Thoughts on Jimmy Kimmel's Suspension

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
First thing we got to talk about yesterday. I was
sitting on my sofa. We had just gotten back from
run club when I opened my phone and I looked
at my phone and it said Jimmy Kimmel suspended indefinitely.
And then there were, you know, conflicting reports. I suppose

(00:20):
most of what we heard was Disney did the suspension,
and they did that as a part of the Jimmy
Kimmel had a bit last week. Was it Friday, I
don't know. It was something like talking about Charlie Kirk's

(00:41):
assassin being maga and that people who were maga are
trying not to admit it or something like that. I mean,
just something that a late night talk show host does
not need to talk about. And then Donald Trump today
was interviewed and he said, this wasn't about Charlie Kirk,

(01:07):
and it wasn't about all these different people or these
different things. This is what he said, and I quote
Jimmy Kimble was fired because he had bad ratings. More
than anything else. He said a horrible thing about a
great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk. And Jimmy Kimmel is
not a talented person. He had very bad ratings and

(01:27):
they should have fired him a long time ago. He
was fired for lack of talent end quote. Okay, I
don't think that's what it is based on what we're hearing,
but it's interesting it also, I mean, you want to
talk about the different things that go into this. Apparently

(01:49):
Disney did this and pulled the plug, but it sounded
like there was a threat from the FCC about misinformation
in the way that he Jimmy Kimmel talked about this.
And then there's like this merger situation where certain companies

(02:10):
are taking over other companies or whatever, and there's some
convoluted way of this stuff to happen. Now let me
let me go ahead and do this really quick. I
two things. Number one, my dream job was always to

(02:33):
host a radio or to host a late night talk show.
Radio's cool, but I wanted to be like Conan O'Brien.
I wanted to be goofy. I wanted to laugh. I
wanted other people to laugh. I didn't want my conversations
to be too serious. You probably could figure out that's
kind of where like my my sweet spot is is
I just I want to laugh, But I like talking

(02:56):
to people, so like interviewing people about different things. I
felt like, yeah, that could be fun. We could do that.
It's a short form interview, very entertaining. You get to
have like certain musical guests or comedians come on and
everybody's just smiling, laughing, clapping. And I don't know what happened,

(03:17):
but in the last decade maybe more and maybe as
a kid, I was just naive to politics being involved
at all. But people like Stephen Colbert, who's already been canceled. Remember,
everybody acted like, oh, we're trying to censor and in
this long time institution, this late show. Look here, this

(03:40):
late show was a success because David Letterman made it
a success. If we're here to act like there's some
sort of lineage with this particular show that the Tonight
Show doesn't have with Jimmy Fallon, which, by the way,
as far as I can tell, Fallon doesn't really get
into politics. I'm not a big fan of him laughing
at him himself all the time on SNL, and I

(04:03):
don't know if I'm really that compelled to watch much
of any of his show now, except for the social
media clips, which is part of the problem for these
late night shows. But Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel especially
have just absolutely leaned into political angles, and it chases
away a big chunk of their audience, especially when your
show is completely predicated on getting people to watch social

(04:27):
media clips. And I don't know of many conservatives who
appreciate anything that those two guys do or what they
say I did. For whatever, it's worth mentioned that on
Wednesday and on Wednesday's shows last week, after the Charlie
Kirk assassination took place, both Colbert and Kimmel did say

(04:52):
that this was a horrible act. They condemned it, but
of course when the political spin started to come out,
they couldn't help themselves, specifically Kimmel trying to blame people
on the political right. You are a late night talk show.
I do not want to hear you wax poetic about
politics at eleven pm Central Time. Did the election of

(05:15):
twenty twenty four teach these characters nothing? Taylor Swift went
out of her way to post a photo of her
holding a cat, saying she was voting for Kamala Harris.
That didn't help. The Harris campaign spends almost a billion
dollars getting people like Cardi b Beyonce and Megan d
Stallion to speak on behalf of the campaign, even if

(05:36):
they have no idea what's going on, and their entire
talent skill set is them twerking. That didn't help. George
Clooney doing everything he could in a more traditional way
to raise money and get people to pay attention to
what the campaign is doing, that didn't help. Yet people
like Kimmel think that it's somehow in their wheelhouse for

(05:58):
them to be like, oh, you know what, these Republicans
are terrible people, and this terrible thing that happened to
a Republican only happened because of other Republicans falsehood, And
now everybody's like, oh no, cancel culture, Oh no, freedom
of speech again, a complete misunderstanding of freedom of speech.

