Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension from ABC feels less like censorship than comeuppance. The comedian who once built his reputation on gleeful political incorrectness now finds himself hoisted by…

WASHINGTON — During the Monday monologue that spawned this kerfuffle, late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel stepped in it when he said, “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this…

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Nine years ago, way back in 2016, my husband and I started renting out the basement apartment of our house as a short-term rental on Airbnb. We live in a college town and figured we'd get some guests during football game weekends and graduations. We didn't realize at the time how many people come to our town to visit their college kids or check out the school, so we were pleasantly surprised by how regularly we were booked.In 2019, we moved into the house next door and now rent out both floors of the old house as separate units. We love being Airbnb hosts and have had a very successful run of it, with almost 1,000 5-star reviews, Superhost status, and lots of repeat guests. Being regular guests haas helped make us good Airbnb hosts.Photo credit: CanvaPart of the secret of our success? We don't charge a cleaning fee or make guests do check-out chores. In fact, we find both things rather loathsome. What makes us good hosts is that we've been Airbnb guests for years. As a family of five that travels a lot, we've found far more value in short-term rentals than in hotels over the years. We love having a kitchen, living room, and bedrooms and feeling like we have a "home" while traveling. We even spent a nomadic year staying at short-term rentals for a month at a time.When you've experienced dozens of Airbnbs as a guest, you learn what guests appreciate and what they don't. You see what's annoying and unnecessary and what's to be expected in comparison to a hotel. We started taking mental notes long before we started our own rental about what we would want to do and not do if we ever had one and have implemented those things now that we do. Chasing Tom And Jerry GIF by MaxGiphyAs guests, we know the pain of the cleaning fee, so we don't charge one.It helps that my husband has a flexible schedule and grew up helping with his parents' janitorial service, so most of the time he cleans the apartments himself. We could charge a cleaning fee for his time and labor, but even if we were paying for outside cleaners, we still wouldn't put a separate fee onto guest bookings. It makes far more sense to us to just wrap the cleaning fee into the price.From a host's perspective, the one-night stay is where the cleaning fee question hits the hardest. Whether someone stays one night or 10 nights, the cleaning cost is the same. But spreading the cost over 10 nights is a very different beast than adding it to one night, especially from a guest's perspective. On the host side, if we had to pay cleaners without passing that fee onto guests, we've barely make anything on one-night stays. But on the guest side, a $100 a night stay suddenly jumping to $150 or more because a cleaning fee was added is painful, and often a dealbreaker. You can see the conundrum. — (@) The way we see it, and as other Airbnb hosts have found, wrapping cleaning costs into the base price comes out in the wash over time, as long as you have some longer-term stays mixed in with the one-nighters. And it's a much better experience for the guest not to get hit with sticker shock on the "final cost" screen, which is already eye-popping when the platform's service fees and local taxes are added on.(I will say, this may only ring true for smaller units. If you're renting a huge home, cleaning costs are going to be higher just because it takes longer to clean. But I still don't think the full cost should be passed onto guests as a separate fee.) Asking guests to stip the sheets saves almost no time and costs a lot in goodwill.Photo credit: CanvaThere's no reason at all to ask guests to do check-out choresAs for check-out chores—asking guests to do things like start laundry, sweep the floor, take out the trash, etc.—those have never made sense to us. Hosts should have enough switch-out linens that laundry doesn't have to be started prior to checking out, and none of those chores save enough time for the cleaning people to make it worth asking guests to do it. I can see taking out trash if there wasn't going to be another guest for a while, but usually you'd want to clean right away after a stay anyway just in case it does get booked last minute.The only thing we ask guests to do is to start the dishwasher if they have dirty dishes (as a guest, that seems like a logical and reasonable request), lock the door, and have a safe trip home. Don't need to pull the sheets. Don't need to take out any garbage or recycling. Those things don't take that long, but that's just as much a reason not to ask guests to do