The Brew: Unfunny Comedian Jimmy Kimmel Cancels Himself; ABC Ratifies His Decision

One more joyless scold who played a comedian on TV has left the building.

I’d literally never watched five seconds of Jimmy Kimmel before I heard about the clip in which he insisted (against all evidence) that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a “MAGA supporter.” Now under pressure from local affiliates and federal regulators, ABC has suspended Kimmel indefinitely from his low-rated late night show.

This is just the most tasteless and across-the-line example of what Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, and countless other “entertainers” have been serving up for years: witless snark, tired sneers, and self-righteous little sermons for the post-Christian church of wokeness. Here’s the clip that outraged half of America and induced syndicates of local stations such as NexStar and Sinclair to demand that ABC pull Kimmel off the air:

The left is about to melt down over Jimmy Kimmel’s how being cancelled.

The bottom line is he isn’t funny.

He replaced comedy with scolding half the country.

And he decided to exacerbate his unfunniness by telling egregious lies about Charlie Kirk.pic.twitter.com/ACMMI9EZWG

— CJ Pearson (@thecjpearson) September 17, 2025

Since ABC gets billions of dollars from free licenses granted to use the public airwaves “in the public interest,” Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brandan Carr also weighed in. How does it serve “the public interest” to broadcast lies about recent political assassinations, and potentially fuel more violence? It doesn’t.

Thank you CNN and Brian Stelter for melting down while admitting we ended Jimmy Kimmel’s career today.

We had FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on the show to announce investigations into ABC and Disney for letting Kimmel lie to millions about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Hours… pic.twitter.com/Yex5cc6k1S

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 17, 2025

Predictably, Leftist cartels such as the Writers Guild of America weighed in on what a threat to “free speech” the Kimmel decision represents:

The Writers Guild of America blasts the decision to suspend #JimmyKimmelLive: “The WGA stands with Jimmy Kimmel and his writers.”

“The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other – to disturb, even – is at the very heart of what it means to be a free people. It is… pic.twitter.com/fUwPcuFYxp

— Variety (@Variety) September 18, 2025

Some conservatives who still polish a little commemorative golden calf labeled “the free market” chimed in to register their alarm:

The First Amendment does not protect performers like Jimmy Kimmel from being cancelled by their private sector employers. But I would have liked the outcome a lot better if the chairman of the FCC had not involved himself in it.

— Brit Hume (@brithume) September 18, 2025

This administration is systematically killing free speech, and these capitulating media companies are acting as willing accomplices. Frightening and shameful. https://t.co/WG1LglUDP6

— S.E. Cupp (@secupp) September 17, 2025

BREAKING UPDATE: The government pressured ABC — and ABC caved. The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way,” tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure,…

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 17, 2025

News flash: There’s no such thing as a “free market” in TV licenses. They are by definition government monopolies. If I tried to start broadcasting in the same bandwidth that ABC used, its executives would rightly call the FCC and have me arrested. ABC doesn’t own those airwaves — we do, and ABC’s use of them is a privilege the government granted in a sweetheart deal going back decades to the dawn of not just of TV, but radio. Such “natural monopolies” are just a fact of life, and they have literally no more to do with the “free market” than the U.S. military does.

Maybe, all things considered, ABC needed some kind of intervention before it destroyed itself:

Will @abc15 condemn this?
ABC News says the text messages between Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson and his transgender boyfriend are “VERY TOUCHING.”

“He called him ‘my love!’ And ‘I want to protect you, my love!’ … He was, you know, speaking so lovingly about his… pic.twitter.com/m2URqOI4oV

— Veterans For Arizona (@VeteransforAz) September 16, 2025

When you hear leftists or squish conservatives warn about how “ominous” it is to “set a precedent” for government censorship that might “embolden the Left to do the same,” ask yourself this: Imagine what would have happened if some right-wing comedian had gone on TV during the national George Floyd martyrdom meltdown and cracked some jokes about how Floyd essentially brought his fate upon himself. (That’s a much more arguable proposition, by the way, but never mind.)

