Why ABC ousted Jimmy Kimmel for calling Charlie Kirk’s killer a MAGA member

Jimmy Kimmel didn t read the electronic room And it cost him his job Now that Disney and ABC executives after huddling all day pulled the plug as Kimmel was preparing for Wednesday night s show it s hard to see him returning The brass explained he s suspended indefinitely meaning lose our number There are serious free speech concerns here especially against the backdrop of governing body pressure Nexstar an ABC affiliate that owns NewsNation also revealed it would preempt the show on its stations DISNEY PULLS JIMMY KIMMEL'S SHOW AFTER COMMENTS ON CHARLIE KIRK'S ASSASSINATION AND MORE TOP HEADLINESWith Stephen Colbert confined to a final season at CBS that would mean two of the three late-night hosts on broadcast networks would be banished Both are social commentators of subject and fervently anti-Trump One happy camper is Donald Trump who has been feuding with Kimmel I played a small role in that as we ll see in a moment Trump congratulated ABC on having the courage to boot Jimmy When the Colbert news broke the president predicted that Kimmel would be next What Kimmel noted in the wake of Charlie Kirk s assassination isn t that awful It s about the killer not as a few early headlines had it Charlie himself Right after the shooting in fact Kimmel offered a somber respectful reaction sending his love to Kirk s family But then he was tone-deaf about the sensitivity of the situation and the widespread anger especially among young conservative activists but also those who disagreed with Kirk The atmosphere right now is like a tinderbox that only needed a single match These are the words from Monday that got him in trouble We hit specific 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 That s it I don t agree that the killer was part of the Trump movement I don t think he was part of any movement just a crazed madman with a transgender partner who had sympathy for gays but not fascists As with all these nutjob murderers and school shooters the media s search on a motive is futile A month from now maybe Kimmel s sentence wouldn t have caused an uproar But he should have sensed that this was not the time Now let s look at what the other side has been saying Trump who was close to Kirk says left-wing radicals are to blame for his killing and that investigations are under way Elon Musk has labeled the left as the party of murder Pam Bondi announced she would prosecute those guilty of hate speech apparently missing the point that the First Amendment is meaningless unless it protects vile speech as long as it doesn t include threats of violence Against that ocean of rhetoric Kimmel s comment was a small trickle And that brings us to the Federal Communications Commission which has the power to revoke broadcast licenses FCC Chairman Brendan Carr who I in the last few days interviewed revealed this on a podcast We can do this the easy way or the hard way These companies can find procedures to change conduct and take action frankly on Kimmel or there s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead Sounds pretty ominous TRUMP EYES REMARKS AT CHARLIE KIRK MEMORIAL IN ARIZONA BLAMES LEFT FOR SUSPECT S RADICALIZATIONBut Carr kinda sorta walked it back at a Politico conference I think you can draw a pretty clear line and the Supreme Court has done this for decades that our First Amendment our free speech tradition protects almost all speech Even Laura Ingraham revealed Carr should have stayed off TV Trump meanwhile urged NBC to fire two total losers Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers which would mean a clean sweep of the late-night landscape It s worth reminding everyone that Charlie Kirk was engaging in free speech and advocating non-violence as he toured the country and built his Turning Point organization Celebrities Democrats and specific journalists are denouncing the Disney ABC decision to blow up Jimmy Kimmel Live That makes me wonder whether as in the scenario of Colbert s Late Show it was losing money or making relatively little money and the comments provided the pretext for getting it off the books Now to the backstory When I sat down with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year it was right after the Oscars hosted as it turned out by Kimmel And he made a joke about Trump Isn t it past your jail time So let the record show that Jimmy started it at least this round So I urged the candidate if he had a response Every night he hits me I guess explained Trump His ratings are terrible So I figured I d hit him because I thought he was a lousy host Referring to reports that a few Kimmel confidantes had begged him not to make the jail joke Trump described me This guy s even dumber than I thought Oh but that wasn t the end of it In his inevitable pushback Kimmel announced of class Fox had picked a guy to interview Trump that no one s ever heard of Well I d only hosted the No cable show in its time slot for a dozen years but I guess that didn t matter to the wealthy La-la-land elite I shot back that while I wasn t a heavily hyped grid star like him my Sunday ratings almost matched his I used my higher-than-normal rating from the Trump interview but let s not get bogged down in details TURNING POINT USA ELECTS ERIKA KIRK AS NEW CEO CHAIR OF THE BOARD FOLLOWING CHARLIE KIRK'S ASSASSINATIONI ll give the final word to Outkick founder Clay Travis the conservative radio host and frequent guest of mine I like Jimmy and his family and have known them for years now I don t like the concept as someone who talks for a living of any person in any creative industry losing their job for any one thing they say Travis says there have been frequent attempts to cancel him adding If your principle shifts based on who has power you certainly have no principles Footnote I wish the greater part media people except for those covering hard-news developments would stop using the name of the suspect in the Charlie Kirk development For multiple years I have refused to name assassins would-be assassins mass shooters and school shooters because that would give them the attention they crave Just not gonna go there Do you remember the name of the killers at Sandy Hook Virginia Tech the Orlando nightclub the Las Vegas music festival the Charleston church Buffalo Uvalde or even the Colorado school a couple of weeks ago I don t either The faster we can consign them to the dustbin of history the better Lavishing attention on them may inspire other would-be gunmen to take action thinking it s a way to turn nobodies into somebodies And here s the absolute proof from the alleged Kirk killer The -year-old texted his roommate his romantic partner about what he had inscribed on the bullet casings If those messages wound up on fox new s I might have a stroke That s why I say it s dangerous to reward these heinous figures by making them household names