Breaking News from Pod Save America - BREAKING: Jimmy Kimmel PULLED OFF AIR After Trump Administration Pressure

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett discuss Jimmy Kimmel being pulled off air by ABC after Trump Administration pressure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, love it. We've got some big breaking news Wednesday night. Disney and ABC are polling Jimmy Kimball's show indefinitely following remarks he made Monday night about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here's what Kimmel said. 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 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. I condolences on the lawmaker friend, Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks?

They've just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. Yes. He's at the fourth stage. of grief, construction. Demolition. Construction.

This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay? This decision came after FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, said this on Benny Johnson's podcast Wednesday. Benny Johnson is a TPUSA staffer. There's actions that we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, listen, we are going to preempt.

We are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC. If we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion. So I think, again, 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, you know, 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 acceptable where we are. It's pretty chilling. You have the chair of the FCC basically talking like a momster.

Apparently he also said in that interview, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. And now we have ABC clearly choosing the easy way. Yeah, we found the easy way. That ABC seems to have folded so quickly. immediately to go even beyond that, right? Like all these people out there being like, well, you know, Jimmy Kimmel said that he was one of us when this was a left-wing shooter. Now, whatever the specific meaning of like one of us or whatever the exact term he uses could mean that like the images over the weekend were that he came from a Republican family, that he wasn't trans as some people had a lot. I don't know exactly what the meaning would be. But even if you take that

as being inaccurate, we have. Corrected. Yeah, we have a way. He, do not think that he would have addressed this controversy that he wouldn't be willing to talk. about this on the show. He could have answered this with speech. Yeah, this is such an abridgment of free speech. I mean, look, to read the full quote, Brendan Carr said, 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. They have a license granted by us at the FCC and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest. There are calls for Kimmel to be fired. I think you could

certainly see a path forward for suspension over this. So, clearly Carr is using his power at the FCC to all but demand that Disney fire Kimmel. I didn't have heard that last part. That was about how explicit about calling for suspension. Shocking. So the, yeah, Jesus. And then within what hours of this interview airing, we find out that a bunch of affiliates have, would you have the timeline of this? Yeah.

So just before the ABC announcement, Nexstar, which is one of the largest owners of local TV stations in the United States, They said that they were preempting episodes that Jimmy Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future. And, Love it, you will be shocked to learn that Next Star is attempting a merger with another media company called Tegna subject to regulatory approval. So we have all these different levels of pressure from the federal government. We have the license pressure. We have the regulatory pressure on the approval of a merger, what they've been using to great effect. That's how they threatened CBS in Paramount. And that's ultimately, as part of that, we saw Stephen Colbert.

show canceled. And it's just, it is obviously wrong for the federal government to put this kind of pressure on a company for speech. It doesn't like, even if you view the speech, even if the speech is inaccurate, right? The First Amendment doesn't go out the window because someone said something inaccurate. You can ask them to correct it. You can criticize them. You can tell people why it's wrong. I suppose someone could sue because you have to prove they did it on purpose, the actual malice. But the First Amendment doesn't go out the window. Yeah.

Also, like, again, we talked about this on the show, but the ABC settled with the White House and paid $16 million for these comments made by George Stephanopoulos that were entirely defensible in court. It bought them nothing, right? Because I was looking at some tweets from the White House. Taylor Budwich, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, tweeted, welcome to consequence culture. Normal common sense Americans are no longer taking the bullshit in companies like ABC are finally willing to do the right thing and a reasonable thing.

Make America great again. The Trump War Room account tweeted, hey, ABC, when are you going to pull Matt Gutman, ABC? You know the reporter who was touched by the text messages that Charlie Kirk's assassin sent his lover? Like, these guys got a taste of cancel culture and they want more and they like it. And, you know, I see also like, by the way, I think there is a divide playing out at real time, though I think a lot of people will start learning how to sing from the songbook. but there are people that are instantly who see themselves as pro first amendment being like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like Kimmel could have apologized. This seems to be going too far. This is a First Amendment issue. But I see just as many people saying, well, you know, these are the consequences or, you know, ABC hates, ABC has been hating on the right for so long or this isn't a free speech. It's a, you know, he clearly said something inaccurate. And it's actually not that far from like the attempts to use like a mortgage document to try to get somebody fired from. a federal job, right? You like comb through the records to try to find a mistake and then use that as a justification. Like, so the, so Donald Trump, no friend of accuracy can say whatever he wants, Republicans can say whatever, because they're friends of the regime, right? But liberals,

you better be on your best behavior because if you're somebody that you're, that is already disfavored, one false step, and all of a sudden you have the FCC breathing down your neck, one mistake, one error, you go too far, you fall for something you saw online, and then, and then you'll have lost your ability to, we'll come after your, we'll come after your, corporate owners will make your life miserable, will make you pay. And like, of course, ABC, Disney, they have a right to hire and fire whoever they want. But it's just so obvious here that this did not come because of some outcry. It didn't come from a bunch of sponsors, you know, threatening to cut advertising spend on the show.

