As Jimmy Kimmel returns to the airwaves, he thanks two Kentucky lawmakers
Jimmy Kimmel directly thanked two powerful Kentucky Republicans in his return to television Tuesday night.
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled off the air by Disney, the network’s parent company, last week after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested his agency could take action against them.
The comments from Carr and subsequent network action set off alarm bells for many because of the free speech implications. That included Kentucky Sens. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell, who were among many Republicans specifically shouted out by the liberal-leaning host Tuesday.
“Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don’t support my show and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway. People who I never would have imagined like Ben Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old pal Ted Cruz,” Kimmel said.
Carr and other conservatives had expressed displeasure with a joke Kimmel made about Trump supporters trying to prove the accused assassin of popular conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was not one of them and poking fun at Trump’s response to the killing.
Before Kimmel was pulled, Carr suggested companies reliant on FCC licenses to air their programming could do it “the easy way or the hard way,” vowing to revoke licenses for those who didn’t “change conduct.”
Paul had sharp words for Carr’s comments in an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday.
“Absolutely inappropriate, Brendan Carr’s got no business weighing in on this,” Paul said.
He defended companies’ right to fire employees like Kimmel if they found certain comments to be distasteful, but “the government’s got no business in it.”
McConnell struck a similar chord in post to X on Monday, agreeing with Cruz’s comparison of Carr’s behavior to that of a mob boss.
“Well, my colleague, Ted Cruz, said it looked just like Goodfellas. As a First Amendment guy, myself, I think he’s probably got it right. You don’t have to like what somebody says on TV to agree that the government shouldn’t be getting involved here,” McConnell wrote.
In addition to his shoutouts to conservatives, Kimmel also said he understood why his controversial comments seemed “ill-timed, or unclear, or maybe both,” adding “it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.”
Speaking at a college campus in Utah on Sep. 10, Kirk was fatally shot from long range while discussing political issues in front of a large crowd. The suspected assassin, a 22-year-old man, is in custody and charged with murder.
Kirk, 31, was mourned across the country, culminating in a packed stadium memorial service in Arizona on Sunday. Kentucky politicians, including many conservatives, shared their grief and condemnations of political violence in the wake of his murder.
In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, some conservatives compared the act to a “war” between progressives and conservatives and have combed social media to alert employers to people who have said negative things about Kirk after his death.
One school district in Kentucky took action against a teacher for their comments, and a University of Kentucky employee has been investigated.