(06:22):
You do not get it. First off, Jimmy Kimmel is
on a network. Network television operates by different rules than
cable does. So when you're watching a show on TBS
versus watching a show on ABC, if they're playing the
same movie, different parts are going to be censored. Network television,
those big channels, they have to be much more careful
than the cable channels do. You may not notice much

(06:45):
censoring at all on some of those channels and some
of those movies. The FCC doesn't have the same control
over them as the FCC would have control over network television. Obviously,
there's a mixed message here because Donald Trump talks about
it's being bad ratings and stuff that doesn't here to
be what this is. I think everybody's got to get
up behind each other on the same message because we
don't want people to misinterpret this is some sort of

(07:07):
suppression of speech. Now, the same people that are getting
all up in arms about this are the same people
that were celebrating and throwing big parties that Roseanne Barr
got taken off of a show on the same network
we're talking about seven years ago because she was saying
things in a conservative way, very pro Trumpian remarks. And
she had a TV show called The Connors, which was

(07:28):
built all around her character as Roseanne, Roseanne Connor and
all the Connors, all this stuff. They killed her off
the TV show because she became a liability because of
the political nature of her comments. We can debate and
argue in that moment, Oh she got canceled. Oh freedom
of speech, she doesn't have it. And now here we
are the people who were saying, well, her freedom of

(07:50):
speech was being suppressed, now are saying good riddance. Jimmy
Kimmel and the people that were celebrating in twenty eighteen
that Roseanne was getting taken off TV. They were celebrating,
and now they're saying, oh they in French, I cannot
believe this. You're taking away my freedom of speech. I
don't know who needs to hear this, but the government
is the only person or the only entity that is
directly responsible for the freedom of speech. So for your

(08:13):
freedom of speech and your first minument to be in friendshipon,
it has to be the government that is going to
you knocking on your door and saying you can't say
that freely. That's not what's happened here. Yes, the FCC
has a position where it has to understand and there
are all these things behind the scenes. Is being threatened
because of the rhetoric, the liberal rhetoric. Yeah, okay, so

(08:37):
you really think that the FCC is trying to cancel
these types of shows when news outlets have been saying
stuff like this on major networks for a long time.
Remember the CBS lawsuit with sixty minutes because of a
illegally cropped up interview that aired on the station. It

(08:57):
was teased one way and then didn't come out the
same way. CBS lost that lawsuit. It's not about politics,
it's about the rules. Throw in another little caveat here
that Hey, by the way, if the government specifically isn't
telling you that you can't say that, it is not,
in technicality, a violation of your freedom of speech or

(09:20):
your First Amendment rights. If your employer says you can't
say that, you're violating a code, just like teachers, like faculty,
members of colleges, like the people that are out there
working in the workforce. These people that are being held
accountable for saying hateful things when they're supposed to be
teaching young people things, among others. That's a bad representation

(09:40):
on the school district and parents all of a sudden
can't feel good about being you being in a classroom
with their child. Yeah, I guess what. The school district
has every right to act on that. Remember the Colin
Kaepernick situation. Remember in the NFL, all of these different
players started taking knees. Different ownership groups and different people
in charge of the NFL said, if you guys keep

(10:01):
doing stuff like this, we are going to punish you.
And everybody's like, I'm gonna keep doing it. And then
people said, you're suppressing their freedom of speech. No they're not.
It's a private entity. Those teams, those employers, those owners,
they don't have to do anything. They are businesses first
and foremost. They do what's in their best interest. So

(10:23):
I just hate how we get all this stuff confused.
I don't care about Jimmy Kimmel. I haven't watched an
episode of Jimmy Kimmel probably in the last fifteen years
at least. I have other things to do, other things
I care about. He, as far as I know, is
just a talking head celebrity that has an outlet once
a day, five days a week, and you can listen

(10:43):
to what he thinks about things. I've not once been
moved by anything he's ever said, so I get why
it's a big deal. But the hubbub absolutely makes no
difference to me. I just do not care. And for
the people who do care a lot about what Jimmy
Kimmel has to say, I apologize that your life has
because I'm so drab and dull. You can't find anyone
else to share opinions with my goodness, I feel sorry

(11:06):
for you. One thing that I definitely feel is some
passion for my bafflementt my baffle Like is that a word?
My bamboozle mint into why this Jimmy Kimmel thing is
such a big deal. And I also understand and also

(11:27):
know and get the whole platform that he is on.
But every time that he would talk about things politically,
it's just like, who the heck are you, dude, Like,
if you care this much about politics, run for office.
This is the same guy who was doing some of
the craziest, crudest things that television had seen on The

(11:48):
Man Show before he got the platform he is it
has now, is this you know, holier than thou talk
show host on late night television? He's if you go
watch The Man Show, if anything needed to be censored,
it was the stuff that they were doing, right, of
course not, We're not going to censor that. If you

(12:10):
want to watch that and you want to be a degenerate,
help yourself out, now, See I am kind of a degenerate.
I do like it when guys smack each other in
the face. I also like it when people go on
the streets, and you know, put people like the Impractical
Jokers have made an absolute career out of stuff like this,
where they put one of their guys or a person
into some sort of regular situation, tell them to do random,

(12:33):
crazy things and generate reactions from the people that are
seeing it. That's the whole point of the show. And
it's meant to make everybody laugh. Nothing's too serious about it.
All of a sudden, somewhere along the line, Jimmy Kimmel
got real woke and he just wanted to let everybody
know about it. I don't get it, So we'll see
what the long term health is. A lot of people

(12:55):
say he's canceled, he got fired, and stuff like that.
I'm not seeing that it is. As far as I know,
it's been postponed or suspended or whatever you want to
say it. That that was the terminology I saw indefinitely. Now,
can Jimmy Kimmel rally the troops somehow ask for reinstatement,

(13:20):
get his show back, and ABC slash Disney allow that
to happen. The people who own a majority of the
networks in which this show will air on, would they
allow that, and would the FCC slap their hands, give
them that warning and say you have to be careful
about the stuff that you put on your show and
from now on, otherwise you could be in real big trouble.

(13:42):
And would that be worth the risk? Can you trust
Jimmy Kimmel to go on his show and not to
say something that's going to get him or the people
that are sitting there in the offices, all the suits
in major trouble and have millions of dollars worth of
fines because he just ided not to break the rule
or he decided he didn't want to follow the rules

(14:03):
that were in place. But also, do you want to
have to babysit a guy? And again, remember why Colbert
got removed the Stephen Colbert Show, Like the Late Show
is Stephen Colbert. They were in the hole like forty
million dollars a year. Everybody's feeling sorry for Stephen Colbert

(14:23):
and that all the people that work on that show,
as if like this was some sort of lack of
justice was paid to this incredibly historic brand. I got
news for you, guys. If the Dallas Cowboys started losing
forty million dollars a year at all, for any reason whatsoever,

(14:46):
the NFL would be looking for new ownership, and they
would be moving them somewhere else or finding new ownership
in Dallas to try to like get things straightened out.
Even the biggest brands, if they start going in the
hold that frequently, especially that much, which forty million dollars
in TV money, that is ridiculous, especially when you consider

(15:07):
how much money they're paying these guys to host these shows.
Give me even ten percent of that money, ten percent
of that money to do one hour of work that
they do every single day, You'll never see me again.
I promise you I'll do. I don't know what. I
will swim with the dolphins. I will taste what the

(15:28):
dolphins leave behind. If that's what it takes to get
ten percent of what these guys make per year, I
tell you, Unfortunately, that's not gonna be happening, and people
aren't gonna be offering me such a deal to take.
And I couldn't imagine if you're losing forty million dollars
a year now. I don't know what the Kimmel property
is worth. I don't know how much money ABC or
Disney is losing on just letting that thing air. Maybe

(15:50):
they had the same idea that CBS had when they
canned the Cole Beart Show. But they couldn't do it
because in good faith, you didn't want to pile on
and act like that's some sort of exodus of all
these late night TV shows. I get that you want
to kind of have good optics with it. At the
same time, you have to keep yourself kind of on
the on the train tracks a little bit here and

(16:12):
understand that a business is going to operate the way
a business should. And I don't I'm not privy to
their numbers, but if they're losing money already and then
the FCC threatens to punish if there was another violation
and then return, whether it was like the government straight
up said you have to get rid of Kimmel or
what that's going to be the big debate. But it

(16:32):
sounds like Disney and ABC made the call it themselves,
and Disney, of course oversees ABC. So if Disney, you know,
the traditionally conservative, you know Disney company, we all know
that that's not the case either. That Disney has been
historically known as a very woke company. They've gotten in

(16:53):
a lawsuits with people like Ron DeSantis, a staunch Republican
governor in the state of Florida. All that stuff taking place, right,
And I like Disney. I like going to Disney World.
I don't like my politics and my cartoon characters to
get mixed up there. But if you think Disney did
this because they're all of a sudden really staunch on
the on the conservative front and they're not going to

(17:15):
allow any sort of liberalism on their stations, get out
of here with that. Disney is not that way. This
is done because he's on a network television show and
he's spreading falsehoods and misinformation about a murder, a high
profile murder at that, and trying to be politically divisive
to impress his woke audience somehow that was watching him

(17:36):
at midnight Eastern. So take what that. Take from that
what you will. I have no idea what the guy
thinks he's trying to accomplish. I don't get it. But
at the end of the day, if this is the
end for him and this is his demise, maybe he'd say, well,
I'm a martyr too. Look at me. I lost my
job because they talked about the things that I've truly felt.