This is because the FCC chairman went on a show at TPUSA of all places and threatened these networks and threatened the affiliates. and the affiliate conglomerate next star is seeking his approval for a merger. And it also is coming on the heels of this series of steps that are so obviously First Amendment violations from Trump's flag burning EO, which is, you know, again, we talked about this on the pod on Tuesday. Like it is a Supreme Court vetted instance of free speech. They were, you know, they were throwing kids in jail for writing op-eds about Gaza for weeks on an end. We're kicking, the State Department announced that you can throw foreigners out of the country if they post mean things about Charlie Kirk on social media. Like, this is some scary fascist stuff. And just the, like the FCC chairman just sort of basically doing programming for these networks, right?

Like saying like, well, it's the kind of, you know, this is, you know, has to serve the community. Let me say again. And you have the FCC chairman basically acting kind of like a programming lead for ABC now, right? Basically, like, well, I think the right thing to do would be to suspend. Like, you're giving direct advice. Advice for how you think they should, what they need to do to avoid your ire with this sort of implicit threat of the affiliates licensed or or ABC more broadly. And, like, I mean, you know, FCC chairman, not usually famous. Right.

Not usually well known. Right. Right. Yeah. And like the FCC, like they can, they can ban obscenity and punishee for obscenity or profanity. They can talk about setting limits for like certain amounts of children's programming. There's sort of political broadcasting rules and equal opportunities for candidates and, and like disclosures and things. But this is, this is very new.

And, you know, it was interesting. The other day, the Attorney General Pam Bondi made this statement about how she was going to crack down on hate speech. You can, there's free speech, but then there's hate speech and we're going to criminalize hate speech. And she kind of walked that back. And I imagine that is because in addition to the ACLU and liberals like crying foul and saying that's blatantly unconstitutional, people like Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly and a lot of like conservative voices were like, hey, this is a road we don't want to go down. This is a path to tyranny. And I have to say like, yes, the attorney general talking about criminalizing speech, that is considerably further than the FCC getting someone fired. from a network, but like, we're still walking down that road.

I just, look, it's almost quaint to say it. Imagine if Barack Obama said, had his FCC chairman go out there and say that Greg Guvill probably should be pulled from the air because of an offhand comment that he thought was inaccurate, right? There would be a righteous outrage from the right, an uproar to say that that is obviously a violation of the First Amendment. And it is true, like, look, it has, it, I continue. you to be like I can't allow I can't believe I'm still shocked by the number of people who's

rushed to rather than point out how obviously dangerous this is go first to justifying it or explaining it because they don't like what Jimmy Kimmel said right they don't like the joke they don't like the tone they think what he said there is inaccurate fine fine do you not understand why that's not the main issue why why why that is dangerous even if you don't like Jimmy Kimmel and think he think he think he did it because he's a biased guy sure sure yeah but the fact that people can't see that or enough people aren't willing to see that on the right anymore. So fucking dispiriting. And finally, Brian Stelter, who's the chief media analyst at CNN, tweeted that he had reached out to the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for comment on what had happened at ABC.

And Brendan Carr sent him back this. So that's a gift from the office. So we are being governed by autocratic, censorious, absolute fucking losers. Fuck. Good stuff. I will say clearly, like, there are two problems that are happening at the same time. One is an aggressive and radicalized federal government that is wielding its power in unconstitutional ways. And the other is that they have found how easily it works.

Like, these people are empowered in part because a company like ABC is willing to concede so readily. Like, this is a fight that they could win, at least in court, right? They are on firm ground to not be pressured into programming decisions by the federal government is a clear violation of the First Amendment. But every time these companies are giving up the First Amendment and not fighting for it. And it's just a reminder, by the way, that we need independent media. We're building an independent media company here at Cricket. And if you want, you can subscribe by clicking join below to become a paid subscriber or go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on any of a number of wonderful platforms. And, you know, look,

you know, you can't fire me, Tommy. Yeah, we're not going to fire our late night host here. No matter what joke, love it makes, we're not going to fire him. Maybe he can host a show with Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. I love that. By the way, Fox News, they didn't fire the guy who said, let's kill all the homeless people. Yeah, they gave him a beat to apologize. Brian Kilmey had got to come back. He said that on a Wednesday.

Everybody picked it up all over the weekend. By Monday, he apologized. Yeah, Kimmel said this. Yeah, give Kimmel a beat to fucking say, oopsie, daisy. The habit of this country. This is not good. Let me tell you the secret of how to look like you know what you're doing. Use mushrooms, toss them in eggs, noodles.

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