Jimmy Kimmel’s Show Pulled Off Air After Claiming Charlie Kirk’s Killer is From “Maga Gang”
Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night US show has been pulled after 22 years following “offensive” comments about Charlie Kirk’s death where the host repeated the falsehood that the suspected killer is from the “Maga gang”. The Telegraph has more.
Disney’s ABC said it would take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off air “indefinitely” after Nexstar Media, one of the biggest owners of television stations in the US, said it would no longer broadcast the show on local stations.
Kimmel, whose show has been on air for over 22 years, said that a “Maga gang” was trying to score political points from Kirk’s killing, sparking a backlash from conservatives who accused the comedian of being tone deaf.
Donald Trump, currently in London for a state visit, hailed the show’s cancellation as “great news for America”.
“The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” the US President – who has frequently been the target of Mr Kimmel’s jokes – said on Truth Social.
“Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible.”
The White House has signalled a crackdown on Left-wing groups in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, while Mr Trump has repeatedly sued, berated and threatened media companies whose coverage he disputes, with legal or other action.
The killing has sparked a wave of anxiety about increasing political violence in America, with Mr Trump blaming the “radical Left”. Critics have accused the president of using Kirk’s assassination as a pretext to crack down on political opponents.
Responding to the reaction in the aftermath of the shooting, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
He then mocked Mr Trump’s reaction to the tragedy, in which the US President responded to a question about how he was holding up by saying “very good”, before providing an update on the White House ballroom’s construction.
“He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction,” Kimmel quipped. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.” …
Several public figures jumped to Kimmel’s defence.
Ben Stiller, the actor and film-maker, wrote on X “this isn’t right” alongside news about the cancellation.
American author Joyce Carol Oates said it was “sad” that a host would be “abruptly fired for anything he says however awkward or inappropriate”.
“If a joke is in poor taste or falls flat the audience’s silence is punishment enough for the comic,” Oates wrote.
“Certainly it’s ‘free speech’ for me, censorship for you. Whatever your politics that is irrefutable.”
California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, accused the Republican Party of a “dangerous” coordinated attack on free speech and warned Americans “they are censoring you in real time”.
Mr Newsom listed “buying and controlling media platforms”, “firing commentators” and “cancelling shows” as examples.
“These aren’t coincidences,” he wrote on X.
Worth reading in full.
Funny how the Left is suddenly worried about free speech and censorship when it’s one of their own. I thought speech had consequences?
Most likely the men in grey suits were just happy to have an excuse to pull a long-running show that was well past its prime. Though eagerness to keep the Trump administration on side amid a high value merger may also have played a role.
Still, it’s not pleasant to see cancel culture spilling out on the Right. A taste of their own medicine and all that. But we want to see an end to comedians being cancelled for making jokes, however unfunny and crass, not an escalation of it. Free speech means a world where no one is cancelled, not where everyone is. It would be a twisted irony if one of the legacies of Charlie Kirk – an implacable defender of free speech – was a wave of cancel culture in his name.
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Shame
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake
It’s funny, I really liked Jimmy Kimmel, I liked his way and his demeanour.
Right up to the point when he would talk about Trump and then he was like a Manchurian Candidate that switched into this bile spewing creature.
Trump derangement is a real thing.
Kimmel is a thoroughly unpleasant man, and about as funny as an outbreak of rabies in a retirement home for guide dogs. I still remember his ‘joke’ during the Covid nonsense about leaving unvaccinated people to die. Loathsome individual.
I don’t think Trump derangement syndrome is a proper term for this. I think this is an organized campaign to harm Trum by spreading outrageous lies about him, the grosser the better, or at least prevent any rational discussion of his politics and make defections from the anti-Trump to the Trump camp as unlikely as possible.
Up to a point yes, but I’d definitely make an exception in Jimmy Kimnell’s case. He’s a propaganda spewing liar and his deliberately crafted bullshit absolutely encourages left wing violence from some of the most impressionable & jelly headed young morons in the US.
I’m not saying he shouldn’t be allowed to say these things, he just shouldn‘t expect national tv coverage and a multimillion pound salary for it. Invest in a soapbox Jimmy.
Hard to prove that this encouragement of violence that you refer to is real or has any effect – I think his speech form what I have seen would be protected by the First Amendment. Whether his employer should sack him is I guess up to his employer as the views were expressed on the show and impinge on his job – but I think it’s a shame for us . I’d prefer him to be eventually sacked for losing his viewership, and if he does not lose much then we have learned that lots of people think like him or don’t find his views unacceptable- and that’s useful information
Well all young people are now primarily taught that Hitler was the most evil man in modern history, so when you’ve got preening morons like Kimmel and his showbiz friends deliberately calling Trump and all his supporters Hitler and Nazis all day every day and only stopping to eat and use the toilet, then this is absolutely going to encourage any impressionable narcissistic ‘progressive’ with access to a gun to take action. Because they’re ‘saving humanity’ of course.
So in this respect, I think this encouragement of violence is very real and has a demonstrable effect as we have seen last week.
What you say is plausible but I doubt it would stand up in court and I am glad of that because it’s open to abuse.
I think people who do that should be called out on it: When referring to their political opponents as Nazis, they’re asserting that the issues in question do not belong to those people may reasonably have different opinions about but that they’re in an existential fight against an absolute evil which must be exterminated using whatever means this takes. In particular, as the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrated, they’re happy to take advantage of politically motivated assassination and not even death of their political opponents ends their deap-seated hostility towards them. This is obviously incompatible with the very fundaments of the representative system where parties with legitimately different approaches to certain political issues compete for voters who both freely and rationally chose whatever suits them best: Citzens of the USA are technically free to vote Trump but under no circumstances can this ever be a legitimate choice. It just means that whose who do are from the basket of deplorables and have been granted rights they really shouldn’t have. In addition to that, their willingness to take advantage of crimes provided that they don’t have to commit them themselves marks them as morally-challenged cowards: They’re lacking the balls to do… Read more »
It’s pretty clear that whoever isn’t in power, whoever feels like the underdog is the free speech advocate.
