ABC’s late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel got the hook this past week by Disney/ABC. An “indefinite preemption” in TV lingo.
Here’s what happened:
During his Monday night monologue, Kimmel said of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, “the MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid…as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
For a guy who’s paid to tell jokes for a living, that wasn’t close to being one. Who asked for Jimmy Kimmel’s political commentary?
The next night, incredulously, he doubled down, saying, “Many in MAGA-land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Again, who asked him?
The next day, the Federal Communications Commission said Disney was now in danger of losing its local station licenses.
I don’t know if FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said that at the behest of his boss, or to score browny points with President Trump. Or maybe he was just shooting from the lip. I just don’t know.
But after Carr’s comments, the Kimmel quarrel grew even larger when ABC’s two big affiliate groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, told Disney it was pulling Kimmel’s show off its stations.
After all that, Kimmel’s bosses at Disney in Burbank yanked him off the air.
Whew!
The lefties went nuts. For them, it was another insidious example of intimidation by Donald Trump and his toadies forcing the major media companies to pay him obeisance.
Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer was at his alliterative best over the Kimmel affair. Schumer erupted, calling it “despicable, disgusting and against democratic values. It doesn’t matter if you agree with Kimmel or not,” Schumer said, “he has the right to free speech.”
Well, Kimmel absolutely has a right to free speech on social media, in an op-ed or on a soap box at a street corner. But Disney signed him to a contract to host a TV show and to make people laugh, and if the company deemed he violated his contract, it had every right to suspend him.
If you’re a righty, Kimmel’s punishment is part of a much needed course correction of the cancel culture that intimidated anyone who said anything it deemed offensive. Remember when micro-aggressions could get you fired?
This is a moment they’ve been waiting for and they’ve trotted out all the how abouts, the people who were backlashed and who fell victim to the cancel culture inquisition when the Dems were in power. How about people like comedian Roseanne Barr and how about people like commentator Megyn Kelly?
How about people like Sharon Osbourne, who was thrown into the cancel culture wood chipper, when, on her CBS talk show, she defended British host Piers Morgan from racism accusations for criticizing the then-Princess of Sussex Meghan Markle.
CBS suspended Osbourne and launched one of its vaunted “internal reviews.”
Osbourne quit before the review was completed, but she would have been fired because the CBS review found “Sharon’s behavior toward her co-hosts…did not align with (CBS’s) values for a respectful workplace.”
In the cancel culture run by the left, when that “v” word was invoked, you knew you were dead meat. You were indicted and put on trial by the woke mob in its kangaroo court, where even the whiff of criticism of its cockeyed ideology of social, racial and gender equity, was a capital offense.
For years under Democrat rule, that cancel culture was nurtured and cultivated, and it grew like a stinkweed inside the workplace, inside government, inside our schools and inside just about every place else.
The leaders of America’s media companies were totally complicit and kowtowed to the liberals. They enthusiastically bought into that culture, turbocharged by the muscle they invested in their DEI departments. They were in lockstep with Democrat presidents and politicians.
When the lefties ran the cancel culture it was their religion.
It was all too real and spectacularly hurtful. Now, with the righties pulling a similar shtick, the libs are like the boy who cried wolf.
The lefties were wrong and now, so are the righties.
A proper cancel culture course correction would be to de-weaponize it, not re-weaponized it under a different political philosophy. It’s coercive, it’s unjust and it’s anti-American.
Power dynamics can change after an election and unless the cancel culture is cancelled now and for good, when the Dems regain the upper hand they will make it even more invasive, more hostile, more aggressive.
Let’s cancel it now!
As for Jimmy Kimmel, my advice for him, if he gets his job back, is to stick to the jokes, and to dump the commentary. Make me laugh before I go to bed, don’t make me cringe.