(17:58):
He's not gonna have the same sort of platform audience.
You know why, because people know better. Go watch the
Man Show. That'll tell you all you need to know.
Now again, I want to tell everybody this, we got
to keep in mind about the differences in opinions politically,
is exactly the difference in what we believe is or isn't.

(18:18):
Cancel culture. You're seeing that from the people on the
political left now, who are always, you know, yelling and
trying to cancel people. And as soon as somebody on
their side ends up having their voice taken away because
they have abused it in some way, they cry, cancel culture,
cancel culture. You said you don't like, cancel culture, and

(18:39):
then you know it does. You can make the argument.
It works the other way too, with Republicans saying the
exact same thing about Roseanne Barn her political beliefs, and
when she was removed from television, we were saying, hey,
all this cancel culture. It's bad. And I think cancel
culture for the most part is bad. Thankfully, you know,
we're I think we're getting away from it just a
little bit, although I think we're too far down the

(19:00):
rabbit hole if you think about it. You know, the
Coldplay couple they're snuggling up in the at the cold
Play show. I mean, people out of them immediately and
ruined their lives. Now they ruin their own lives by
deciding they were trying to be secretive and cheating on
their significant others and acting like a fool when they
were put on the big screen. But I don't know,
like social media didn't out them, then that doesn't become

(19:27):
like a life altering thing for both of their families
and themselves. Right again, I don't feel sorry for them
as much as I feel bad for their families that
had to also deal with all that stuff. They were
finding the Facebook profiles of the people that they were
like married to. You know, it's crazy stuff. As far
as Jimmy Kimmel goes keV sent a few emails in

(19:48):
he said he wasn't funny no matter the reason, I'm
not gonna miss him. Yeah, I'll be honest. I I don't.
I don't, like I said, I don't remember really watching
him that much. The only thing that I ever watched
Kimmel stuff for was on social media after the fact,
when a musical artist that I was interested in was
on a show. I like the musical acts. I'm a

(20:10):
big music guy. So when you know, like when slip
knots on and they're playing a couple songs, I'm like, heck, heck, yeah,
I want to hear Slipknot on Jimmy Kimmel Live. What's
that gonna sound like? Another band that I like, Panic
at the Disco back when they were making awesome music
ten Fit to ten twelve years ago. You know, they
showed up on Kimmel and they were awesome. It's like this,

(20:32):
Kimmel actually does really good stuff for the musicians. They
got a great stage set up, the sound always sounds
really good. I like it. I don't need Jimmy Kimel
to enjoy that. I haven't watched Jimmy Kimmel monologue or interview.
I guess the only interview that I have watched was

(20:54):
in recent years. And this is well probably gosh, five
six years ago. Now is him and Fallen. Kimmel was
supposed to have Ryan Reynolds on and Fallon was supposed
to have Will Ferrell on. Now, Fallon is located in
New York and Kimmel's located in Los Angeles, so they're

(21:16):
far apart from each other, and they if they knew,
they sold it like they didn't know. But they introed
like Fallon introed Will Ferrell, and then Ryan Reynolds came out,
and then on Kimmel he introed Ryan Reynolds, and then
Will Ferrell came out, and then they both were talking
about each other's movies. Essentially, it was it was honestly,
that was funny, but it had nothing to do with

(21:37):
the host as much it had to do with Ryan
Reynolds and Will Ferrell being clowns. Now, that's the only
time I've ever actually watched a Kimmel interview voluntarily that
wasn't or a monologue because of work, right, Like, I
just I don't know. I sometimes he says stuff like
when he was bawling his eyes out after a school shooting,

(21:58):
which I understand, I totally get. It messes me up
to but he's a late night talk show host. I
don't need you to be waxing poetic about the political world.
I don't need my late night talk show hosts to
be advocating for gun control and saying people who are
against gun control are monsters. Okay, So this is a
long time come in as far as his political viewpoints

(22:23):
ahead of this other thing from Don. Don's always very
combative and always doing everything he can to either oppose
the hardcore conservative viewpoint or to undermine kind of the
greater point that most people who would be a Trump supporter.
I get into arguments to via email with Don quite

