Jimmy Kimmel was back Tuesday night with loads of self-serving throat clearing.
He opened “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by rattling off all the fancy friends who called on him during his painful — but very brief — exile, including David Letterman, Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern.
He praised people on the other side of the ideological aisle, who rightly blasted FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s foolish rhetoric on Benny Johnson’s podcast.
He gave a soliloquy about free speech and blasted the Trump administration.
One person he let off the hook: Himself.
Kimmel willfully misunderstood what landed him in hot water in the first place. It wasn’t jokes about Trump. It wasn’t a joke at all. It was him essentially saying that Kirk’s murderer was MAGA, when it was clear that wasn’t the case.
In essence, he told a lie. Or as the left would say, “disinformation.” Audiences found it distasteful. Local stations and later ABC and Disney decided to keep him off air because, reportedly, he had plans to double down.
Kimmel didn’t intend “to blame any specific group for the actions — it was a deeply disturbed individual,” he said, not mentioning the flurry of celebrations from folks online who clearly belong to the greater left.
“That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make, but to some, that felt ill-timed or unclear or maybe both, and for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you’re upset.”
But he did blame one group in order to exonerate another group. It was simply dishonest and unnecessary to the actual joke he was setting up about Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death.
The lone bright spot was Kimmel acknowledging Erika Kirk forgiving the man who killed her husband, calling it “an example we should follow…A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow. It touched me deeply.”
In saner times, his monologue would have started with Charlie Kirk and ended with Charlie Kirk. But, in saner times, we also wouldn’t have watched a man assassinated on a college campus over his beliefs.
One cannot forget Carr’s role in feeding this brouhaha. He opened his big ol’ mouth, made big ol’ threats (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”), despite the network bigs already reportedly making decisions about putting Kimmel on ice.
Carr ended up knocking the ball into his own goal.
And his words – not his actions – helped build the staircase for Kimmel to stand upon and essentially declare himself a free speech martyr.
Despite all the charges of fascism and censorship, Kimmel’s show was both taken off and brought back on air by Disney. Apparently, all it took to smooth things over were some conversations between the host and his corporate overlords. Yup, conversations, the very thing Kirk relentlessly advocated for.
Local broadcast groups Sinclair and Nexstar are still holding out and not airing the show.
However, neither Kimmel – nor his Hollywood pals, who came out in droves to sign a petition to decry censorship – are true warriors for free speech.
They are craven opportunists reacting out of fear that their cultural monopoly is being eroded.
CNN reporter Lisa Respers France turned it into a cinematic blockbuster pitting good versus evil, saying “it almost feels like ‘The Avengers’” because “Hollywood came together with the left and Jimmy Kimmel’s audience, and they really kind of formed in what felt unstoppable.” She said this forced “normies” to acknowledge “where this country is headed.”
Conversely, this episode underscores the fact that rich Hollywood types don’t give a rat’s behind about normies. No petitions were signed when everyday people were censored on social media for mainstream views on COVID-19 or fired from their jobs because they wouldn’t take a COVID shot. Heck, Kimmel even joked that they should die.
On Tuesday, Alphabet, the company which owns Google and YouTube said the Biden Administration pressured them to censor accounts, many conservative, who diverged from approved covid or election narratives. And they’d be reinstating the YouTube accounts that were yanked.
In 2024, Meta honcho Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the administration also pressured them to remove information about COVID, including satire and humor. He said he regrets caving.
Where were they when Twitter locked the New York Post out of our account, over our exclusive reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. And a group of intelligence officers wrongly declared it “Russian disinformation.” They were cheering it, because it helped Biden win.
They were quiet all along because it didn’t affect them, their paychecks or their influence.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