And whoever is in power… not so much.
I don’t think that’s a freedom of speech issue. Kimmel wasn’t participating in some kind of discussion or an academic publishing opinions someone objected to, he was a talk show host on a commercial TV channel and this means his job (he was getting paid for) was to produce ‘content’ helping the bottom line of his employer. The kind of content he really produced apparently convinced someone working for the TV channel that it wouldn’t be helping the bottom line and hence, the show got axed.
AFAIK, nobody’s trying to go after Kimmel in person and that the same people who want to jail others for years for privately posted internet content are now howling about “censorship” is just their usual disingenuity.
I keep hearing about the right adopting the cancel culture, but as far as I understand at least I’m this case there has been some backlash and some complaints, but no one demanded for Kimmel to be axed. It was at the pressure of Nexstar and Trump only hailed the decision afterwards.
https://youtube.com/shorts/GM3z8ylPZ_4?si=yDlfqUVlfc5f3awI
A baby plod turns up at the home of an elderly cancer patient’s home to berate her for hurty words on FB.
FSU on to it. 👍👍👍
Bonkers. This is how bad it is.
First of all, we now live in a world where offensive words are equated to violence. By law.
But actually, it’s even worse, because if you accuse someone of committing physical violence, you have to present some reasonable proof. But not with hurty words. With hurty words there is no need to prove that harm has been done. Just the claim by someone that they have been offended is good enough. Accusations are taken at face value.
That woman.- and anyone who is accused of causing offence – should demand proof. Where is the unequivocal proof of this harm? In no other instance of the law can you just accuse someone of something and be taken seriously without presenting some proof.
This is another one of those laws that came in around the Bliar/Camoron time. It was supposed to deal with racism. Apparently your speech is racist if the other person thinks it is and they don’t have to provide proof of intent or anything else. It just has to be”feel” like racism to them.
nowadays, it has morphed into the hurty feelings law as it was always going to.
its about time we got someone in who will dump all of Bliars laws and most of Cameron’s wannabe Bliars laws.
this is getting ridiculous!
Another one here. Seems there’s half a dozen officers waiting for a guy with a drill and hammer to break into a lady’s empty house ( she was out at the hospital with her disabled daughter at the time ) because they want to charge her with an invented hate crime. Organising a protest online, along the lines of anti-immigration, i think. You can hear her explaining if you put the sound on, anyway. Honestly, how do they have the right to do this? Shocking. Would they have cuffed her and taken her away if she’d been in?😬
https://x.com/KieraDiss/status/1967951725639225521
Thanks Mogs. I don’t know how these plod sleep at night. How many more instances like this?
Well, it’s all going well in this country with two tiers of free speech, isn’t it. Call for Nigel Farage to be killed on Tiktok and according to the Met, it’s move along, nothing to see here, no crime. Call for the same for Starmer at the UTK march and an arrest quickly follows. Months, even years of the Palestine protests attacking Israel and calling for its obliteration and, again, move along, nothing to see here, no crime but some bloke gets 30 months in prison for asking who Allah is, with the judge acknowledging no evidence that he partook in the violence, he was a bit ‘bullish’ though. Nice to live in a country where policing and justice are so even handed.
Once again this is not a free speech issue. It is the peddling of flagrant lies which fall well below any reasonable broadcasting standard. I e. Without the extra woke values conflicting with beliefs and expressions which might raise a legitimate question.. Its just lies and exceptionally bad taste. Not illegal but way below standard.
If they cancel every show that peddles lies, there aren’t going to be too many programmes left on the TV.
You wouldn’t have any news programmes for starters…
And that’s a bad thing?
Yes it is
We need to know what other people are thinking and trying to make us think
If we had freedom of speech then you’d get a spectrum of views and you would be able to make your own mind up
Yeah state controlled regulators like Ofcom policing media content has worked out so well for us
It’s nothing to do with Ofcom or similar state stuff, it’s whether a company wants to see it’s basic purpose and image messed up by shoddy workmanship at the most fundamental level. You are conflating two separate issues
I interpreted “any reasonable broadcasting standard” as an externally imposed one. If it’s some standard that the firm in question imposes on itself, then yes they are free to do so.
Unfunny crass and tasteless.
But should not have been cancelled.
That was his stock in trade.
Far Left ‘comedians’ should be prosecuted for fraud.
Sorry but this is total hypocrisy! You either have free speech or you don’t! You can’t complain that your enemies have as much right to their say as you do. And that applies to both left and right!
Except cancel culture is not “spilling out on the Right” and the sacking of Kimmel is not a free speech issue, despite what Democrats such as Chuck Schumer say (he claims it’s Trump shutting down free speech: “it’s what autocracies do … this is what dictators do”). Yeah, right. Kimmel’s show was getting terrible ratings, and, most egregiously for the parent company, he lied, on a national broadcaster, that it was a MAGA supporter who killed Kirk when it was already clear that this was not the case.
Beware of the both-sides fallacy! Only one side believes that words are violence, and therefore speech (of the kind that Charlie Kirk promoted) can be met with physical violence. Only one side engages in political violence. Only one side talks of the other side as being full of hate whatever the speech. Only one side needs security when speaking in public. Only one side consistently argues in bad faith. Only one side celebrates the death of political opponents and dances on their graves. Only one side believes in the noble lie.