Jimmy Kimmel Returns—Sarcasm Over Apology

Jimmy Kimmel returns after suspension. ABC says Jimmy Kimmel Live returns tonight, Tuesday night. According to the New York Times and Deadline, Disney paused the show last week after Kimmel's remarks about Charlie Kirk's killer sparked a political firestorm and FCC chair Brendan Carr suggested ABC needed to, quote, change conduct. Disney said, quote, we made the decision to suspend production and because we felt some of the comments were ill timed and thus insensitive when they started. Expecting comedians to be sensitive is a question that's not been answered. But we'll get back to that. Continuing with their quote, we have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy and decided to return the show on Tuesday. Station Group's nexstar and Sinclair signaled they may still preempt the program in some markets. Kimmel's late night peers rallied in support and free speech concerns mounted across Hollywood and beyond, with Disney saying, quote, jimmy will say what Jimmy wants to say. Tonight's monologue is poised to be one of the late night's most closely watched moments in years. Okay, what's the real message here? Jimmy Kimmel going back. Back on the air is the first sign we've seen in about nine months that democracy is not dead in America. It's the first bit of good news I've been able to glom onto or anyone else in a long time. And it shows that enough people speak out, someone eventually will listen. Okay, let's dig a little deeper here. Let's look at the fact I think ABC was in a horrible bind. Bob Iger, the CEO of the parent company, got a lot of criticism for this and perfectly justifiable. They were roundly condemned by free speech experts, by centrists, by conservatives, by Ted Cruz, by virtually everyone other than MAGA card carrying stooge henchmen who we'll call white black and black white if Dear Leader tells them to. So this was a move that was just vilified across the spectrum. Taking off a comedian for saying something that hurt the feelings of some people. That's what was truly bizarre about this. On a factual basis, he was not incorrect. Now, I did 35 minutes on explicating every word, every comma in the Jimmy Kimmel commentary. That comedic monologue that got him bumped off. So I'm not going to do that again here, but take a look at it. It's a good reminder. So to recap, the FCC chairman basically said, we can do this the hard way or the easy way, implying to ABC News, you better take this guy off the air or we're going to take away your broadcast licenses. Now they didn't do that yet. But are we really going to define authoritarianism and dictatorship of only when the leader and the government officially closes something? I mean there is something about them making threats on Public Airways that we're going to destroy your business if you don't give us what we want. Because that's what mobsters do. Mobsters don't say give me 10% of your revenues from this restaurant every month or I will burn it down. They don't say it that way. They say, hey, nice little restaurant you got here. Sure be a shame if something happened to it, like if it burned down. By the way, I'd love to be an investor in your restaurant. Let's say 10%. So I want 10% of your revenue every month. And as your business partner, I'm going to provide you with security. Wink, wink. That's how mobsters do it and that's how this tyrannical regime did it. And I for one am extraordinarily happy to see that the people have spoken of us. Whether ABC got so much pushback from its viewers, from its creative community, from its vendors, from its other stations, whatever reason they, they weighed things and the way last week they weighed it was it seems like we're going to be better off taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air because we've got whole bunch of right wing station owners saying they're not going to carry the show anyway. We've got the federal government saying they are going to hinting they're going to take away our broadcast license in which case we'll be out of business and then Jimmy Kimmel will be off the air because we'll all be off the air. That was their rationale last week and now the people have spoken up finally. So many people who are concerned about whether we still have a democracy or not have been frankly troubled by all the atrocities, all the trampling of constitutional rights and divisions of power over the last nine months. It seems like this issue is different. This people, this sort of woke people up. I guess you could say it's the attitude of Americans. Oh, you want to cut off US aid and hundreds of thousands of kids around the world starve to death. Ho hum. Let me get back to watching entertainment. But then you take away their entertainment, you take away Jimmy Kimmel and apparently a lot of Americans like well now you've gone too far. It's one thing to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent little kids around the world who are starving to death without their USAID Money, that's one thing, but taking away our comedy, that's a bridge