Colbert response to Kimmel suspension

 

Better than Jon Stewart's response, which was pretty good.

Colbert's monologue.

No poking fun at the king

When Trump praised CBS for canceling Stephen Colbert, he said "I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next."

Late Wednesday, the network pulled the plug on Kimmel’s show before he took the stage by claiming, “Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely."

That followed a statement from media powerhouse Nexstar Media Group, which owns hundreds of television stations, claiming, “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views or values of the local communities in which we are located.”

  Raw Story

Those people are not watching Jimmy Kimmel. Obviously there is a government watchdog policing speech on TV. Pure authoritarianism. Fascism at work.

[T]he banning of Kimmel was set in motion by Donald Trump’s handpicked FCC Chair Brendan Carr who previously threatened ABC/Disney on a podcast by stating, “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

[...]

[H]e took a completely opposite view about censorship in years past.

Everything changed when Trump 2.0 began.

[I]n 2019 [Carr wrote on X (Twitter)], “Should the government censor speech It doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in. The name of the public interest.”

“In 2021 he wrote, quote, ‘A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official in 2022.” Brzezinski read.

In 2023 he wrote, "Free speech is the counterweight. It is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian's dream.

[...]

Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That's why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”

So what did Kimmel say about Kirk anyway?

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was, uh, grieving on Friday − the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this. "Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. 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, OK?"

  USA Today

Reveling in Kimmel's cancellation, Trump is going after two more comedians: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

"Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done," Trump wrote. "Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT"

  TV Insider

Just a few months ago, MAGA was screaming about "cancel culture." Now, they're loving it.

In a couple of months, the only thing we'll have to watch is state TV propaganda.

In reality, ABC claims Kimmel is suspended "indefinitely".  I guess they're waiting to see how much of a backlash it causes.  

Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr took to X earlier on Wednesday to praise Nexstar for not airing the late-night talk show on its ABC affiliate networks in response to Kimmel’s comments about the death of Kirk: “I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing. Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community.”

The news came after Nexstar, which owns dozens of local ABC affiliates, announced its intention to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! episodes starting Wednesday night.

[...]

Carr said, “Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say, ‘This garbage, to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future, isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.’ But this sort of status quo is obviously not, not acceptable where we are.”

  TV Insider

Apparently, Carr is a whore to power.

BTW, Stephen Colbert won Best Talk Show a few days ago.

And, reminder...

UPDATE 03:23 pm:  The orange god king is looking really unhealthy.

Legally, they are.

The Trump administration is full of hateful, evil, vengeful nut jobs.  

UPDATE 09/19/2025:

Apparently, the law is whatever he thinks it is.

And what exactly did Jimmy Kimmel say? Reports are making it sound like he said something objectionable about Charlie Kirk. But that's not true. He said something objectionable about the Orange God King and his minions.

"Thank you for joining us here in Los Angeles, the second largest city in a bitterly divided nation where, like the rest of the country, we're still trying to wrap our heads around the senseless murder of the popular podcaster and conservative activist Charlie Kirk yesterday, whose death has amplified our anger, our differences," Kimmel said on his show last week.

"I've seen a lot of extraordinarily vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum. Some people are cheering this, which is something I won't ever understand," he said in the opening monologue.

"We had another school shooting yesterday in Colorado, the 100th one of the year. And with all these terrible things happening, you would think that our president will at least make an attempt to bring us together. But he didn't," Kimmel continued.

"President Obama did. President Biden did. Presidents Bush and Clinton did. President Trump did not. Instead, he blamed Democrats for their rhetoric," he said, shifting his monologue to attack Trump for his past behavior on matters such as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

[...]

Kimmel said in his opening monologue on Monday that the U.S. had "hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it, but in between the finger-pointing, there was grieving."

He noted the White House "flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this."

Kimmel added: "Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. 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?"

  Axios

UPDATE 09/25/2025:

Another Trump/asshole

Because Elon Musk is a thin-skinned, petty (is it "petit"?) tyrant?

Also...

Twitter suspended at least a handful of reporters on Thursday, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, the New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and political video influencer Aaron Rupar.

[...]

It is unclear what prompted the suspensions.

Rupar, who made Mediaite’s list of the Most Influential in News Media for 2022 published on Thursday, said he does not know why his account was suspended.

[...]

Later, it was reported Rupar’s account was permanently suspended.

  MSN

Perhaps because he regularly video-clipped Trump's speeches at the most unflattering and dishonest bits.

Rupar's response.    

Musk must have changed his mind since April...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Also, rival platforms not allowed:

UPDATE:

Apparently, Musk suspended all accounts that linked to an account tracking his private plane.  I wonder why he couldn't just tell those accounts (most all journalists) to take down those links.  

UPDATE:  Looks like Musk is indeed another Trump and making journalists "enemies of the people."

Sheera and Katie may both be suspended next.*

UPDATE:  Good one...

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

UPDATE:  JFC!  Now he's done away with Twitter Spaces.  Elon Musk is the embodiment of "cancel culture" and a giant fucking baby.

UPDATE 12/16:

UPDATE:

*UPDATE:

Musk left the event, and not long after the Space abruptly ended and was then deleted entirely by Twitter.

Then Twitter took the entire Spaces product offline for almost a day, with Musk saying a “legacy bug” needed to be fixed. After it returned, Notopoulos found she had been banned from Spaces.

[...]

Twitter also targeted its nearest rival, Mastodon, banning linking to several Mastodon servers and blocking users from adding their Mastodon username to their profile.