it. Annoying your guests by asking them to do something extra—especially if they're already paying a cleaning fee—isn't worth the tiny bit of time it might save the cleaning people. Most guests are try to leave the place as they found it, standard cleaning routine aside. Photo credit: CanvaThis approach works very well, because 95% of guests leave the space neat and tidy anyway.In almost 10 years, I can count on one hand how many problems we've had with guests leaving a significant mess. That's been a pleasant surprise, but I think part of the reason is that guests are simply reciprocating the respect and consideration we show them by not making them pay extra fees or do chores on their way out. We're going to have to clean it anyway, so putting work on them is unnecessarily burdensome, even if it's something that doesn't take long. People recognize that. To be fair, it probably helps that we aren't some big real estate tycoon buying up a bunch of apartments and turning them into short-term rentals run by impersonal management companies. People's complaints about how short-term rentals impact local housing economies are legitimate. Our situation is more aligned with the original "sharing economy" model, renting out our home to guests who come through town. And in a small college town with a large university, there often aren't enough hotel rooms during busy weekends anyway, so it's been a bit of a win-win all around.I think us being in close proximity, having personal communication with our guests (but also leaving them their privacy), and not charging or asking anything extra of them makes them want to be respectful guests. From our perspective, both as guests and hosts, cleaning fees and check-out chores simply aren't worth their cost.This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

Both former Vice President Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro launched invectives at one another this week, adding to the squabbling that is consuming the Democratic Party in the aftermath of their electoral defeat. Reviews of Kamala Harris’s new book set to be released next week, 107 Days, have reported that she uses the book to paint Shapiro as a power-hungry egomaniac who had the gall to muse on the art he might display at the vice president’s residence when he was in D.C. to be interviewed for the role. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 160: Kamala Harris Promotes How She Failed in 107 Days) In the book, Harris writes that Shapiro was more interested in how the vice presidency would help him than in how he could help her win. Moreover, she writes that she believed Shapiro could not handle occupying the second-tier spot underneath her. Shapiro, she said, “would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” Harris even writes that she had to call Shapiro out when he was acting during his vice presidential interview as if they would be equal partners if he were chosen. She proudly writes that she told him: “A vice president is not a co-president.” Harris even said the “vibes” in the interview were not good. Kamala’s confession that she didn’t think Shapiro could handle being No. 2 vindicates the sources who came out last year to say Shapiro had been passed over because Harris feared he would steal the “spotlight.” Shapiro fired back in no less aggressive form. In a podcast appearance, he said Harris would “have to answer” for her failure to speak to the American people about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. “[S]he’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly,” Shapiro told sports commentator Stephen A. Smith. Shapiro stated that he, in contrast to Harris, hadn’t been “in the room” but that he had still been “very vocal” with Biden and “extremely vocal” with Biden’s staff with “concerns about his fitness to be able to run for another term.” Shapiro said, “I was direct with them. I told them my concerns.” And now, a key member of the Democratic Party, one fated to face her in the 2028 Democratic primary, is calling her out on it, in no uncertain terms, and demanding answers. The bigger deal here is Shapiro’s decision to drop the bomb that Kamala can’t defuse. Harris knew precisely how cognitively incapacitated the president was, and yet she kept silent for the sake of her own ambition, without regard for the fact that her silence endangered the country, if not Western civilization. And now, a key member of the Democratic Party, one fated to face her in the 2028 Democratic primary, is calling her out on it, in no uncertain terms, and demanding answers. (RELATED: The Cancerous Lies of the Corporate Joe Biden) The strange thing about this feud is that it should never have been this way. Harris should obviously have picked Shapiro to be her running mate over the doddering Tim Walz. Shapiro would have guaranteed victory in the most important state and had the seemingly perfect profile, as a charismatic and popular governor who fared electorally well in more conservative areas. Yet Harris evidently felt threatened by Shapiro’s confidence and was afraid he would show her up. Ironically, this is exactly what she condemns Joe Biden for. In 107 Days, she faults Biden and his staff for fearing that her success as vice president would make the president look weak. