Jimmy Kimmel and the Canceling of Culture

Yesterday, ABC announced it had suspended the late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely. Their reasoning was because of Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks regarding the recent assassination of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk.

Before we go any further, here’s the comment:

"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."

While the motives of Kirk’s assassin remain nebulous, the MAGA movement’s rush to Kirk’s death is true. The Vice President of the United States went on Kirk’s podcast and said:

"Of course, we have to make sure that the killer is brought to justice," Vance said. "And importantly, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years and, I believe, is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin's bullet."

So Jimmy Kimmel said a true thing—they were using Kirk’s death to score political points—and that put him in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration, specifically FCC chair Brendan Carr. Carr has made no secret of his desire to use his power to censor those he believes speak ill of the administration. Furthermore, he has leverage since Nexstar, one of the biggest owners of U.S. TV stations, is dropping Kimmel with an eye on FCC approval for its $6.2 billion merger with Tenga.

For corporations, this is how they’re going to “play ball” with the Trump Administration. We already saw this play out earlier this year when CBS canceled The Late Show. The stated reasoning was because of the show’s declining value, but it’s clear that firing Stephen Colbert, a comedian critical of Trump, was a sweetener for an FCC that cares more about the President’s feelings than the law, business, or anything else a normal FCC chair would care about when addressing mergers. We’ve also seen this in news departments with settlements over winnable cases that amount to little more than bribes. CBS paid up, and so did ABC News. Now they throw a late-night comedian to the wolves and shrug it off because late-night TV is dying anyway.

The problem with seeing this all as the cost of doing business is that the wolf is never satisfied, and it’s always angry. We don’t need to take the administration’s stated concerns seriously because there’s no consistency. Sending troops into Washington, D.C. isn’t about crime. Throwing tariffs at other countries isn’t about economic growth. And going after Kimmel isn’t because they just loved Charlie Kirk so much. We can use Occam’s Razor here, and our incredibly thin-skinned President doesn’t like people making fun of him, and he likes that he can use the state to punish those whom he deems insufficiently obsequious. There’s always something to be mad about and some thin pretext to address the real concern.

To think this stops at Kimmel or Colbert is ridiculous, and corporations thinking that if they can tear away enough of their programming to appease the administration will only lead them into a black hole of gray slop. Sinclair, another larger owner of TV stations, also pulled Kimmel and stated they will air a tribute to Charlie Kirk instead. I’m not sure how many people are going to tune into that, but it doesn’t really matter if your goal is to only create programming approved by the state. Nothing has to compete on the grounds of quality. You just have to be entertaining in the way that appeases a 79-year-old man who thinks 300 million people died from drugs last year.

That’s not a pluralistic society, and the right-wing doesn’t want us to live in one. For all of Ezra Klein’s bleating that we have to live with one another, a large part of the right-wing project is a refusal to live with anyone who doesn’t conform to their small boundaries. They don’t want to live with trans people. They don’t want to live with Muslim people. They don’t want to live with people of color in positions of power. They don’t want to live with a Cracker Barrel logo that is different than a previous Cracker Barrel logo. They have a specific way of viewing the world—one that puts white, cisgendered, heterosexual men at the top by virtue of being white, cisgendered, and heterosexual—and then what follows is who can win the favor of dear leader.

For executives, they see removing Kimmel as an easy business decision. You sacrifice a show that’s part of a dying trend to secure money and favor. But because our current right wing thrives on relentless attacks against countless perceived foes, you’re going to have to throw someone overboard tomorrow and the day after and the day after. Network sitcoms are also struggling. Does this mean ABC needs to cancel Abbott Elementary? Hollywood liberals are insufficiently mourning Charlie Kirk. Maybe it’s time to take the Oscars off the air? I don’t like using the slippery slope argument, but we can see the Administration’s machinations clearly from their lawsuits against ABC News and CBS News to the attacks on Colbert and Kimmel. There’s no way this stops at Jimmy Kimmel.

For the rest of us, we should be clear-eyed on what’s happening. For years now, right-wingers, reactionary centrists, and edgelord comedians have whined about “cancel culture.” But that has never been about living in a pluralist society where we all listen to each other and are allowed to speak our peace. What we’re seeing crystallized with the Kimmel suspension is what has been true for years for these so-called defenders of free speech. For them, free speech means that they can say whatever they want, and you can say whatever they want. That’s not a thriving culture, but one that’s dictated from the top down by the least compassionate, least creative people our society has to offer.