  Guardian

Musk is Trump's twin brother from another mother.

UPDATE:

UPDATE 12/18:

It's not getting better.

No doubt he already plans to step down.  He's been getting complaints from Tesla investors that he's spending too much time on Twitter and not enough on Tesla.

Throughout the week, investors have called on Musk to find someone else to run Twitter’s day- to-day operations, and shift his focus back to Tesla. On Wednesday, the EV company’s third-largest investor Leo KoGuan, tweeted that Musk had “abandoned Tesla” and that the company “has no working CEO.” Following the platform’s journalistic purge, investor Joe Cirincion tweeted a call for Musk to leave Twitter, accusing him of “killing the company with his antics.”

  Rolling Stone

Also...

Elon Musk on Wednesday told a Delaware judge that he plans to "reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time."

  Axios

From this case:

Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta hopes to prove that Musk used his dominance over the electric vehicle maker's board to craft [his] 2018 [$56 billion pay] package and then duped investors into approving it.

[...]

The first day of a week-long trial in Wilmington, Delaware, featured testimony from Ira Ehrenpreis, a Tesla director since 2007, who was pressed to explain why the board did not demand that Musk dedicate himself to the company full-time.

[...]

Musk, speaking virtually to a business conference on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday said he had too much on his plate at the moment.

[...]

Tornetta has asked the court to rescind the pay package, which Tornetta's attorney Greg Varallo said was $20 billion larger than the annual gross domestic product of the state of Delaware.

Musk and Tesla's directors, who are also defendants, have denied Tornetta's allegations, arguing that the pay package ensured the entrepreneur would guide Tesla through a critical period, which helped drive the stock tenfold higher.

[...]

The disputed Tesla package allows Musk to buy 1% of Tesla's stock at a deep discount each time escalating performance and financial targets are met. Otherwise, Musk gets nothing.

Tesla has hit 11 of the 12 targets as its value ballooned briefly to more than $1 trillion from $50 billion, according to court papers.

A decision will likely take around three months after the trial and could be appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court.

  Reuters

UPDATE:

So now he can claim he wasn't just a fuck-up, but that he put it to a vote and is bowing to "vox populi".  And his ironically challenged fans can cry "cancel culture".

UPDATE 12/19:  It will  never end.

Today's "conservative" politics

I’m part of the first Black generation since the end of Reconstruction who will die in a country that is more legally bigoted than it was when we were born.

[...]

[C]onservative “thought” is not what it used to be. And conservative “skill” at expressing those thoughts has now largely devolved into what plays well on Fox News. In my day, you could distinguish between, say, William F. Buckley and David Duke. And, more to the point, even if you couldn’t draw a meaningful distinction between the policies Buckley and Duke would support, Buckley was carefully practiced in saying the quiet part quietly. James Baldwin could hear it, but most white folks could not (or would not).

Conservatives will tell you that [...] a rise of “illiberalism” is squelching free speech across academia, and chipping away at freedom anywhere and everywhere else.

[...]

What conservatives would have acknowledged as racist as recently as 20 years ago is today’s conservative orthodoxy.

[...]

Take the Voting Rights Act, which in 2006 was reauthorized by an overwhelming majority of the House and received unanimous approval in the Senate. Just 15 years later, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—meant to restore the original Voting Rights Act after the conservative-controlled Supreme Court eviscerated it in 2013—received 219 votes in the House, none of them from Republicans, and couldn’t get anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate.

[...]

And yet, the bigoted trash that gets trundled out on Tucker Carlson every night is what these white wingers actually believe. The fact that their racism is raw and unapologetic doesn’t make it any less real, or any less of a force in American society. This dynamic is especially acute in legal academia, where the bigotry endemic to mainstream conservative thought is given the force of binding law by the U.S. Supreme Court and judges throughout the federal and state court systems. Chief Justice John Roberts has made a career out of limiting the ability of Black people to vote. Clarence Thomas thinks systemic racism is just something Black people are supposed to overcome, while his wife is famous for actively supporting a violent insurrection. Samuel Alito—well, the only thing that mitigates his antipathy towards Black people is that he also hates women, gay people, Muslims, civility, democracy, and the truth.

  Elie Mystal @ Balls and Strikes

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Something, somoething, cancel culture

A parent earlier this week demanded the book, “Michelle Obama: Political Icon,” by Heather E. Schwartz, be removed from Katy Independent School District libraries, alleging it "unfairly" paints former President Trump as a "bully" and makes white girls feel ashamed of themselves.

The book is among at least 86 titles challenged by parents in Texas this year, according to a NBC News tally, with most of them centered around race, sexuality or gender.

  The Hill

If "a parent" is female, I know one white girl who SHOULD be ashamed of herself.

The parent in their complaint said they believed the book was written to indoctrinate children into "the leftist movement with a negatively slanted view of another president," and taught "reverse racism” by “wanting young white girls to believe that the way they talk is a culturally unacceptable way in today's society."

The way they talk?

Also, the other president is Trump, of course.

A spokesperson for the Katy Independent School District told Changing America that the book was never a candidate for removal.

"The inquiry cited was submitted by one parent of the over 89,500 children the school district serves," Katy ISD Communications Manager Maria Corrales DiPetta wrote in an email. "Contrary to suggestive media reports, the book was never considered for removal, nor removed at any point, from District libraries."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is it time to start a GoFundMe to get Tucker Carlson professional help?

But....I don't get the chyron.  He's complaining that the removal of sexy shoes is offending him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Tucker was right.  😆