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she writes. “None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well…. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.” (RELATED: Kamala and Joe’s Longstanding Feud Reaches Breaking Point) In 107 Days, Harris begins to make signs of half-hearted regret over what happened with Biden. But she does nothing to really answer the question Shapiro is asking. “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in her book. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” She went on to say that Biden’s decision to run for reelection “should have been more than a personal decision.” She continued: “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.” One of her excuses for why she didn’t tell Biden to drop out is that Biden wouldn’t have listened to her because it would sound “self-serving” coming from her. She writes, “And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she writes. Of course, Harris is playing a game here. She’s pretending the question is whether she should have, either privately or publicly, called on Biden not to run or told him to drop out. But the sin is not Democrats’ failure to permanently occupy the White House. The sin is them covering up the fact that the president had totally lost it by nearly every cognitive measure. The sin is the fact that they coached him through every word he said from his Botox-altered mouth and every step he made with his shuffling gait — and all pretended together like he was a safe person to have in charge in the event of war with China. Democrats now acknowledge Biden shouldn’t have run for a second term, but the difference between a first term and a second term is a moment. If Biden could be president the morning of January 20, why couldn’t he be president the afternoon of January 20? Notably, when Shapiro said Harris was going to “have to answer” for her failure to speak up, he wasn’t talking about Democrats’ decision to get behind Biden’s reelection bid. He was talking about the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline, as he made his answer in response to Smith’s question of how Americans should feel “when we hear something that we suspected but wasn’t acknowledged by politicians who were looking for our support, and then we find out later we were right, and they should have spoken up, and they should have shown more courage.” Of course, underneath all of this is the question of whether Harris snubbed Shapiro because he is Jewish and has a record of support for Israel. Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told the New York Post last year that, had Shapiro been picked, “The ticket would have been too pro-Israel. Harris doesn’t need a battle over Israel-Gaza.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson similarly concluded, “[S]he was reluctant to put a vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Jewish heritage because they’re having a split in the Democratic Party. They have a pro-Palestinian, in some cases pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party…. Sadly for Josh Shapiro, because of his heritage, I think that is the reason he was overlooked.” Kamala Harris has answered why she was too scared to tell Biden not to run. But she hasn’t given an answer for why she hid Biden’s cognitive decline. Unfortunately for her, her claims that Biden hadn’t lost it aren’t exactly believable. Maybe Josh Shapiro will hold her feet to the fire during the primary. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: The Unspeakable Evil of Christopher Cooprider What on Earth Is Going on at the University of Wisconsin’s Medical School?

Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension from ABC feels less like censorship than comeuppance. The comedian who once built his reputation on gleeful political incorrectness now finds himself hoisted by his own progressive petard, pulled off air after suggesting Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer was a Trump supporter rather than what he actually appears to be — a far-left fanatic with a taste for blood. Don’t confuse this for another cancel culture moment. It’s the predictable end of a peculiar American transformation. (RELATED: Pull ABC’s Broadcast License? After the Last Few Days? Hell, Yes!) Kimmel began as comedy’s carnival barker, hosting The Man Show with a beer-guzzling, breast-ogling sensibility that would make a frat house wince. Back then, he was authentically awful. A puerile provocateur who never pretended to possess deeper wisdom. His comedy was crude but consistent, offensive but honest about its own emptiness. Then something shifted. Maybe it was Hollywood’s gravitational