adminNew Yorkers I spoke to on the street made something plain: Americans are tired of late-night hosts who trade in cheap partisan snark and then feign surprise when their own rhetoric blows up. Jimmy Kimmel’s on-air character assassination of an entire political movement after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk crossed a line for a lot of decent people, and ABC’s weeklong suspension of his program showed that even media giants can’t act with impunity.
Kimmel’s monologue didn’t land as comedy — it landed as a political broadside, lumping millions of law-abiding patriots together with a violent crime before facts were clear. That kind of reckless, partisan theater from a man paid by a corporate empire should have consequences, not standing ovations from the elite bubble in Hollywood.
What followed exposed two ugly truths: Washington’s regulatory power can be used to bully private companies, and corporate boardrooms panic when their balance sheets wobble. FCC Chair Brendan Carr publicly warned broadcasters, creating a constitutional fight that rightly alarmed Americans who cherish free speech even when they dislike the speaker.
Local station owners acted like they finally remembered they answer to viewers, not celebrities, pulling the show from large swaths of the country until the pressure mounted and ABC quietly reversed course. That patchwork of preemptions and reversals proved that when the audience pulls the plug — financially and politically — the elites back down. The affiliates who stood up deserve credit for putting local viewers ahead of woke content mandates.
The market spoke loudly: Disney saw subscriber backlash and a hit to its value as consumers punished a company that looked ready to sacrifice principle for the sake of celebrity cover-ups. Conservatives who warned for years that cultural institutions would self-immolate unless held to account watched as grassroots pressure forced a rethink — a small victory for common-sense Americans who pay the bills.
This episode should teach two lessons to hardworking patriots and to the coastal elites who think they run the country’s culture: accountability matters and freedom of speech is not liberty for abuse. We should defend the First Amendment while also insisting that corporate media stop treating audiences like serfs to be lectured and dictated to; when networks behave like megaphones for partisan outrage, viewers will vote with their wallets and their remotes. The people of New York — and the rest of this country — made that point loud and clear.
