Ashamed

Jimmy Kimmel's firing makes me ashamed to be an American

By Drew Magary

In a vacuum, ABC’s sudden suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” won’t change my life in any meaningful way. Kimmel operated in late night, a genre whose cultural influence died off many years ago. And I myself never watched Kimmel’s namesake broadcast, which has run on ABC without incident for 22 years. I’m sure it’s a perfectly decent show, but it was never one that I felt the urgent need to tune into. I’m glad it existed, but I lived without it.

The rest of this country will now also have to do likewise. ABC, owned by Disney, took Kimmel off the air indefinitely (and almost certainly forever) yesterday. This move did not happen in a vacuum. Quite the contrary. In fact, Kimmel’s demise was quickly engineered by a number of factors after the host said this during his monologue on Monday night

Some context here. Extreme right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk was killed in cold blood last week. The man suspected of shooting Kirk is Tyler Robinson, who recently turned himself in to the authorities. Kirk didn’t deserve to be felled by an assassin’s bullet — no one does — but Jimmy Kimmel never stated, nor implied, as much. In fact, Kimmel went out of his way on Friday night to distance himself from any sort of macabre gloating over Kirk’s murder. (“Some people are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand.”)

Unless you consider it a remarkable feat of “conservative activism” to declare the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to be “a huge mistake,” or to claim that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people,” there was very little to admire about Kirk’s professional accomplishments. He was an unremarkable commentator who trafficked largely in ugly, spiteful rhetoric. Kirk’s dedication to his particular craft naturally endeared him greatly to President Trump. Where Kimmel went wrong was in the follow-up episode when he went after Kirk’s allies, the President included, who immediately, and recklessly, attempted to portray the politics of the shooter, which are still nebulous, as violently left wing.

“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.”

The petty grievance machine went into overdrive the second those true words escaped from Kimmel’s lips. After Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chief, heard Kimmel’s remarks, he went on the podcast of another Trump ally, Benny Johnson, to issue the following warning:

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, we can do this the easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The not-so-implicit threat here was that Carr would revoke ABC’s broadcasting license, which would cost Disney billions of dollars. Follow the money even further, and you’ll find Disney isn’t the only company invested in ABC’s fortunes. Two companies own 66 local ABC affiliates across the country. One of them is Sinclair, whose penchant for forcing local news anchors to recite scripted right-wing propaganda was documented extensively by my former Deadspin colleague Tim Burke seven years ago. The other is Nexstar, which also leans right and currently has a $6.2 billion consolidation deal awaiting formal approval by Carr’s FCC. Both companies wanted Kimmel gone from the air, and ABC helped oblige them. 

This comes in the wake of CBS canceling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” when that network’s parent company, Paramount, was also awaiting FCC approval on a merger with Skydance Media. Play ball and you get your consolidation. Make any trouble and you’ll get put out of business.

That’s reality as it stands right now, and well into the future. In the wake of Kimmel’s ouster, our President has set his eyes on a clean sweep, and it’s smart money to bet that he’ll get it.

So you see, this isn’t really about some joke that Jimmy Kimmel made. It’s not even about Charlie Kirk. It is — predictably, infuriatingly, exhaustingly — about our awful president whose every diseased musing has infiltrated every aspect of American life for nearly a decade now. With the bureaucratic powers of the federal government at his disposal, Trump has now commenced the process of booting all dissenters off the airwaves while remaking the entirety of American media in the MAGA image. Not only has Trump succeeded thus far, but he’s done so at such a remarkable speed that I fully expect Seth Meyers to be homeless by sundown. Once that happens, our miserable president will move on to making all of us miserable in some other way, and some other way after that, and on and on until there’s nothing good or truthful left.

Throughout Trump’s ruinous second term, I have done a fairly effective job keeping my head on straight and getting on with my life. Last night, I felt as if that ability had been forcibly taken from me. I didn’t realize I needed Jimmy Kimmel to prosper this badly, and I’ll wager you didn’t either. He was harmless in the aggregate: a professional comedian doing routine professional comedian’s work. But because he dared to attract the Eye of Sauron, he’s now exiled.

I see no reason why you and I won’t be next on the list, because well-resourced opposition is all but nonexistent. All this country needs is one leader of industry, just one, to tell this administration to go f—k itself. To date, not a single one of them has. Not even Disney chair Bob Iger, whose company has willingly defied MAGA persecution in years past. Iger is the most powerful man in Hollywood, and Trump still found a way to cow him anyway.

All of this makes me want to vomit. It leaves me quivering with equal parts hopelessness and aggravation, and it makes me want to scream out questions that I already know the answers to. Doesn’t anyone in this country have a goddamn spine anymore? (No.) Aren’t the alpha predators at the top of our economic food chain as tired of this s—t as I am? (No.) Don’t they have enough money already? (No.) Will avenging the ghost of Charlie Kirk solve any of this country’s problems? (No.) And where the f—k are DEMOCRATS on all this? (peacefully asleep under their 500-thread bed linens). 

Every question I ask makes me feel bilious, and every answer makes me feel worse. I hope all of these people end up in a Hell that’s worse than the one they’re constructing right in front of us. I don’t just feel embarrassed to be an American in the wake of Kimmel’s firing, I actively dislike being American because of it. I wish I was from f—king Norway or something. Did you know that Sinclair will air an hourlong tribute to Kirk in place of Kimmel’s show on Friday night? What will those 60 minutes entail, screenshots of tweets? I f—king hate all of this.

Because Trump has ruled over American culture for so long now that I understand, innately, that no one in his MAGA coalition will stop until all of us are as miserable as they are. The war for truth is over, and the truth has lost by a resounding margin. I’d make a sly joke about it, but what reason is there to laugh anymore?