pull, or maybe Kimmel simply spotted his opportunity at the peak of cancel culture. He needed an off-ramp from his frat-boy past, and he took it. The transformation was jarring. It was like watching the class clown demand to be valedictorian. One day he was celebrating “Juggies,” the next, he was lecturing America about healthcare while choking up over his son’s surgery. The contrast with his former co-host, Adam Carolla, couldn’t be clearer. Carolla stayed what he always was: a blue-collar contrarian with steady convictions and no taste for respectability politics. Love or hate his rants, he never betrayed himself. He is still the guy fixing cars and griping about traffic, just with a louder microphone. He built a podcast empire on the very authenticity Kimmel abandoned. Carolla may be cranky, repetitive, even reactionary. But he has remained recognizable. The same man, only amplified. Kimmel, by contrast, became something worse. A reformed sinner desperate to flaunt his salvation. Critics often compare Kimmel’s trajectory to Howard Stern’s evolution from shock jock to celebrity interviewer. But this lazy parallel misses crucial differences. Stern may be insufferable in his current incarnation — a disheveled, wild-haired loudmouth turned pampered recluse holding therapy sessions with A-listers. But his slide never felt quite so scripted. The angry young man simply aged into an anxious middle-aged one. His obsessions remained intact even as the scenery changed. Where Stern is trapped in his own head, Kimmel is trapped by his own hypocrisy. Stern’s insufferability comes from self-absorption, not self-righteousness. He is addicted to dissecting his own psyche and, by extension, everyone else’s. He is pathologically narcissistic and neurotically needy. His interviews, however long-winded and soul-destroying, spring from a grating but genuine curiosity about human behavior. That makes him more of a bore than a preacher. Kimmel offers no such consistency. His sanctimony is selective, his sermons opportunistic. Where Stern is trapped in his own head, Kimmel is trapped by his own hypocrisy. When he cries about gun violence or healthcare, audiences can’t tell if it’s raw emotion or a rehearsed performance. Call me cynical, but I’d bet on the latter. The uncertainty is poisonous to comedy, which requires either complete honesty or acknowledged artifice. This fakery is why Kimmel’s political moments land so awkwardly. He wants applause for moral courage while hiding behind the excuse of “I’m just a comedian.” He longs for the freedom to offend and the authority to preach, but in reaching for both, he achieves neither. Medieval court jesters survived by speaking truth to power while hiding behind humor. Modern late-night hosts do the opposite: they speak power to truth while pretending to be outsiders. Kimmel’s suspension shows just how flimsy that pose really is. His remarks about Kirk’s alleged killer captured everything wrong with his act. They were political guesses dressed up as moral clarity, delivered with the smug confidence of a man who mistakes a TV platform for actual wisdom. The tragedy is not that Kimmel was suspended. The tragedy is that he turned into the kind of figure who deserved suspension. The boisterous beer bro at least knew his limitations. The virtue-signaling host apparently doesn’t. And what comes next? In truth, there is no triumphant TV return waiting for him. This is not the age of Johnny Carson or Jay Leno. It is the age of TikTok, livestreams, and podcasts. The networks no longer command the culture. Kimmel might try to claw back relevance by launching his own show on YouTube or a podcast like Carolla’s. But who, I ask, would tune in? Carolla’s listeners show up because he’s still Carolla. Stern’s devotees stay because he’s still, in some fashion, Stern. Kimmel is no longer Kimmel. He is a hack hybrid — half-activist, half-entertainer, full fraud. Only the most deluded could mistake that for a draw. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: The Age of Spiritual Warfare Is Here. Will You Rise or Fall? The Shameless Exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s Murder The Godfather of Global Disorder

Trading Mr. Rogers’ cardigan for Hamas controversy, Ms. Rachel — the YouTube darling of preschoolers whose “Songs for Littles” has garnered more than 14.7 million subscribers — has sparked backlash over what some have claimed to be her promotion of propaganda supportive of Hamas. Platforming Motaz Azaiza, a Palestinian journalist who has been considered by Israeli media as “one of the most identifiable voices with Hamas in the digital arena,” Ms. Rachel posted a short video of herself singing about the “letter M” with “my friend Motaz.” Describing himself as a “genocide survivor,” Azaiza has called for “Palestinian resistance” after the October 7 vicious attack on Jews in Southern Israel. Last spring, Ms. Rachel shared content that suggested that Israel was the aggressor in the War, showing