The left-wing echo chamber just lost one of its loudest prima donnas. Jimmy Kimmel Live! is on hiatus because, at long last, the man’s smug shilling caught up with him. It even ended with a walk of shame moment at the studio, with Kimmel and his defenders blaming everyone but him.
ABC suspended the show after Kimmel turned Charlie Kirk’s assassination into a revolting monologue prop, trying to pin it on “the MAGA gang” without a shred of evidence.
Network affiliates decided he had finally jumped the shark and reached for the off switch. Nexstar announced it would no longer carry the program.
Sinclair went further—replacing his Friday slot with a Charlie Kirk tribute special, and a poison pill for Jimmy the Pompous—demanding he apologize to Kirk’s family and make a donation to Turning Point USA.
ABC soon followed with an indefinite halt.
The truth is, Kimmel jumped the shark years ago, and reality has finally caught up with him.
He became a caricature of his audience—radicalized, overbearing, and endlessly disdainful of the rest of America. And there just aren’t enough of them tuning in to keep the lights on.
Johnny Carson had impeccable timing, and while he played favorites, he poked fun at both sides. Letterman—especially in his early years—brought irreverence and could laugh at himself—think of Mr. T’s legendary appearance on Late Night.
Kimmel brought irrelevance instead, torching the late-night niche ABC had spent decades trying to carve. He has all the wit of an impetuous DMV clerk with a hangover and the priggish tone of a hall monitor.
When your “comedy” brand is moral superiority—mocking the majority of the nation, salting the vast fields of Americana like Romans plowing Carthage—and your celebrity guests are as out of touch as the host, parroting DNC talking points night after night, don’t be surprised when your favorables sink lower than the neighborhood HOA president’s.
An ABC affiliate in Des Moines—or anywhere outside the Acela corridor or the Pacific Coast Highway—can’t sell Jimmy Kimmel Live! as “must-see late-night.”
Once Sinclair and Nexstar realized the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze—and that the content was actively mocking their viewers—they walked.
Rather than show contrition, reports indicated Kimmel wasn’t preparing an apology at all—he was preparing an explanation. In other words, more patronizing of the same audience he’d spent years ridiculing.
In his world, conservatives don’t merit compassion or understanding; they’re just the punching bag in a nightly gripe session. ABC knew a smug non-apology would only inflame outrage, so it pulled the plug before he could make it worse.
Predictably, the usual suspects are crying that Kimmel’s suspension is an attack on free speech. It isn’t.
Here’s what the First Amendment actually says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Notice the subject: Congress. The First Amendment protects against government censorship. It does not compel ABC or its affiliates to hand a paycheck to a host whose response to the assassination of a political leader—a critical moment in our polity—is crass insensitivity, or worse, a callous attempt to spin a false narrative out of it.
It does not force Sinclair or Nexstar to carry his program. It does not obligate anyone to associate with speech they find vile.
Simply put: free speech ≠ freedom from fallout.
And for all the hair-on-fire claims that this is creeping authoritarianism—let’s be real—that’s not how authoritarianism works.
Nobody is jailing Jimmy Kimmel or banning him from speech. What this kind of overwrought hyperbole does do is normalize hysteria.
It radicalizes the unhinged, escalating grievance into violence. It’s the same fevered climate of exaggeration that almost certainly fueled the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the first place—because of his publicly expressed religious and conservative views.
No one is stopping Jimmy Kimmel from finding another platform for his shtick (though another word starting with sh- comes to mind).
No one is forcing him to stand in Neyland Stadium this Saturday and declare that singing Rocky Top is a trailer-park tune and that calling the home team “Big Orange” is overcompensation. But it would be entirely on brand for him—and frankly, worth the price of admission to see what happens next.
Late-night television was once the crown jewel every legacy network fought to claim. Absent The Tonight Show—and the still-popular Little House franchise—NBC was dying a slow death in the 1970s and early ’80s. The 1990s brought the Late Night wars, an arms race for viewers and prestige. But like the networks themselves, the format is now a dinosaur.
Today, broadcast late-night isn’t cutting edge—it’s a fossil.
Gutfeld! on Fox News proves there’s still a market—but it’s everything Kimmel’s show isn’t: relevant, conservative, entertaining, and actually funny. It works precisely because it’s at home on FNC, offering a respite from the serious news of the day.
Kimmel had a stunning—and revealing—take earlier this year when Stephen Colbert was pink-slipped:
I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.
He doubled down, brushing aside reports of financial losses:
They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions—probably in total billions—and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows.
That level of hubris finally caught up to him.
Affiliates—who supply those millions, even billions, in fees—are more than a little tired of footing the bill for toxic progressive claptrap, especially when Kimmel boasts about drawing barely a fifth of the audience he once had.
That’s all you need to know.
Charlton Allen is an attorney, former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission, and founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc. He is editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC