Was Jimmy Kimmel Censored?

"Charlie Kirk was the antithesis of Jimmy Kimmel."

By The Brownstone Institute

Charlie Kirk was the antithesis of Jimmy Kimmel. Kirk was tremendously influential with the youth while Kimmel’s sanctimony is reserved for a dwindling audience of the blue-state elderly among coastal elites. Kirk sought good-faith debate while Kimmel relied on monologues of smears. Kirk was fundamentally decent, while Kimmel is callous and cruel.

This week’s headlines reveal another difference between the men: the reaction to Kirk’s assassination is a grassroots movement, while the fury resulting from Kimmel’s suspension is the result of an entitled bureaucracy accustomed to an unaccountable monopoly on the public’s resources.

Corporate media and its kept activists have howled in response to Kimmel’s suspension, but none of its leaders offer an answer to a simple question: why should the First Amendment protect an ideologue’s right to make millions from lies on government-subsidized public airwaves, in defiance of market trends, but not independent Americans’ right to dissent from predictable media orthodoxy?

The litany of attacks on free expression is familiar. We’ve been exposing this and fighting it for five years with mountains of documents drawn from FOIA and court discovery. We’ve exposed the methods, funding, cut-outs, and algorithms. We have all the receipts, tens of thousands of pages of them.

New York Attorney General Letitia James used the weight of the state to demolish VDare, Peter Brimelow’s website dedicated to immigration. The Biden Administration coerced Big Tech into suppressing critics of the regime’s Covid policies.

Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice sentenced Douglas Mackey to prison for lampooning Hillary Clinton. Climate scientists bankrupted journalist Mark Steyn for mocking them. President Biden weaponized international legal systems against Pavel Durov and Julian Assange for facilitating the free flow of information.

From Peter Brimelow to Tucker Carlson to Bobby Kennedy to Mark Steyn to Alex Jones, the victims of the war on free expression were all independent voices who committed no crime other than deviating from the tenets of the deep state. That heresy led a parade of Democratic figures, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, law professors, and left-wing media to call for the removal of First Amendment protections that obstruct their agendas.

“The First Amendment stands as a major roadblock for us right now,” John Kerry remarked last year ahead of the presidential election. During the pandemic response, the Democratic Party attempted to obliterate that “roadblock.”

During oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said to the plaintiffs: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods..” After all, the public needs “accurate information in the context of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.”

White House advisor Andy Slavitt lobbied Amazon to ban politically unfavorable books and demanded Facebook remove memes ridiculing the Covid vaccines. Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty coerced Big Tech companies to remove “mal-information,” meaning true content that cut against official narratives. In April 2021, he strong-armed Google into ramping up its censorship operations and told executives that his concerns were “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH.”

“Are you guys f***ing serious?” Flaherty asked Facebook after the company failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” At other times, Flaherty was more direct. “Please remove this account immediately,” he told Twitter about a Biden family parody account. The company compiled within an hour.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote a letter to Amazon threatening that selling Bobby Kennedy’s books were “unethical, unacceptable, and potentially unlawful.”

The Department of Homeland Security, through a subsidiary called CISA, colluded with social media platforms and NGOs to censor Americans through a process called “switchboarding.” CISA then coordinated with left-wing censorship apparati like Media Matters, the Atlantic Council, and the Stanford Internet Observatory to suppress unapproved reports challenging the efficacy of masking, lockdowns, and vaccines.

CISA classified posts criticizing lockdown measures and mask mandates as consistent with “pro-Kremlin media.” And they justified their censorship by claiming that “Anti-migrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, racist, and xenophobic tropes have been at the forefront of Covid-19 related conspiracies.”

The history of this censorship apparatus is discussed in great detail in Brownstone Institute’s Covid Response at Five Years: The First Amendment Versus the U.S. Security State.

Perhaps most ironically, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that Fox News remove Tucker Carlson from the air in 2023, telling CNN, “We not only have a right to tell Rupert Murdoch and Fox what to do, but an obligation.” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) used his perch in the House of Representatives to insist that Fox stop airing Carlson, deeming his reporting to be “lies” and “propaganda.”

But the cognitive dissonance appears lost on these figures as they bemoan the loss of Jimmy Kimmel from late night television.

Unlike cable outlets, ABC enjoys the government subsidy of “public airwaves” and therefore has an obligation to ensure programming is in the “public interest.” Moreover, it now appears that the decision to fire Kimmel was independent of the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission’s threat.

Undoubtedly, Kimmel’s late-night routine loses the parent corporation, Disney, tens of millions of dollars per year. Further, Sinclair, the owner of local affiliate stations of ABC, swiftly condemned Kimmel’s lie, demanded an apology, and announced that it would air a tribute to Kirk in the time slot normally reserved for Kimmel’s show.

Reports now reveal that before the suspension, Kimmel planned to go on air and continue to blame Trump supporters for the Kirk assassination. Advertisers and affiliates, including executives at Sinclair and Nextar, called to voice their concerns. Disney CEO Bob Iger and another executive then decided to suspend Kimmel after 66 of 200 affiliate stations said they would not air Kimmel’s next episode, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Nonetheless, leaders of the ruling elite now wave the banner of free speech, insisting that Kimmel is a “modern Tom Paine,” joined in this maudlin display by other late-night hosts who bemoan their declining market share.

But their insincerity is too easily discernible after years of censorship and smears. People like David French of the New York Times blessed the censorship of five years, including even that which deplatformed the sitting president, but have suddenly converted into free speech absolutists. They want everyone to pretend not to notice that the censors of just a few years ago have become the free-speech advocates of today.

Note, however, that this is selective. They demand the right of Kimmel to preside over a money-losing show without a substantial audience while remaining silent as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn daily remove content from Brownstone Institute.

Their real source of anger is the loss of yet another bureaucratic entitlement program, reminiscent of their hysterics amid DOGE cuts earlier this year. From the public airwaves to USAID to DEI contracts, the deep state and its media mouthpieces have enjoyed a long-standing structural advantage thanks to the largess of the taxpayer.

Now, the primal roar of legacy media echoes throughout the left wing, co-opting the slogan of free expression, as the Trump administration threatens to deal that cultural hegemony its final blow.

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