They Came For Jimmy Kimmel

As a fascist authoritarian, Trump has always wanted to silence the comedians who are his most effective critics.

I was going to write about Kash Patel’s testimony around the Epstein files, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead we need to discuss what happened yesterday with comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended indefinitely by Disney/ABC.

Photo couresty of Bloomberg

The first thing to understand, without a shadow of a doubt, is that this is not about Charlie Kirk or what Kimmel said about him. This is about Donald Trump wanting to get Kimmel off the air, his cronies doing all they could to make that happen, and a cowardly capitulation, yet again, by a major media company.

Today I want to present the throughline of this narrative clearly and succinctly. Then I want to zoom out and speak about why Trump has targeted comedians like Colbert and Kimmel and who is likely next. Finally, I want to talk about how we respond to this latest blatant attack upon free speech and the march toward authoritarianism.

“NEXT to go”

Trump has wanted Kimmel off the air for some time. He even said so explicitly back in July, following Stephen Colbert’s cancellation.

“The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes,” Trump posted.

The White House wants us to believe Kimmel was fired for insensitive comments about Charlie Kirk. But that narrative has already been debunked.

Per Rolling Stone, senior executives who gathered yesterday at ABC yesterday didn’t think Kimmel had said anything wrong—and he hadn’t. But threats from the White House cowed them into submission:

In the hours leading up to the decision to pull Kimmel, two sources familiar with the matter say, senior executives at ABC, its owner Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources say, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.

“They were pissing themselves all day,” one ABC insider tells Rolling Stone.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr had issued that threat explicitly on Benny Johnson’s podcast yesterday. Carr warned, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He urged broadcasters to declare, “We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore” because of possible license revocation.

In short, “Nice network there, would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

ABC affiliates Nexstar and Sinclair, which both need FCC approval for mergers, answered Carr by saying they would be preempting Kimmel on all their local stations. Then Bob Iger of Disney, which owns ABC, made the call to suspend Kimmel.

Johnson celebrated Kimmel’s cancellation, making no secret that it was a joint and possibly even planned effort, saying in part:

[W]e ended Jimmy Kimmel’s career today.

We had FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on the show to announce investigations into ABC and Disney…

Trump also celebrated the news, but he wasn’t satisfied. He’s now set his sights on Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

This was not about Charlie Kirk

As discussed above, many executives at ABC did not believe that Jimmy Kimmel had said anything wrong. For the record, here is the part of Kimmel’s monologue from earlier this week that the right claimed required him to be cancelled.

It’s important to hear the whole statement in context. First, Kimmel doesn’t say anything that others were not also saying, including the governor of Utah who was disappointed that Kirk’s killer was not an immigrant from a foreign country but was rather “one of us.”

It’s also important to hear that, during that same minute or so, Kimmel had also mocked Trump for displaying zero remorse or grief for Kirk and instead pivoting immediately to talk about his ballroom. That made Trump look very bad to Kirk’s base.

For wider context, in a different monologue from Tuesday night, a day before Kimmel was cancelled, he also skewered Trump on a number of issues. Trump was likely furious at Kimmel for, among other things

• showing footage of a giant banner unfurled in the U.K. displaying Trump and Epstein together;

• pointing out the man who helped plan Trump’s trip to the U.K. actually wrote one of the letters in the Epstein birthday book;

• calling Trump a “little tattletale” after Trump threatened to tell on a reporter to the Australian prime minister;

• mocking his “gift” of an extravagant ballroom to the American people that we’ll never get to be inside;

• saying his $15 billion defamation suit was like a number Kimmel’s children make up;

• playing footage of Eric Trump saying Charlie Kirk was like a second son to Trump (even though Eric is the second son);

• calling out the fact that Kash Patel had no credible explanation for why Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison; and

• running a humorous fake digital ad about Patel selling pages of the Epstein files.

You can enjoy the whole monologue here, as it may be his final one.

If Trump was listening or watching clips of it, he likely badly wanted the mocking and the criticism to stop. This is especially true for anything mentioning Jeffrey Epstein while Trump was on his state visit in the U.K.

It’s likely to my mind that the White House sicced the FCC Chair on Disney and decided to exploit the Kirk killing to justify silencing Kimmel.

The authoritarian playbook: silence the comedians

Authoritarians come for comedians because they are singularly effective at revealing such leaders to be fundamentally weak or absurd. Fascists require a populace that is cowed and fearful, so satire and comedy that generates laughter and derision cannot be long tolerated.

As Stanford professor of political science and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted, Vladimir Putin also came for comedians back in 2002. He silenced a popular puppet that regularly mocked him on television.

“In the early Putin years, banning comedy shows was also a thing,” Prof. McFaul wrote. “Kukli on NTV was one of the most famous comedy shows to get cancelled in 2002. Putin apologists at the time called it a ‘business decision.’”

The satirist who lampooned Putin as a “poison dwarf” eventually had to flee the country in fear of his life.

Trump isn’t in a position, at least not yet, to threaten the lives of comedians who mock him and his cronies. Instead he’s using the full power of the federal government to go after their platforms and exploiting the weakness of corporate leaders to achieve his ends.

How should we the public respond?

Christopher Armitage of the Existential Republic wrote a useful piece today on what we can each do, as consumers and as citizens, in response to Disney’s capitulation. You can read the full piece here. But the primary point is, corporations only understand when their money is at risk.

That means we aren’t powerless. We can do at least four things to hurt them where it matters:

1. Cancel Disney+ and tell them why.

2. Call/email/mail those companies to complain.

3. Screenshot and tag advertisers asking why they support censorship.

4. Share this playbook with others.

Beyond direct action, there remains a larger strategic question. By shifting the national conversation away from Kirk and toward the censorship of Trump’s opponents, the right may have badly miscalculated. In a comment to Heather Cox Richardson’s post on social media, I wrote these words early this morning, and I want to share them here.

There often comes a point where those in power become cocky and badly overreach, misreading the room and handing the opposition an opportunity. When voices from all sides of the political spectrum come together in condemnation, we know we have hit such a point.

Wading into the culture wars with full-on censorship and cancellations will backfire. Comedians like Kimmel and Colbert are beloved figures who speak hard truths in entertaining, accessible ways to millions. The fascist right has nothing like their star power, and it has no sense of irony or comedy, which is why it is so threatened by such figures.

Our job as citizens is to keep the truth tellers in the spotlight, to amplify their voices, to support whatever independent platforms they go to, and to push back against censorship by talking with our families, friends and colleagues about the importance of free speech—something Charlie Kirk even claimed to champion.

Politics is downstream of culture. What that means is that those who best speak to culture sway our politics the most. I can tell you, the “manosphere” isn’t going to like this either. Neither will the South Park guys or other outspoken political commentators. Uplift their responses across your own networks in the coming days.

The right has managed to take a national conversation about Kirk’s murder and turn it into one about authoritarian censorship. That’s a huge unforced error, and we should exploit it.

It is now up to us to seize upon that overreach and make the Trump regime pay a big price for it.

The national conversation—which they have just changed on all of us through their own actions—is now about authoritarian attacks on free speech. It is not just about Charlie Kirk’s murder, but also the cynical exploitation of his death as a transparently false justification for censorship.