Last night, in another act of corporate cowardice in the late-night sector, ABC announced that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would be “pre-empted indefinitely” after FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened action against the company following on-air comments about right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated a week prior.

Kirk, who made a career out of workshopping hateful talking points on college campuses primarily targeting black and queer people, which were then recycled into the larger right wing media system, got his worthless racist guts splattered all over Utah Valley University campus in front of thousands of people. The investigation, such as it is, is in its early stages, and for now, the suspect’s motives remain a point of intense contention between the American political right and left.

Kirk’s assassination was followed by a frenetic response by his supporters and friends within the Trump administration, who seem to be trying simultaneously to honor him at the national level while pushing back ferociously on any mention of his life’s work. Several websites have sprung up straight out of the McCarthy era to collect lists of people remarking on his death on social media to harass and demand that they be fired, frequently targeting academics and journalists.

Kimmel, and all the people who work on his show, are now the highest-profile victims of this campaign, which goes straight to the highest levels of government. Kimmel, a frequent and enthusiastic critic of President Donald Trump since he began his political career in 2015, had limited his remarks to extremely tame observations about this political reaction and to Trump’s apparent disinterest in Kirk’s death. Carr personally threatened to open a political investigation into ABC as explicit punishment for Kimmel’s comments. Trump had been pressuring Disney to censor Kimmel as far back as 2018, making this another specific example of Trump-aligned figures using Kirk’s death as an excuse to go after something he’d wanted for years.

Hey, didn’t this just happen?

Yes, you could say that – the Nazi takeover of Germany was quite recent in the scale of human history, and just about anyone who knows the details can see the overlap plain as day. The Nazi government consolidated power rapidly on Feb. 28, 1933 with the Reichstag Fire Decree, which indefinitely suspended several articles of the German constitution, roughly equating to the American First and Fourth Amendments, and then set law enforcement on the communists, whom Hitler had already wanted to target. Right-wing governments frequently use crises like these to build momentum toward crackdowns they’d already had in mind – more recent examples include the Bush administration using the Sept. 11 attacks to build into the completely unrelated Iraq invasion, which was already in the Republican party’s 2000 platform, and the current Israeli government using the Oct. 7 attacks to fuel an obvious campaign of genocide that has been ongoing since the country’s inception in 1948.

No no no – didn’t this just happen a couple of months ago at Paramount?

Oh! Yes.

In July, CBS announced that leading late-night host Stephen Colbert’s contract would not be renewed when it expires next year in a move that is widely seen as capitulating to the Trump administration. Parent company Paramount agreed to donate $16 million to the Trump Presidential Library to settle a lawsuit that they easily could have won. Colbert, another frequent and vociferous critic of the president who had helmed the highest-rated late night show in the nation for several years at that point, called the payoff what it was – a big fat bribe. He was told he would be let go days later.

Kimmel’s firing mirrors not only the end of this process, but the beginning – in December 2024, before Trump was inaugurated, ABC agreed to donate $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library to settle another easily winnable lawsuit, and now, at the express behest of the administration, they’ve fired their own late-night star.

Trump controls both companies through the administration’s power to approve mergers. In his first term, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in a deal that required Justice Department approval. Paramount is currently in the process of merging with Skydance, and Nexstar Media Group, which operates the ABC stations “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” appears on, entered an agreement to acquire its main rival, TENGA Inc., last month.

At the time of the Colbert announcement, Trump gloated, “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.” Last night, he publicly encouraged NBC to fired late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

Wait, I remember! Didn’t this just happen a few years ago at Disney specifically?

Oh! Oh yes, yes in fact it did.

In 2018, as pre-production was ramping up for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Disney reflexively fired series writer/director James Gunn after trolls started circulating bad jokes he’d made on Twitter 10 years prior. After public outcry, including from the cast, he was quietly re-hired a year later, but not before establishing a relationship with Disney’s main superhero rivals at Warner Bros. Gunn directed Superman this year and is now in charge of the company’s entire suite of DC Comics properties.

Days before all this, Colbert received an almost minute-long standing ovation when he came out to present at the Emmys and took home the trophy for Outstanding Talk Series, the show’s eighth straight year as a nominee.

That’s why I’m not worried about this. Cowards blow in the wind.

The immediate, universal backlash against Kimmel’s dismissal streaked across the internet last night, from other media outlets, from fans, from entertainers, from politicians and even from former president Barak Obama, almost all of whom are stating that they plainly see the corruption at work here, and given Disney’s specific pattern here, it’s hard to imagine the show won’t resume within a few days – assuming Kimmel is willing to return.

None of this is easy. None of this should be taken lightly. Right now, hundreds of people are out of a job, and apparently I’m doing my damndest to join them.

But two months ago, I wrote that we must never be willing to comply with authoritarianism, that they’ve already lost as long as we refuse to be afraid, and now it’s quite clear that we’re not. Stay loud, stay angry and keep fighting back.