ABC drops Jimmy Kimmel over mild Charlie Kirk joke

The "free speech" guys are now really into canceling shows that hurt their feelings.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, RFK Jr. appeared on a right-wing network called Real America’s Voice to memorialize his late pal, who Kennedy says advised him through his big transition into Trump-world during the 2024 presidential campaign. “I met a spiritual soulmate,” said the Health Secretary. “The thing that united us was his total commitment to free speech.”

This is how we are being told to remember Kirk: as a devout man of God and charismatic conservative who, as Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times, “was practicing politics the right way” because he was willing to drive around and debate college kids on issues like guns and abortion and affirmative action to convert their hearts and minds. It doesn’t matter how fiercely we disagree about politics, the Kleins of the world tell us, as long as we respect each other’s right to peacefully express those beliefs.

And that sounds lovely, in theory. But as many a better writer than I have pointed out this week, including Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair today, Kirk’s politics “amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.” Kirk was openly white supremacist; he celebrated the man who brutally attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer; he said our annual guns deaths are “worth” the privilege of owning guns; he said abortion is worse than the Holocaust. And even as conservatives cast him as the “13th disciple” and ultimate warrior free speech, anyone who so much as quotes Kirk’s own words or describes his views accurately in the wake of his “political assassination” is being fired, expelled, and arrested in his name.

The latest head to roll is Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show ABC pulled off the air “indefinitely” tonight over a brief joke Kimmel made about Kirk in his Monday night monologue. “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel had said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

That was…it. Kimmel mildly suggested that MAGA is more interested in pinning the shooter’s politics on trans people and “the left” than in actually grieving Kirk. It’s not a particularly funny joke, to be fair, but it’s the kind of passing jab that late-night comedy hosts are supposed to make about politics. That’s the whole job. And Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, absolutely crashed out over it, calling Kimmel’s remark “the sickest conduct possible” on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show today. Carr then threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcasting licenses if they refused to fire Kimmel, sounding like a third-rate movie goon. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said.

Of course ABC caved and pulled the show, because right-wing oligarchs own and control nearly the entire mainstream media at this point, and offending Trump in even the slightest way hurts their bottom line.

The Kimmel cancelation comes after CBS’s Colbert show cancelation earlier this month, because CBS is now pivoting hard to the right. And earlier this week, the Bezos-owned Washington Post fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah, for posting one of Kirk’s more hideous quotes about Black women lacking the “brain processing power” to be taken seriously and speaking out about “white inaction” on gun violence. Attiah is literally an opinion writer, mind you—she was being paid to express her opinions. And the Post, which covers and serves a 43-percent Black city, now has zero remaining Black opinion writers.

Meanwhile, university students in Texas are getting expelled and even arrested for “mocking” Kirk’s death, the Pentagon has been firing employees who say anything critical of Kirk on social media, and Marco Rubio is threatening to revoke the visas of non-U.S. citizens who “celebrate” Kirk’s murder. What it means to “mock” or “celebrate” or “criticize” in these cases is, of course, subject and nebulous by design. We are simply meant to praise and grieve the racist podcaster guy or face severe consequences, as RFK’s spiritual free speech soulmate would have wanted.