The Bloody Shirt Of Jimmy Kimmel

The Obama network is desperate to change the subject from Charlie Kirk's assassin

Grok AI

The assassination of John F. Kennedy by a confirmed communist resulted in decades of ridiculous fables assigning blame to the CIA and a murky conspiracy of Vietnam warmongers. Leftists could not accept that it was one of their ideological own who pulled the trigger. Prominent leftists in the entertainment world, most notably Oliver Stone, have propagated these fables to disconnect Lee Harvey Oswald’s committed communist ideology from the bullets that killed the president.

History does not really repeat. It does rhyme, however, and Jimmy Kimmel is the latest example of this gnostic cult phenomenon. Today, a former president, the entire Democratic Party, and the hand-wringing remnants of the old liberal order are all deeply, deeply concerned that Kimmel has been silenced for his political views. They are dressing him up as a martyr and waving his bloody shirt, an American political tradition from the dark days after the Civil War.

Charlie Kirk’s blood was not enough for them. They want more.

“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 and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” - Jimmy Kimmel

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Bob Iger and Dana Walden made the call to freeze production of Kimmel’s show. Neither of them is a Donald Trump enthusiast. Neither of them recieved a phone call from the White House. Instead, “multiple ABC station owners held calls with senior Disney leadership expressing their concern” over Kimmel’s remarks Monday evening, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The station owners were likely emboldened by remarks from FCC chair Brendan Carr on The Benny Show podcast, an example of the new media that has boomed in the age of old media’s credibility imploding. As Chairman Carr noted, Kimmel’s remarks Monday clearly violate broadcast regulations on the public airwaves. He called on the station owners to take action, saying that the FCC would take action as needed or if called upon.

Altogether, Carr’s remarks were anodyne to anyone who is not committed to changing the subject from the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has long been pilloried by left wing hall monitor Media Matters For America as a horrible, no-good right wing corporate owner of local TV news affiliates, also happens to serve a lot of conservative markets. A company with conservative customers has conservative values? You don’t say.

Sinclair was not about to have Kimmel infuriating their viewers, many of whom would call stations, boycott advertisers, and take action by, get this, complaining to the FCC. Sinclair saw too much risk in Kimmel, so they told Disney they were pre-empting his program. So did Nexstar Media Group. Together, the two companies control about one-third of ABC affiliates. Kimmel was starting to disappear from television without a single government censor.

“Sinclair’s ABC stations will air a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk this Friday, during the Jimmy Kimmel Live! timeslot,” read a press release from Sinclair. “The special will also air across all Sinclair stations this weekend. In addition, Sinclair is offering the special to all ABC affiliates across the country.”

They added what amounts to a verdict: “Sinclair will not lift the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our stations until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability.” They want apologies and “meaningful” donations from Kimmel in Charlie Kirk’s memory. These would be pedestrian demands if they came from, say, Black Lives Matter.

“Regardless of ABC’s plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform.”

Nexstar also issued a press release saying the company “will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets” into “the forseeable future.”

According to THR, as the press releases were being prepared, ABC executives were having “multiple conversations” with Kimmel. “The execs wanted to know: How was Kimmel going to address the situation on Wednesday night’s show?” Emphasis added:

The answer was not satisfactory to management, sources say. Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. The second source says that the blowback was snowballing enough that had ABC not acted, Kimmel’s show would have been dark in a large swath of the country, even beyond the Sinclair and Nexstar territories (including in the Washington, D.C., metro area).

The situation became a safety issue as Disney employees saw their emails doxxed, per the first source — some even received death threats. Disney wanted Kimmel to address the situation in a way that “would take down the temperature,” but what he had planned was “going to fan the flames with the MAGA fan base,” the source says.

Of course, Team Kimmel denied that the alleged comedian wanted to make things worse. Instead, Team Kimmel says, Kimmel wanted to contend that his remarks were “being grossly mischaracterized by a certain group of people” and he “wasn’t kowtowing” to them. Which would have made things worse.

With showtime at hand, when “the studio audience was lined up outside but had not yet been brought in,” Iger and Walder chose the “last resort” of suspending production. The Wall Street Journal has corroborrated the details of the THR story. “Before his on-air appearance, Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, spoke to the host about his plan, the people said. After speaking to Kimmel, “she and other senior executives thought that the star’s approach could make the situation worse.”

“You can’t avoid ratings,” Chairman Carr told Fox News on Wednesday morning. “At the end of the day, the market is going to be undefeated.” The market was correcting Jimmy Kimmel. “And a lot of corporations, Disney and Comcast, they had frankly been subsidizing this content.” No one is actually silencing Kimmel. He is free to speak, “but if you’re going to have a license from the FCC, we expect you to broadly serve the public interest,” Carr said. Watch:

Along with Stephen Colbert, who was reportedly losing $40-50 million a year when his show was recently canceled, Kimmel is “facing the consequences of the choice that they made to appeal to a very narrow audience,” Carr said. In fact Jimmy Kimmel Live! averaged 2.4 million viewers in 2015 and averages 1.6 million in 2025, a steady decline of 37 percent over ten years.

Worse, the audience Kimmel lost was exactly the crowd that advertisers want, 25-54 year olds, the people who buy stuff. He “averaged nearly 1 million viewers among the critical demo in 2015 but plummeted to only 261,000 in 2025,” Fox News notes. “The ABC late-night program shed a staggering 72% of the audience that helps pay the bills over the past decade.” No wonder Sinclair and Nexstar wanted him off their air. No wonder the advertisers were calling ABC.

