“Here we are again on another day of mourning in this country,” Jimmy Kimmel began Wednesday’s episode of his show, acknowledging the shooting that killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Kimmel spoke to an empty theater as he joined the chorus of late-night hosts to address the country’s deadliest mass shooting of the year.
Holding back tears, Kimmel quickly focused on “our leaders on the right—the Americans in Congress and at Fox News and these other outlets” who “warn us not to politicize this.” He continued, “Because they don’t want to speak about it. Because they know what they’ve done. And they know what they haven’t done. And they know that it’s indefensible. So they’d rather sweep this under the rug.”
Kimmel then implored Republican leaders in Texas including Greg Abbott, John Cornyn, and his frequent enemy Ted Cruz, to enact gun control laws. “If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on,” he said. “There was an armed guard in Buffalo. There was an armed guard in Parkland. There was an armed guard in Uvalde. They had armed guards. There were police officers armed on the scene, and these murders still happen.”
Speaking to Cruz directly, Kimmel added, “I don’t believe Ted Cruz doesn’t care about children. I refuse to believe he is unaffected by this. He’s a father. I bet he went to bed sick to his stomach last night. It’s easy to call someone a monster. But he’s not a monster—he is a human being. And some people might not like hearing me say that, but it’s true.”
“So here’s the thing I would like to say to Ted Cruz, the human being, and Governor Abbott, and everyone,” he continued. “It’s okay to admit you made a mistake. In fact, it’s not just okay. It’s necessary to admit you made a mistake when your mistake is killing the children in your state. It takes a big person to do something like that. It takes a brave person to do something like that. And do I think these men are brave people? No, I don’t. But man, I would love it if they surprised me.”
The host was visibly shaken when acknowledging that there had been 27 school shootings in our country this year alone. “How does this make sense to anyone?” he asked. “These are our children!” Kimmel pointed out that Republicans against gun reform are not the only people to blame. “This is now our fault,” he said. “Because we get angry, we demand action, we don’t get it, they wait it out, and we go back to the lives that we should rightfully be able to go back to. But you know who doesn’t forget it? The parents of the children at Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and now Robb Elementary School. They won’t forget it.”
After his monologue aired, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted that the ABC affiliate in Dallas had cut away from his speech and vowed to “find out” if it had been intentionally censored. A source told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that “the commercials aired and cut out part of the monologue because the 10 p.m. newscast ran long. It wasn’t just the monologue that received off-kilter cuts to commercials. An interview with Seth MacFarlane was chopped up into mangled segments between spots.”
This post originally ran on Vanity Fair.
