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PORTSIDE CULTURE

JIMMY KIMMEL’S CANCELLATION IS PEAK HYPOCRISY  
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Branko Marcetic
September 18, 2025
Jacobin
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_ After campaigning on ending censorship and cancel culture, Donald
Trump is making the list of things you're not allowed to say in
America longer and longer. ABC’s cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s
late night show signals that not even comedians are safe _

Last night, ABC announced it was pulling late night host Jimmy
Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” mere hours after
Donald Trump and his Federal Communications Commission chairman,
Brendan Carr, publicly threatened the network. , (Kevin Winter / Getty
Images)

 

"Republicans are the party with a sense of humor,” comedian Tony
Hinchcliffe said
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chuckling, at last year’s now-infamous Donald Trump rally at Madison
Square Garden.

So much for that. In Trump’s America, you are now not
only forbidden
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criticize a certain foreign country (Israel), post impolitely about
corporate executives, or have memes on your phone that mock the vice
president. You’re now apparently also not allowed to make jokes
about the president or his friends.

Last night, ABC announced it was abruptly pulling late night host
Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” mere hours after
Trump and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman,
Brendan Carr, publicly threatened
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Trump was already unhappy
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ABC’s news coverage of his administration, and Carr specifically
cited a part of the monologue that Kimmel, who has spent years getting
under the president’s skin, delivered this past Monday.

Trump loyalists will say Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air because of
the jokes he’s made. They say the real problem was he was _whipping
up __violence_
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was _spreading __misinformation_
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incidentally, the same excuses Democrats have used the past eight
years when they pushed tech companies to censor their users. Here is
Kimmel’s offending statement:

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.

Kimmel’s critics are correct that he was factually wrong here in
implying Kirk’s killer is MAGA: there is no indication yet he was a
Trump supporter and, in fact, no evidence
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far that he had any strong political views at all beyond being pro-gun
and pro-LGBTQ. But you’re allowed to be factually wrong and on TV:
most of the people on TV are, including on pro-Trump news networks —
which are, at least nominally, actual news reporting outfits and not
late night comedy shows, and which just straight-up lied
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their viewers the other day about a different political assassination,
telling them the Trump-voting
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advocate
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assassinated Minnesota’s Democratic House Speaker this past June was
actually a Democrat.

There’s also no indication yet that Kirk’s killer was a
“leftist” either by the way, or that he was radicalized
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less than one semester at Utah State University. That hasn’t stopped
Trump and every official, politician, and pundit associated with him
from repeatedly claiming both of these things as fact, including on
news networks loyal to the president. None of this has been met with
any outrage from those on the Right who have suddenly become sticklers
for the facts — because their outrage is plainly not motivated by
any concern of the sort but with finding an excuse to punish and
intimidate Trump’s critics and political opponents.

As absurd as it is to go after Kimmel, this is a serious escalation.
It doesn’t really matter how bland Kimmel’s run-of-the-mill
pro-Democrat, anti-Trump politics are, and it doesn’t really matter
if the inevitable legal challenge ends
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a court ruling that slaps down ABC and the FCC. The point here is to
create a general climate of fear, particularly among the news business
executives who have or might have business before the federal
government — as Nexstar, one of the major ABC affiliate station
owners whose criticism of Kimmel’s comments preceded ABC’s
decision to cancel, has
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and who have already proven
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exceptionally cowardly.

Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is only the most high-profile facet of
an escalating censorship campaign aimed at silencing Trump’s
critics.

Just like Democrats did when they repeatedly hauled tech executives
before Congress and pressured them behind the scenes, the GOP’s goal
here is to scare and coerce profit-driven entities into doing the
censoring for it for the sake of expediency. Eventually, the hope is,
no censoring even has to happen at all; people will just know what
they are and aren’t allowed to say and will hold their tongues all
on their own. The claim now being made
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Republicans that this is just the free market in action and not a
First Amendment violation isn’t any more convincing now than when
Democrats were using that line the last four years to justify tech
censorship.

Kimmel’s cancellation is only the most high-profile facet of an
escalating censorship campaign aimed at silencing Trump’s critics.
Trump’s allies are now pressuring
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executives to censor mean posts about Kirk, are pushing
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Kirk’s critics to lose their jobs
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are preparing
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pro-Israel billionaires in charge of the largely pro-Palestinian
TikTok, and are planning
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wider crackdown on left-wing groups opposed to Trump.

That’s all as they continue their campaign of repression against the
pro-Palestine movement, whose criticism of Israel’s
genocide growing
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of Americans (including conservatives
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are agreeing with. Somewhat lost in the current news cycle is that at
the same time that Kimmel was taken off air, Palestinian antiwar
activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil has been ordered
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country — less than half a year after his US citizen wife gave birth
to their US citizen son — with apparently little hope for appeal.

It is not hard to see why this is happening. Trump is an unpopular,
flailing president engulfed in a scandal around his close friendship
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pedophile, and one who is lashing out at his critics in the media
while struggling
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stand up to a foreign prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who treats
him like a doormat.

But the desperation of these actions, and the pathetically thin skin
they are revealing, doesn’t make them any less menacing. There will
quite rightly be legal challenges to what Trump is doing. But given
that the whole aim is to prey on and encourage political cowardice
among American institutions, the antidote also has to be to not
succumb to such crude intimidation and to continue to speak out and
criticize. There is, after all, no shortage of
things _to_ criticize, from Trump’s dismal economic stewardship
and diversion
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law enforcement from fighting crime
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his warmongering and selling out to Israel — all major betrayals of
campaign promises that this current assault on free speech is just the
latest instance of.

People voted for this administration because they wanted things to be
less expensive; they didn’t vote for it because they wanted to be
told what they can and can’t say and what comedians they’re
allowed to watch on TV. Continuing down this road will be terrible for
both the country and quite possibly Trump’s presidency itself —
and yet it seems it’s a road the president and the people around him
are determined to keep going down.

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Contributors

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

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* Jimmy Kimmel
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* Charlie Kirk
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* Donald Trump
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* censorship
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* Fascism
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* Free Speech
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