetime viewership, and handily beats the network on YouTube.
So take a bow, Rebecca Kutler, Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the gang over at MSNBC. For all your smug and condescending talk about defending democracy, you’ve done more than anyone to keep Trump’s movement alive. Trump haters should despise MSNBC, because MSNBC is the fuel that helps keeps Trumpism burning.