One of the unsaid rules about American comedy, at least in the last couple of decades, is that it barely evokes laughter, perhaps because it started taking liberal talking points too seriously. When the news broke of Kimmel being fired, one wondered when was the last time he was actually funny onscreen: the correct answer is nine years ago in a “deleted scene” featuring Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck which was a part of a promo for Batman vs Superman.
The truth is, with a few notable exceptions like Bill Maher or Dave Chappelle, most American comedians have been de facto members of the Democratic establishment, which was evident in the run-up to the 2024 US Presidential Election where they came up against a candidate who was just naturally funnier than all of them put together while they rooted for a candidate who would laugh at everything.All of this makes the reaction to Jimmy Kimmel Lies—sorry, Live—being taken off air extremely predictable. A piece in the Daily Beast titled “R.I.P. the First Amendment, Killed by Cowardice and Greed” epitomised the reactions where it moored Kimmel’s firing around the death of the First Amendment, kind of like Western civilisation peaked when Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done played over the end credits of Transformers (2007).The piece, subtly taking a leaf from the Ashwatthama hata iti moment from the Mahabharata, omitted Jimmy Kimmel’s statement that got him in trouble: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterise this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”That particular bit from Kimmel (anything other than them) likening the killer to MAGA, was absolutely mendacious, even if one could argue that it did not qualify as hate speech under the Brandenburg definition of hate speech (call for violence and likely to incite).The rest of the piece is predictable: lamenting the death of the First Amendment, complaining about Americans facing professional consequences for expressing their views, the state using the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to silence political rivals, the media and social media, universities and big corporations acquiescing to threats from the state. The article goes on to argue the last time this happened was the McCarthy era, conveniently omitting that this was exactly what happened to Trump and his allies after the President left office. In fact, almost every point could be replicated from a Conservative POV about how American media and the other levers of control acted after Donald Trump lost.Trump was de-platformed from all social media platforms, his allies were hunted and the DOJ weaponised to find loopholes to go after anyone related to MAGA. And this happened with the media cheering on, blatantly repeating the lies of the Steele dossier. The feverish fantasies were treated as fact, only to collapse under scrutiny years later.The lies weren’t just exclusive to Trump or the MAGAverse.
Cancel culture has been America’s favourite blood sport. Roseanne Barr lost her show overnight after one tweet. Gina Carano was dumped from The Mandalorian and her agency for memes. Megyn Kelly was fired by NBC over Halloween costumes. Dave Chappelle faced Netflix walkouts for jokes. Joe Rogan was hounded with boycott campaigns on Spotify. Tucker Carlson was yanked off Fox News after advertiser pressure (and Jimmy Kimmel was very happy about it). Parler was wiped out by Apple, Google, and Amazon in concert. J.K. Rowling was blacklisted for insisting on biology. Mike Lindell had his pillows pulled from shelves and his accounts banned. And Alex Jones was simultaneously erased from every major platform in 2018.The media and academia came together to silence anyone who suggested that sex was real and not a spectrum, that men and women should have separate teams and bathrooms, or that Covid-19 could have come from a lab, with even the scientific community abandoning all pretence of Merton’s laws. Joe Biden’s cognition was talked up, Harris’ inability to even record an interview was played down. Universities that once prided themselves on being the modern-day Socratic marketplace of ideas punished people who didn’t toe the liberal line. Scientific American started sounding less like a journal of science and more like BuzzFeed in a lab coat.Which brings us back to Kimmel — the tragic hero of this farce, not silenced by tyranny but by Nielsen ratings. This isn’t a free-speech issue per se, but an accounting one. His suspension, or earlier Colbert’s brush with censors, isn’t a First Amendment tragedy; it’s just capitalism euthanising a failing format.
Late-night TV is dead, the jokes aren’t funny, and the audience would rather watch Joe Rogan. ABC didn’t suddenly grow a conscience about hate speech; they simply found a convenient excuse to dump a bloated whale that hadn’t been funny since Ben Affleck pretended to climb out of his pants.Was it timed to please Trump, the FCC, or to pre-empt regulatory heat? Quite possibly. But let’s not pretend this is Selma or Tiananmen. This was network math: keep advertisers happy, ditch the dead weight.Much of American media has been operating as an extended arm of the Democratic Party because it assumed the gravy train of clicks, outrage, and Trump-as-foil would last forever. Trump has gone about dismantling that, punishing universities, threatening corporate overlords and making them bend the knee, getting rid of federally funded services like NPR — whose CEO once declared that reverence for the truth might be a distraction to “finding common ground and getting things done.” With friends like that, who needs propagandists?Trump, with his former national BFF Musk, promised the Republican ticket was about free speech. But he’s hardly the first politician to turn Janus-faced after the results come in. If Trump had lost, the “woke” snakeskin would never have been shed, and America’s institutions would have happily kept humming along in their old partisan register. When Trump announced he was running again, Murdoch’s New York Post treated it like an embarrassing obituary — buried deep inside, as if hoping no one noticed.America’s commitment to the First Amendment has never been principled; it has always been transactional. The rule is simple: let my guy speak, shoot the other guy. Sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally.And that’s the bottom line: free speech in America is not a right in the Platonic sense, but a privilege weaponised by whoever holds the microphone. It may be better than most countries, but it is still a delusion — an aspirational myth that survives more in the slogans than in the practice.In fact, the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk inevitably showed America’s tenuous relationship with the first two Amendments in its constitution.
The First is lionised in speeches and slogans, but jettisoned whenever it’s inconvenient. When Trump left office, liberals and their Big Tech allies gleefully threw red-hatters off every platform, buried stories they disliked, and weaponised Russiagate like a holy war.Today, Trump and MAGA sing the same hymn. The very people who raged against cancel culture now practise it with missionary zeal. Academics, nurses, and journalists who mocked Kirk’s death have been punished into silence. The chorus hasn’t changed — only the choir.And the Second? America treats it like scripture carved in bullets. No matter how many bodies hit the ground, the excuses pile up higher than the graves: blame mental illness, blame drag queens, blame anyone but the Glock. The right to bear arms has become the right to bury friends.The First muzzles, the Second kills. One silences you, the other buries you. And yet both are worshipped like scripture. Free speech and gun rights — America’s two holy freedoms, and the two it understands least.