photos of emaciated children without noting that, in some cases, these children were suffering from genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. Last Spring, the StopAntisemitism organization appealed to the American Justice Department to ask U. S. officials to open an investigation into whether Ms. Rachel is serving as a paid propaganda agent. The StopAntisemitism website declares that “Accurso spreads evil propaganda against the State of Israel to more than 20 million followers through multiple accounts, more than the entire population of Jews and Israelis in the world.” Earlier this year, Ms. Rachel ignored the Israeli hostages and Jewish children impacted by the October 7 attack and raised $50,000 through Cameo for Gaza’s children, along with the children of Sudan and Ukraine. Later, she posted on Instagram that Israel had violated the Geneva Convention by halting aid when Hamas broke the ceasefire. The truth is that Israel has overseen the transfer of more than 2 million tons of aid into Gaza on more than 107,000 trucks since the War began after October 7. Ms. Rachel has also used her “Songs for Littles” YouTube channel to convince children and their parents of Israel’s malign complicity in hurting children. While much of her pro-Palestinian rhetoric has been posted on Instagram, Ms. Rachel has also used her “Songs for Littles” YouTube channel to convince children and their parents of Israel’s malign complicity in hurting children. In this heartbreaking video, Ms. Rachel sings one of her viewers’ favorite “songs for littles” with Rahaf, a 3-year-old double amputee from Gaza who had been evacuated for medical treatment by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. In an interview with PBS, Ms. Rachel said that the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund reached out to her when they first saw her advocacy for Gaza and asked her to help. “They told me Rahaf loved the show, and then they said, Would you want to meet her and have her on the show? And I said I’d love to … I’m so honored that I could be helpful or I could provide a moment of relief or joy in the midst of genocide.” Ms. Rachel shared that Rahaf’s father and two baby brothers are still in Gaza, but they have family FaceTime calls with them. But according to BuzzFeed, the family avoids eating during the FaceTime calls because “the family has so little food” in Gaza. Echoing Hamas’s talking points and relying on data from Hamas’s health ministry, Ms. Rachel has shared that 14,000-15,000 children had been murdered by Israel in Gaza since October 7. These figures have been debunked by Hamas itself, as reported in the Jerusalem Post, which claimed that 70 percent of all of those killed were combat-aged men, not women or children. All of this is far from the kind and gentle — and apolitical — Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Refusing to use his platform to promote his politics, Mr. Rogers preached love and acceptance in a period of history marked by turbulent politics, racial tension, and the Vietnam War. Mr. Rogers never tried to tell children that the United States was the aggressor in the War in Vietnam — he simply never spoke of it. Everyone was welcome in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — including Black children and adults, as well as children with handicaps. As one writer recently observed: “His show tackled grief, divorce, race issues and disability by asking kids what they thought instead of speaking for them.” Mr. Rogers taught kindness — not ideology.  Ms. Rachel’s platforming Hamas sympathizers breaks that trust. Ms. Rachel’s support for Gaza — at the expense of Israel — is just the latest political entanglement to draw backlash to her YouTube channel. In June 2024, Ms. Rachel celebrated Pride Month on her “Songs for Littles” show, posting a video on the first day of Pride Month. “Happy Pride to all of our wonderful families and friends.” And the year before, some parents expressed anger and frustration around her featuring Jules Hoffman, a nonbinary co-star with a nose ring and an ambiguous gender presentation. It is doubtful that Fred Rogers would ever feature a nonbinary co-star like Jules Hoffman or celebrate Pride Month on his Neighborhood of Make-Believe. He knew it would be confusing for toddlers — just as he would have rejected Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library. Mr. Rogers invited children to embrace their God-given identity and to always remember that they were loved “just the way they are.” He even had a song celebrating that called: “I Like You As You Are.” Ms. Rachel’s platform reflects a dramatic departure from the message of love, kindness, and self-acceptance that Mr. Rogers promoted — it is one that calls into question Ms. Rachel’s fitness as a shaper of young minds. READ MORE from Anne Hendershott: Furries Are Having a Dangerous Cultural Moment Speech, Spite, and the Oxford Union’s Shame Illinois Law Mandates On-Campus Abortion Services