(22:45):
a bit, And I don't read a lot of Don's
emails for what it's for whatever it's worth, because it's
not constructive.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
I got trolls to call in on the phones. They
want to mix it up with me and stuff like that.
You know what, we can have those debates. I'll defend
myself sometimes it'll heated and whatever. Via email. I can
do a lot better of just being like I don't
need to even read this, but I am going to
read this one I mentioned and compare the Kimmel suspension
with Roseanne Barr being removed from her television show which

(23:14):
she was the centerpiece of The Conners, which was kind
of a reincarnation in a way of the family from
the show Roseanne, which was a huge show in the nineties,
and she got very politically opinionated, and people were saying
that she is filled with hate because she's conservative, and

(23:35):
all this stuff, and they removed her, basically killed off
the Roseanne character on the show and let the show
keep going. It was controversial at the time. She felt
like she was canceled by people who disagreed with her,
and there were a lot of people saying, well, she
doesn't even have a First Amendment right to express herself.
The First Amendment doesn't protect her in that situation, just
like the First Amendment wouldn't theoretically protect Jimmy Kimmel in

(23:57):
this situation. When Disney got a threat from the FCC
that there are violations potentially here, and Don mentions this
and says, these are apples and oranges, the Kimmel and
Roseanne things. Apples and oranges. Roseanne was not silenced by
the government. You're right, she was not. That was a
network decision to get her off of the air. But Don,

(24:17):
says far right FCC chairman Brendan Carr attacked Kimmel with
threats of federal penalties that directly led to Kimmel's suspension,
and then talked about all his high ratings and everything. Oh,
come on, man, these shows do not come close to
what the ratings used to be at all. It doesn't
matter if they're the highest rated late night show. The
highest rated late night show is not pulling anything close

(24:38):
to what the highest rated late night show was doing
in the Leno Letterman era. It just wasn't right. So
talking yourself into the idea that, oh, yeah, this is
still he's still a big guy and they're still making
a ton of money and the ratings are awesome, it's
not true. I'm not buying it for a second now. Again,
for whatever it's worth, I understand, and this FCC thing

(25:01):
is lingering over the top. But if you read the rules,
especially when we're talking about network television, a person who's
sharing opinions and also acting as though they are sharing news,
the stuff he was saying was patently false. It is
incorrect information. It is not being said in good faith.

(25:21):
This is stuff that was said in order to rile
up people incorrectly. And there are things you just cannot
do when you're on network television. And yes, the FCC,
you could say, because of the Trump administration, they are
in some way politically motivated to try to silence somebody
who's one of their biggest critics with the largest mouthpiece

(25:44):
because he has a big network that he talks on
at late night. But that's not the point here. The
point is there are still rules, and if anybody would
have said what was said by Jimmy Kimmel, they certainly
would have gotten a letter from the FCC or the
station themselves would be up to potentially face a lawsuit.
That doesn't also go in with the sinclaara in next

(26:04):
star situation where there are affiliates around the country that
are afraid to air a program like this and that
is affecting potentially a merger and money that's going into
these networks. There are way bigger business implications to something
like this than just oh, the far right leader of
the fccs the whole reason this happened. You think Disney

(26:26):
would just like sit back and let that happen if
they didn't think that something legitimate was wrong here, ask
yourself that question, don and anybody else that thinks that
this isn't the same. It's not exactly the same, but
the principle is the same. You have to do what's
best for the business entity in and of itself. That's
what this is about. It's not silencing someone with the

(26:48):
protecting the First Amendment or anything like that. Trust me,
there have been people that have been ragging on politicians,
and listen to what Colbert has been doing over the
better part of the last you know, seven or eight
years at lead with his political viewpoints. That's done no
favors for him in his ratings either, and he got
canceled because they were losing money, losing crazy amounts of money.

(27:09):
Let's not kid ourselves as to what this actually is
here business decisions. Tucker Carlson, however, did have a very
interesting perspective on this, and I am going to play
that audio because he doesn't quite see it that same way,
and he's been quite opinionated in a very opposite way
of someone like Donald Trump and the way that he's

(27:29):
done stuff, which is very odd here in his first
year back in office. I'll tell you and play the
audio for you when we come back. Yesterday I played
some audio from Tucker Carlson who had this thing. Maybe
it was two days ago, I can't remember. It was
a day or two ago, and it was Tucker Carlson
essentially saying, well, Charlie Kirk agreed with me on Israel,

(27:53):
and he said, you know, Benjamin NETANYAHUO was doing bad
things in Israel, all this stuff. I kind of took
umbrage of that. I didn't like that he said it
that way. I didn't like that he is using Charlie
Kirk's name posthumously, like to make himself feel right about something.