too far. I'm not saying that's moral logic I necessarily respect, but I do like the final result. The final result is at least one corporation in America. That's not abc, it's their parent company. Disney has said we're going to stand for American values. We're not simply going to bend the knee and placate Dear Leader the way Amazon seems to and Apple and certainly X and so many other big media companies and tech companies. So whether they're building a long time spine that can really stand upright for the next six months, year, three and a half years, I don't know. They certainly didn't look like paragons of virtue last week, nor did they when they gave the, what is the $15 million bribe to Trump to placate him. Getting upset about George Stephanopoulos accurately calling Trump what we know he is and what courts have found him to be. So ABC News and Disney, they have, they have tried to survive. And let's make no mistake about it, it's easy for me or you or anyone who's a small, tiny little entity to criticize them when you are a huge, huge publicly traded company with multiple, multiple divisions of a company, all of which have some hand of government regulating it. It's a balancing act. Because to just say I'm sure all the time could mean, oh, 50,000 people just lost their job. And I don't know anyone who can just crassly ignore the impact on people when you know, lack of compromise can get a lot of people out of work, out of jobs, perhaps careers destroyed, perhaps losing homes, perhaps, perhaps your kids going hungry. So it's not an easy time to be a CEO in America of a publicly traded company. But savvy CEOs are looking to history and they can see what happened to a lot of the business people in modern day Russia. Short term it's great. Hey Nabokov, you get the entire lithium mining industry, you're now a billionaire. Short term it can be really great. But then you criticized your leader Putin in that case, and all of a sudden you find yourself falling balconies and go back eight or so decades, a little further west in Europe from Russia, and you see the business leaders that rallied around charismatic authoritarian forces saw their economic net worth go to zero. That's right, the stock markets in certain countries in the 1940s in Europe went to zero. So I believe savvy business minded leaders, CEOs need to keep an Eye on history. You don't want to go back in history that far. Just look at what happened to Argentina under Peron's rule. You went from a country that had one of the highest standards of living in the Entire world, top 10 in the world, to an economic basket case. Peron had a very charismatic leader. He didn't call himself a Fidel style socialist, but he was an autocrat. He wanted to make decisions about these government. These businesses have my stamp of approval. They're going to do well. These don't. I get to regulate our version of the Fed and everything else. And how did that work out, folks? Initially, if you were Perrone's friend, you got a lot of money, things were good. But in the long term, not so much the economy. The average person's income of Argentina when Peron took power was at 80% of America. By the time he left, it was in what it is virtually today, about 20% of American income. Absolutely dismal. So I'm urging more and more business people, think about your bottom line for the long term. Is Disney going to be hurt by this? I don't know. Because they do have. And for those of you in other countries who don't know that, we have TV networks. They typically own seven or eight TV stations in big markets, but the rest are independently owned by other people with other agendas. And then they carry the programming nationwide. It's a complicated, convoluted way of doing it, based on a world before the Internet was invented, but it's still around. But because of that, you have certain allies of the current administration who own TV stations that carry ABC programming, like Jimmy Kimmel. And so they were flexing last week saying, how dare you have a comedian make fun of a politician when it hurts our feelings. Even though they didn't seem to mind every politician mocking and vilifying and using hyperbole to mock Biden and Clinton and Obama and for that matter Bush and Reagan and yes, even Trump in the first administration. So there's some people really trying to change the rules of how public discourse works in America. To be clear, it's not censorship for a private company that owns TV stations to decide they don't want to air a particular comedian. But in this case, given the context, it is pretty slimy. And Claus signing in to say hello. Claus, thanks so much for saying hello. If you're watching us live, you can always post your comments right here. Regardless, for everyone except for TikTok, I can't see your comments till the end of the show. But for everyone else, if you're watching on YouTube, on Facebook, on TikTok, not on TikTok, on X, on Instagram, if you post your comments, I see them right away. So I appreciate you doing that. All right, we're going to be back after this commercial version.