The former free speech warriors of the right have now become the cancel culture warriors in what’s becoming a new distopian media landscapre in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assasination last week.
Wednesday night, ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel would be yanked off the air “indefinitely” after comments the late-night host made this past Monday in reference to Charlie Kirk. However, Kimmel didn’t go on his show to mock Kirk or essentially make light of the situation surrounding his death. First, in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, Kimmel took to social media to offer up his condolences to Kirk’s family posting the following on Instagram:
What the Trump White House and his media arm in the FCC are pissed about are specifically these remarks:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said, suggesting the alleged killer could be a right-winger.
Of course, right-wingers will get on here and bloviate about how ABC is a “private company” and can essentially do what they want with Jimmy Kimmel and his late-night show. The problem is that all of this appears to be premeditated by the government, particularly FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who went on Benny Johnson’s podcast and suggested that broadcasters pull or preempt “garbage” content to avoid the “possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC.”
The first local broadcast to bend the knee was Nexstar, one of the largest local broadcast station groups, which on Wednesday said it would preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” beginning that night over the host’s comments about Kirk.
But it wasn’t just Carr who was planning Kimmel’s takedown in the days after Kirk’s death. Donald Trump, back in early August, suggested that Kimmel would be the “next to go” after it was announced that CBS would cancel Stephen Colbert’s show in May of 2026.
Well, it hasn’t worked. And it hasn’t worked, really, for a long time, and I would say pretty much from the beginning. Colbert has no talent. I mean, I could take anybody here. I could go outside in the beautiful streets and pick a couple of people that do just as well or better. They’d get higher ratings than he did. He’s got no talent.
Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next. They’re gonna be going. I hear they’re gonna be going. I don’t know, but I would imagine because they’d get– you know, Colbert has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon.
It should be obvious to anyone that Kimmel’s show being taken off the air indefinitely due to what seems to be clear government pressure is morphing into a constitutional crisis—something conservatives are always quick to revert to (the Constitution) whenever they play the victim to the rest of society. This is especially true when some homophobe refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple or a fascist in the White House incites his cult members into a riot to stop an election.