(28:15):
And then immediately after that, Ted Cruz went on social
media and said, actually, Charlie, in my caught last conversation
that was he couldn't that couldn't be further from the truth.
He agreed that we needed to continue to protect Israel,
and we were very pro Israel and growing into Semitism
among the political right in Americas. What's the biggest threat
to you know, the situation at hand here? And I

(28:37):
hate that I just and JD. Vance said pretty shortly
thereafter went on his social media and said, look, I
get that Charlie Kirk created a lot of passion in discussion.
He liked it. I think it's good that we can
debate the things that he would be debating right now
if he were still here with us. But maybe we
should stop putting his name in these conversations until at
least we have time to heal as a country, get

(28:59):
through that funeral this weekend, and move on you know
what I'm saying, And to J d Evans, I couldn't
agree with that more. That's not going to stop people
from saying things now. Tucker Carlson has not been shy
to talk about things from a very opposing viewpoint from
the typical Trump Maga conservative, which is strange because Tucker Carlson,

(29:24):
I think was synonymous with Trump's reelection campaign here in
twenty twenty four, and many thought that he was going
to be a major player. There was a chance that
he was going to have a chance to get a
job in the cabinet or something. Again, I think he
enjoys having the microphone in a voice, and I don't
think being the president or being the vice president or

(29:45):
anything like that is something that at this point of
his life is super appealing to him. While Charlie Kirk
very well could have ended up becoming a presidential candidate
or a figure into the future, I also think he
specifically felt like he had more power to to reach
people through debate and the way that he did his show,
and the way that he would go to college campuses

(30:06):
and through Turning Point USA. And yeah, he's only thirty one.
It's hard to predict what the rest of his life
would have looked like. But there's absolutely nothing that tells
me that he felt like his voice was somehow less
than a lot of people that are in the government
right now. Tucker feels the same way. However, Tucker has
been very, very interesting on some of his shows lately.

(30:31):
And here's something that I saw post on social media
from another recent show that he had, which was the
exact same show that he talked about Charlie Kirk in
his name, And I wanted to play this audio for
you because it is quite interesting what he's warning against,
and I know many Democrats who actually agree with this.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Tucker Carlson, you hope that you hope that Charlie Kirk's
death won't be used by a group we know call
bad actors to create a society that was the opposite
of the one he worked to build. You hope that
you hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're
seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged

(31:13):
to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me,
if it is. If that does happen, there is never
a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever,
And there never will be. Because they can tell you
what to say, they're telling you what to think. There
is nothing they can't do to you because they don't
consider you human, they don't believe you have a soul.

(31:36):
A human being with a soul, a freeman has a
right to say what he believes, not to hurt other people,
but to express his views.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
That is Tucker Carlson on his show, and you can
read into that what is seemingly something that just happened
to Jimmy Kimmel in a way. Now again, I think
that Jimmy Kimmel being suspended and it is mostly a
business decision, not just to avoid FCC violation, but also
to help with merger, to help with you know, maybe

(32:07):
this was the opening that Disney and ABC needed to
clean house and maybe try to revamp what late night
looks like. Because think about what CBS is doing. They
are going the other direction as well. They're saying, you
know what, late night television, it's not the same, it's
not the ratings cup it once was. We're losing forty
million dollars a year. We got to move on to

(32:29):
something else. That's what they're going to do. And I
think ABC Slash Disney saw the same thing, and this
is an opportunity to maybe do that. But don't forget
this part too, that if the same type of conversation
was taking place with a Democrat in office, we the conservatives,
would be shouting immediately that this is a quick violation

(32:52):
of First Amendment rights. You cannot express your own true opinion.
They are trying to silence us. They're silencing what we
can can say, what we can think, what we can do,
and if you question anything, there could be laws in
place that say you're in trouble for it. We can't

(33:13):
let that happen either. So while it's important for us
to figure out that, hey, Jimmy Kimmel being you know,
suspended indefinitely is one thing, whether it's business decisions, whether
it has to do with his politics, whether it's FECC violation,
all that stuff, If we the people start getting shadow
banned or warned or losing our jobs with a frequency

(33:36):
because we are expressing ourselves, whether it's the hate speech
that I think you absolutely can say when you have
teachers talking about Charlie Kirk's death and saying one Nazi
down or something absolutely ridiculous like that, again, that I
don't want those people teaching my kids. That could be
a business decision. But at the same time, understand that