“The ratings for legacy late night shows have been in a free fall,” Carr tweeted yesterday with a clip of an appearance on CNBC. “And you now have local TV stations that no longer want to air that programming. They’re pushing back and making programming decisions that they believe are responsive to the local communities they serve.” Where is the lie?

Carr credited Trump for creating a “permission structure” that encourages station owners to complain about content that is not serving their communities. It is normal for Trump administration figures to praise Trump for everything that happens, whether or not he had a hand in it. However, Carr did not indicate White House responsibility for anything more than a signal. Under the law, “the check on the content is your local TV station,” not the FCC, Carr said.

Expect more news soon. “We’re not done yet,” Carr said, noting that “a disruptive moment” is bringing “changes in the media ecosystem” that has supported content like Jimmy Kimmel Live! at a loss. For years now, the red ink from late night shows has amounted to television networks “subsidizing” partisan speech, Carr says, turning entertainers away from “laugh lines to applause lines.”

Speaking to Scott Jennings yesterday, Carr indicated that another ABC program is under scrutiny. “I think it's worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these programs still qualify as bona fide news programs and are therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime which Congress put in place,” Carr said. The View is widely panned for anti-Trump and left wing bias, having featured 102 left-leaning guests and zero conservatives so far in 2025.

This is a market correction. So far, Chairman Carr has done nothing except signal the market to correct itself the way it was designed by Congress to self-correct. Everyone fussing over Jimmy Kimmel’s free speech rights is blaming Trump by proxy through Carr.

But Kimmel is free to tell stupid lies about Tyler Robinson, the killer of Charlie Kirk. He is only not free to do that on late night broadcast television — not by law, and not without consequences. All of America has been lectured for over a decade that free speech still has consequences, now here are some.

Some of us are old enough to remember when the Biden administration argued successfully that government censorship is not government censorship if it has been laundered through third parties. Americans were systematically silenced online in the name of public safety. The Wall Street Journal editorial board even warned in 2024 that “liberals may rue” the Supreme Court’s Murthy v. Missouri decision “in the future as much as conservatives do.”

This is the world that the liberal managers, the Democratic Party base, wanted. They howled about ‘norms’ and ‘civility’ and then denounced Donald Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. They held hearings about ‘misinformation’ and silenced alleged misinformation on social media.

The censorship regime went far beyond covid or vaccines or election tampering allegations. My own Twitter account was suspended 448 days because I offered someone $1 million for a transgender gerbil.

Welcome to the downside of normalizing abnormality

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Jimmy Kimmel was not being funny on Monday night. Humor is no longer the point for Kimmel. As Carr noted, Kimmel is chasing applause instead of laughs. The audience that applauds him is not the one that buys things. They are the high-engagement Democratic voters, people who need a dose of cope every day in the second Trump term.

Speak of the devil. Barack Obama is sticking up for his friend Jimmy. Barack and Michelle signed a lucrative deal with Netflix in 2019, but that deal was subject to a “downgrade” in August with an “overall-to-first-look extension” alongside Megan Markle’s. “In both cases, the exclusivity carried by their respective, splashy original deals has been removed,” writes Tony Maglio, the same journalist at THR reporting on Kimmel’s suspension.

It means that the Obamas underperformed so badly as streaming shows that Netflix is no longer paying them up front for content, let alone paying to promote that content. Instead, the new contract gives the company the right to look at any project the Obamas might propose and decide whether to take a pass on it (“first look”).

Barack calls the suspension of Kimmel “government coercion”. His cultural currency already devalued, the former president debases himself further by dressing Kimmel up in a bloody shirt and then waving it around like that. He also thinks that Karen Attiah, who fabricated a Charlie Kirk quote to charge him with racism, is a victim of silencing by the White House.

Last night, Black Lives Matter protesters turned out on the streets of Manhattan, some wearing masks, to shout “FUCK CHARLIE KIRK” because his life does not matter to them. The GOP midterm ads are writing themselves. Receiving the elite signals from the left, as well as the permission of hand-wringing liberals, they celebrated the elimination of one of their enemies. Which is fascism, right? I was repeatedly told that’s what fascism is.

Jimmy Kimmel was trying to stir up partisan animosity. Obama is trying to stir up partisan animosity. This false martyrdom is aimed at distracting and detracting from a shattering event that ought to have ended all denials about left-wing violence in America.

All the well-meaning people joining the chorus of concern are not actually helping to calm partisan tensions by enacting their precious principles. They are the idiot who always makes a stressed-out person worse by telling them to calm down. Stop telling people to calm down.

As I have said for a week now, Charlie Kirk was killed by a gnostic death cult in our midst. It walks in the streets shouting his name with F-bombs. Uprooting that death cult is essential to your survival, dear reader. The people celebrating Luigi Mangione outside the courthouse are going to celebrate your murder, too, whenever it is time. Antifa simps will make up lies about you after they murder you, and then Jimmy Kimmel will repeat those lies, and follow them up with ‘jokes’ aimed at still-living political opponents.

Then Barack Obama, who got his political start in the living room of ‘reformed’ domestic terrorist William Ayers, will defend Kimmel as a victim of political interference if advertisers and station owners revolt. He will wave Kimmel’s bloody shirt around and call it a political witch hunt because that is what he is good at. It is what his political machine has become since 2016.

Having lost more relevance than any former president in my lifetime, Obama has turned into a disappointment. Kimmel was funny, once, and he is a disappointment now, too. The market is correcting the value of their brands. Do not let anyone fool you into believing otherwise.

All of the progressive Democrats from a decade ago give me a sour taste, anymore, and I am not alone. The best thing they can do right now is stop trying to make this all about themselves. They are going to reap the whirlwind at this rate.