Charlie Kirk’s Great Sorting Out.
Aside from part-time jobs at the porcelain factory in Sun Prairie and an iron foundry in Oshkosh, Blaska made his living (such as it was) on the back of the First Amendment.
So it was disheartening to hear this morning my old friend Mizz Vicki barking over the AM airwaves defending government censorship of late-night TV personality Jimmy Kimmel — or more to the point, the threat of same. We say that a) because we can (the free speech thing again) and b) because Mizz Vicki herself has uttered risible calumnies against the political Left — many of them true, most of them well deserved.
The ABC television network announced that it was pulling Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely.” No, we never watched it either but this latest chapter in The Great Sorting Out has the First Amendment back in prime time. During his opening monologue Monday 09-15-2025 Mr. Kimmel editorialized:
“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.”
Kimmel was factually wrong. Hellz bellz, it was another damnable progressive lie, politically motivated, and mean-spirited. Classic example of Saul Alinsky’s tactic: accuse others of that for which you are guilty. The Utah County district attorney related that Robinson’s mother said her son “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented.” Think about it, why would MAGA kill one of its own? It’s absurd!
Our own cancel culture?
Mizz Vicki rides with the speech posse by claiming that ABC’s Kimmel somehow violated Federal Communications Commission standards. But if lies and bad taste were actionable — and Kamala Harris the judge, jury and executioner — Madison’s big talker would have been silenced instead. Didn’t Vice President Vance just six months ago lecture Europe about using Big Government to regulate speech?
Democrats in the early 1960s used the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” as a cudgel to harass right-wing broadcasters in order to “suppress offensive speech.” (Source here) Only when equal time was abolished in 1987 could partisan ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Mizz Vicki claim a microphone. Are we back to the bad old days? About Kimmel, current FCC chairman Brendan Carr issued an unmistakable threat:
“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Elon should have abolished the agency.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: The FCC may have shoved but it’s equally possible the aftershocks of Charlie’s assassination forced Big Media to realize that non-stop condescension from smug coastal elites like Colbert, Seth, Jon Stewart, and the Jimmys was royally pissing off half its potential audience.
Contra the big-government socialists at The Nation magazine, American presidents of both parties have not been mocked anywhere near on equal terms — not since David Letterman and Jay Leno and certainly not since “Here’s Johnny.” Back when late-night comedians were actually funny. And spoke to America.
Didn’t Charlie Kirk want all speech to be free?
and die for it?
28 responses to “No one is laughing, Jimmy Kimmel”
Methinks you’re overcomplicating it Dave. Important to note that the FCC did not take him off the air – ABC did. Yes, Brendan Carr did threaten to act against ABC but did not. The ABC honchos saw that Kimmel had gone too far, pissing off a large portion of the country. And maybe the honchos were pissed too. They have every right to do what they did. Anyway, they didn’t fire the tool – maybe they should have.
Read what I wrote because that’s what I said.
Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC and a Trump appointee, was doing the President’s bidding when he used threats to coerce ABC into suspending indefinitely Jimmy Kimmel’s late night comedy show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. Kimmel has been a vocal critic of Trump for years, and so ABC caved. DJT has a fragile ego. Like all dictators, he will never rest until he has total control of American media. We shall see if Trump and his media oligarchs have the chutzpah and skill-set to achieve autocracy. Let the lawsuits begin.
As long as they don’t come after SOUTH PARK. Dementia Don condomizing Satan is just too funny.
MOMMY MOMMY THAT MAN SAID BAD THINGS ABOUT ME> sniff, sniff, whine.
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
The only time(s) I laughed at anything JK said was when he played straight man to the great (and much funnier) Ben Stein on “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” Where, oh where can liberals go to find their biases confirmed and their egos stroked now that Jimmy’s off the air? Oh, right—everywhere but Fox.
Never watched his show but this (hosting the 2023 Oscars) was goddamn funny:
“We know this is a special night for you, we want you to have fun, we want you to feel safe, and most importantly, we want me to feel safe, so we have strict policies in place.
If anyone in this theater commits an act of violence at any point during the show, you will be awarded the Oscar for best actor and permitted to give a 19-minute-long speech.”
Disagree. A private business can fire who it wants to based on their speech. And that is NOT a free speech issue.
Exactly. Same thing with Colin Kappernick. Bosses get to decide what’s acceptable
Again, never said private enterprise couldn’t fire him. Said the government should not. It’s all there in the blog.
I see we have a failure to communicate.
“A private business can fire who it wants to based on their speech. And that is NOT a free speech issue.”
Agreed. But the government needs to stay out of it and let the market sort it out. Otherwise we get the same sort of BS that the Biden administration pulled with Facebook during COVID.
That said, I will lose little sleep over this. Kimmel, Colbert, and others who do what they do are chiefly responsible for dragging our political discourse into the sewer.
Mordecai for the win.
I will also lose no sleep over it but this should have been a “don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake” moment.
“I will also lose no sleep over it but this should have been a “don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake” moment.”
Also agreed, and hopefully that’s the government’s approach on these incidents from now on. We may have reached the point where the silent majority will no longer stand for this latrine rhetoric and will stomp it out with their wallets, votes, and better speech. I would welcome it.
No mention of Sinclair and Nexstar refusing to air the show that forced ABC’s hand. Did I miss where Trump/the FCC did that?
And no mention of what those stations are doing – airing a one-hour Kirk special in Kimmel’s place on Friday night (I think)
I think a more important story is that Antifa is now a terrorist organization – long time coming!
I think your timeline is correct. Sinclair has 38 ABC stations and Nexstar has 26 ABC stations.
Think we said that ABC decided pissing off its audience not a good marketing strategy.
Who is Mizz Vicki?
I think part of the Kimmel sacking is Dismay/ABC had two of their largest affiliates saying “no mas” to the show. The fear of losing more money, then the implied threat from the FCC made his sacking happen.
Just remember the people that wanted the Government Office of Misinformation/ Disinformation. Remember the people that wanted people silenced for any covid/covid vaccine that didn’t fit the government’s talking points. Remember how our government had social media ban people and restrict people on their platforms. These people now scream about free speech because somebody gets suspended from his TV show. I wonder if the ACLU would stand up for the American Nazi Party today for their right to march in Skokie IL. like they did years ago?
Back in 1969 the Nixon White House put pressure on CBS to cancel The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour because of its anti-Vietnam War stance and criticism of administration officials. CBS caved. Gotta wonder: Will SNL last? This is good old-fashioned state repression on display.
Interesting question about the ACLU and the American Nazi Party, Bob.
A handful of exceptions aside, SNL hasn’t been funny since Norm McDonald left. If it gets cancelled, it will be because the writers dug its grave.
Lying to people about a vaccine in such a way as to hurt them is NOT responsible free speech. I have argued that RFK, Jr should be in jail for the number of people his lies about measles to the Samoan government that caused them to cancel vaccinations for it. That lead to a few dozen deaths when someone brought measles back into the country. THAT is depraved indifference.
I think we disagree about most policy issues, but thank you for writing this. It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate way to “honor” Kirk than by stifling free speech. If any doubt remained that the administration was simply trying to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to silence critics, Trump himself put that to rest yesterday when he stated directly the FCC should consider suspending the licenses of networks simply for being critical of him. “I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me… I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
Truly a new terrifying blow against free speech.
And if promoting misleading narratives were grounds for license revocation, Vicki herself and nearly every talk radio host across the spectrum would have been shut down long ago.
Progressives invented cancel culture. Normies are refining consequence culture.