(33:56):
if that just starts happening to everybody and you're losing
your job because you express your opinion on something, we're
talking about something a little bit different here. Just keep
an eye on both sides here. Understand it's not always
about who's in office. It's about what's happening. Never forget it.
Of course, your biggest piece of information that the news

(34:18):
cycle has generated over the last twenty four hours was
last night we learned that Jimmy Kimmel and his show
Jimmy Kimmel Live was being suspended indefinitely on ABC, and
it has created a lot of chatter in a lot
of different realms about this, and people on the two

(34:39):
sides of the aisle see it very differently. As you
could imagine my initial reaction to this. I was at
run club last night, not thinking about the news. Then
I foolishly went to social media to just see what
was happening, and that was the first thing that popped up,
because everyone was talking about it within the hour that

(35:01):
it was announced, and I couldn't decide how I felt
about it at first, and this is a thing that
you know, I think I'll get to the whole FCC
in the real reason and all this stuff in a second.
But the real crux of my emotions was, am I

(35:22):
okay with somebody who has political points different than me
being silenced? That was like the first initial reaction. Now,
certainly that's not all that's at play here, but that
was the first thing that I was thinking about. The
answer for that is no, I don't want anybody silenced
or to have the inability to speak out and share

(35:45):
their opinion in general. The second thing was the platform
that we're talking about here isn't the same as just
you sharing your opinion in a conversation with someone. This
is a person who is on network television who the
segment in question. He essentially says it was a maga

(36:10):
person and blames the political right for the assassination of
Charlie Kirk, just a couple of days after he had
had I thought pretty genuinely sincere words about Kirk's assassination
and how this is a dark day for America. Stephen Colbert,
who's obviously a super duper lefty liberal type person, also

(36:31):
in the way that he does his late night show
for as long as he's going to be doing it,
for whatever it's worth. He said the same thing. I
don't think those words are in vain, and I don't
think they were lying. I also think that as soon
as it becomes more of a news topic instead of
a shock topic, we start to share opinions and start
to split hairs on down the line. There are a

(36:54):
lot of people who have said things over the years
that have been punished for saying those things because of
the platform that they are on. This goes down to
the moment of Okay, so, who's in charge of Jimmy
Kimmel's show, And the answer of that directly is ABC

(37:17):
or the Disney Corporation. Who who owns ABC. Well, you
could say that Disney doesn't need a lot of pushback
to do something. If he says something on their station
that they politically disagree with, they have the ability to
give him a talking to or to suspend him or
in this case, something that has been proven to be

(37:38):
false information. They can step in and say, look, that's
not what we want to do here. Now that's not
what happened here. But Disney does have the right to
do that. It is their company. Yes it's network television,
and yes we can talk about what different types of
shows require different types of coverage, but you'll get a
different vibe from what a new new cast is going

(38:00):
to be on network television. And the people you see
on cable television, like the legacy medias of the CNN
and Fox News types, they can get away with a
lot more because they're not on the network. You see
the lawsuit that Donald Trump and the campaign around him

(38:21):
sent to CBS when they aired an edited version of
an interview and essentially misled people in the way that
an interview was performed or produced and then aired. He
won that lawsuit. The CBS had to pay a lot
of money for that. When the FCC says this was
false information, they may come down heavy handed. They may

(38:45):
find the company, or they may require some sort of apology.
Right if you listen and you're watching like a sports
game or something, and then somebody who's on the telecast
says a bad word and it was live and they
didn't get it bleeped, well, well, the immediate reaction is
to apologize for that, and then you may not have

(39:05):
the type of penalties that the SCC may come heavy
handed down. It sounds like Jimmy Kimmel didn't want to apologize.
That was a factor into the decision to suspend his
show indefinitely. For those who are crying that this is
some sort of violation of the First Amendment, that is
just not the case. There are many examples of this
taking place right now. Think about teachers. There have been
teachers in Nebraska and in Iowa that pretty high profile ones,

(39:28):
including in the city I went to college in and
got my first full time job oscar Loosa, in southeast Iowa,
they had an art teacher who was working for the
school district. He was the guy who posted one Nazi
down That's all he put on his social media. This
was right in the wake of the assassination last Wednesday
of Charlie Kirk. Immediately got screenshot it and was shared

(39:49):
by a ton of people saying, is this the kind
of person we want around our kids in school? Well,
the oscar is a school district yesterday voted on this matter.
They set up an emergency of the school district in
the school board and they voted to terminate the contract
of that individual. Did they have a choice? Probably not.
I mean, if you say, well, he's got to write