It wouldn’t have been just syndicates of local TV affiliates that came down upon that network, but angry mobs of looters who were unrestrained by the police, defended on TV news as “mostly peaceful,” and lauded as “antiracist activists” as ABC’s headquarters burned in the background. That comedian’s life would be ruined — as Seinfeld’s Michael Richards’s was for using a racist epithet — and any executives who tried to defend him would find themselves both unemployed and unemployable.

And nobody would have complained about any of this (except maybe here at The Stream. We definitely would have, especially in 2020.) The Left would have gloated over it (as it did when Roseanne Barr and Tucker Carlson were forced off the air) while most on the Right would have sadly shrugged, their eyes glazed over with that “learned helplessness” stare seen on tortured beagles in Anthony Fauci’s labs.

But now the worm has turned and the likes of Jimmy Kimmel can’t joke about people getting murdered. The Left made these rules, and now they’re just going to have to play by them. Maybe after a few years of the Right pushing back, working within the civil and natural law but playing hardball, the Left will internalize the lessons of civility. We can’t rush the process. They need to feel the pain.

It’s great to see longtime principled libertarian Jeffrey Tucker weigh in on this issue, displaying his usual prudence:

The hue and cry about the new censorship via Trump seems overblown from every case about which I’ve read, particular on the case of the late night dudes. These pathetic fake “comedians” have been marionettes for their deep-state puppeteers, mouthing unfunny and predictable…

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) September 18, 2025

And Bravo to Sinclair for replacing Kimmel’s show this week with a well-deserved Charlie Kirk tribute:

Sinclair’s ABC stations to Air Special in Remembrance of Charlie Kirk During Jimmy Kimmel Live! Friday Timeslot

Sinclair’s ABC stations will air a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk this Friday, during the Jimmy Kimmel Live! timeslot. The special will also air across all…

— Sinclair, Inc. (@WeAreSinclair) September 18, 2025

This week, for the first time in many years, I will be watching ABC during that time slot.

Erika Kirk to Carry Charlie’s Torch at TPUSA

Kirk’s lifetime project, Turning Point USA, is in good solid hands — his widow Erika’s:

The Turning Point Board has unanimously elected Erika Kirk as the new CEO and Chair of the Board.

In prior discussions, Charlie expressed to multiple executives that this is what he wanted in the event of his death. pic.twitter.com/PazORgiHWP

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) September 18, 2025

Trump Declares Antifa a Major Terrorist Threat

In a long-overdue move, President Donald Trump has issued an executive order designating Antifa a terrorist organization:

“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION…” – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/irLHCkrX1n

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 18, 2025

Keep in mind what Antifa is: a political hit squad funded by dark money to field mobs of armed, violent street toughs to intimidate and attack conservatives and Christians. It’s not some spontaneous band of woolly-headed, high-minded liberal idealists, but a Communist street militia founded by the Soviet Communist Party to spread its power around the world.

Antifa likes to pretend it’s a grassroots resistance. The truth? It was born in Bolshevik Moscow.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union used antifascism as a Trojan horse to spread communism across Europe. In Germany, Stalin’s Comintern bankrolled the Communist Party to launch…

— Jack Poso (@JackPosobiec) September 18, 2025

Antifa was started by hardcore Stalinists in Weimar, Germany, where it competed with the Nazis brownshirts to see how many Social Democrats, Catholics, and conservatives they could beat up and kill. Antifa actually helped the Nazis turn the streets of democratic Germany into a violent, chaotic war zone — driving frightened conservatives to grasp at straws and hand power to Hitler. The Soviet policy at the time was crystal clear: First Lenin, then Stalin preferred that the Nazis take power from moderate political parties because they believed it would bring on a Communist revolution.

Organizations with histories like this one deserve to be treated as what they are: terrorists. For more, see fearless journalist Andy Ngo, who has been persecuted and threatened for years because of his honest coverage of Antifa’s organized violence:

I went on Newsmax to discuss how we should interpret the announcement from President Trump that Antifa would be designated a terrorist organization. pic.twitter.com/7of5bWlBE4

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 18, 2025

Along The Stream…

As political violence and divisive rhetoric afflict our national community, it’s worth remembering that “Love, Not Radicalism, Is the Way Forward.”

This afternoon, learn about stunning archaeological findings that align with the Bible.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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