(40:11):
to say what he wants, that's not the same thing.
He also has a job to do. There's a code
of conduct that teachers and students alike have to abide by,
and if you are going to break that in some way,
including a social media post that is a controversial or
b puts people's trust in doubt with you. Even if
you're an art teacher, they have to understand, or anybody

(40:34):
who has opinions like this has to understand that when
my kid goes to class, I want to know that
they're getting taught by somebody who's not trying to indoctrinate
them into an ideology that's either hateful or something that
I principally disagree with. That's not what school is for,
especially in a public school setting. You're supposed to be
somebody I can trust with my children. When you have
these types of hardcore, very politically motivated posts, especially one

(40:59):
that you could absolutely say would incite a violent reaction
like one Nazi down essentially celebrating the killing of a podcaster,
an influencer, a commentator, I mean, I wouldn't want my
kid even if I was a hardcore Democrat. I don't
know if I could trust my kid in an art
class with a person that felt that way either. So

(41:24):
if teachers are losing their jobs, or people who are
working in hospitals could be losing their jobs or put
on leave, maybe even officers of the law could be
put on administrative leave for sharing their political opinions about
things of this nature. Why can't a talk show host?
The government isn't telling ABC or Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

(41:46):
It may have the optics of that because of who's
in office, but the same guy was in office when
ABC and Disney decided they wanted to pull Roseanne bar
off of the Connors. She had some very controversial conservative viewpoints,
and the company made the business decision it was best
for that show if it was going to continue to

(42:06):
kill off her character, get her away from the show
itself and let it exist without her, even if she
was the entire genesis of why the show existed in
the first place. I know a lot of Republicans in
that moment were crying foul and saying she has a
right to have free speech. Sure she does, she absolutely does,

(42:27):
just like Disney and ABC have a right to do
what they think is best for their business. That is
not unlike what happened here. I know people are challenging
that and saying that's not the same thing. The FCC
is way more involved here. Maybe it is. Donald Trump
didn't even mention the FCC when he talked about this today.
He said, well, he's got bad ratings, he's not a
talented individual. A lot of personal attacks on somebody who,

(42:50):
for whatever it's worth, has made a long career in television.
You can say he doesn't have talent or anything like that,
but he's definitely gotten himself to a point where he's
a household name and been doing that show for a
long time. So if we're talking about this from that
standpoint and that perspective, for one reason or another, all
I need you to do is just try to put
yourself into a mindset, whether you're left or right of

(43:11):
center politically, that the company has to do what it
has to do regardless. Think about Colbert being forty million
dollars in the hole on a year to year basis,
That is the kind of thing from my perspective, that
is probably driving this as much as anything. That's a
great excuse to maybe rebrand and reconfigure your entire late
night schedule and not have to be paying a lot

(43:32):
of money that you're not getting back to a show
that is no longer the cash cow that maybe it
once was. Did have a Colleen send me an email.
I did mention in the last segment that Donald Trump
won a lawsuit against CBS. She says it was settled.
That is accurate. It was settled. CBS paid a lot
of money as part of that settlement. They didn't want

(43:52):
it to extend and go to court. They did not
fight back. Why because they would have lost. So I
apologize for using wording that isn't exactly one hundred percent right,
even if the principle of what actually occurred is exactly
what I said, So my hands are clean. I apologize
if me saying he won incentive, it was settled and

(44:12):
he got a ton of money out of it affects
the way that you view the story in and of itself.
I think maybe you should probably read into what that
lawsuit actually was, because I don't know how that's any
different than what I said lastly before I get out
of this. There are other many different examples, A couple

(44:33):
of different people say, well, what do you think about
the person that got fired or let go because of this?
What do I think about the person that got let
go or fired because of that? Guys, I gotta tell you,
I've been around people who have been let go for
different various reasons. You can argue whether or not it's
good or it's bad. You can talk to yourself about
whether it's good or it's bad. At the very last moment,

(44:54):
I have to explain this to you. If it's a
private sector situation, if it's a business, whether it's it's
a school district, which is a bit different because of
how many different people are affected by it. As long
as it's a business decision, you have to take it
up with that individual business. If it is a private

(45:15):
entity that says I don't like you talking about politics,
I don't like you being a part of you, or
saying this type of stuff publicly, it is a negative
connotation or impact to my business. That individual has the
right to manage their company however they want, and especially

(45:36):
in states like Iowa and Nebraska, there are different rules
based on what you can and can't be fired for.
So just keep that in mind. We can disagree all
we want about whether or not it's right, but it
is up to the individual business, or entity. Just remember
that it's not the government.