The Curtain Falls On Jimmy Kimmel: When the Authoritarian State Decides What We Can Laugh At

Not many people remember when Constitution Day is. I’ve lived here for over 27 years, and I’ll admit I’ve let it slip by more often than I’d like. It’s September 17, the day in 1787 when delegates signed the Constitution in Philadelphia. It’s supposed to be a reminder of limits on power, of rights that don’t belong to kings or presidents but to people.

This year, September 17 brought something else: the indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! A late-night talk show disappearing might sound trivial. But the way it happened — the speed, the pressure, the coordination — was a chilling reminder that free expression in America is no longer guaranteed.

The irony that it happened on Constitution Day is almost unbearable.

The Spark

The sequence started with a comment. The critics say that Jimmy Kimmel joked about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. When the reality is that his joke was aimed at Trump, who, when reporters asked how he was coping after the tragic killing of Kirk, started talking about how beautiful the East Lawn was beginning to look. I do not recall a single sentence that Kimmel uttered that directly made fun of Kirk or his death.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece (by Karl Rove) insisting Kirk wasn’t killed by us, but by a single killer and how we should stop politicizing his death — and within hours, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, was on the offensive.

Carr publicly warned ABC that it could face consequences for Kimmel’s remarks. He suggested broadcast licenses could be on the line. Carr isn’t just a regulator. He’s also one of the architects of Project 25, the conservative blueprint circulated among Trump allies for remaking executive power. Reading his threat, I didn’t see the dry language of bureaucracy. I saw a shot fired.

The Chilling Effect in Real Time

I’ve heard conservatives complain for decades that “the media is controlled by the left.” Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when I was new to America, this sounded like background noise: talk radio, Fox News monologues, bumper stickers. But I never saw evidence that media owners were left-wing. They were rich, mostly white, mostly male. And rich white men rarely bet against the GOP.

This time, it feels different. The FCC chair had put his thumb on the scale. And the corporations didn’t resist. In fact, the corporations, Nexstar and Sinclair — two of the largest ABC affiliate owners wanted exactly this, and they immediately announced they’d stop airing Kimmel’s show. Sinclair went further: they demanded a public apology and even a donation to Kirk’s organization.

Disney-owned ABC folded within hours. Kimmel was gone.

President Trump celebrated the suspension, as NPR documented, and then called on other networks to fire late-night hosts. The message was clear: fall in line or be next. He even went onto threaten that “broadcasting licenses should be pulled back on the entire networks” if they didn’t stop criticizing him.

This isn’t about one comedian. It’s about the ongoing capture of American media by Trump-aligned billionaires and political allies. We’ve already watched Elon Musk turn Twitter, now X, into a predictable funnel for MAGA-aligned voices. Larry Ellison and his son David have acquired Paramount, gaining control of CBS, and are reportedly circling Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Univision, once a bulwark for Spanish-speaking communities, has swung sharply right under new ownership. Even Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times have softened their stances.

The media ecosystem when I entered the country in the late ’90s — messy, loud, full of competing voices — looks almost unrecognizable today.

The Corporate Deal Behind the Curtain

There’s another layer to the Kimmel story that most people haven’t connected yet. And it has nothing to do with jokes or ratings. It has to do with money, mergers, and leverage.

In the United States, there are limits on how many local television stations one company can own. Those caps exist to prevent one giant corporation from controlling too much of the public airwaves. Nexstar Media Group is already the largest station owner in the country. They don’t operate a national network like ABC or NBC — instead, they’ve spent years buying up local affiliates. By law, no company is supposed to reach more than about 39% of U.S. households.

And Nexstar wants to get even bigger. It’s been pushing to merge with Tegna, another major station group. That deal would give Nexstar control over even more affiliates, but to make it happen they need the explicit permission of the FCC.

At the same time, Disney — which owns ABC — has its own deal with Nexstar that would put them over the ownership cap as well, also requiring FCC approval. Which means that right now, a huge amount of media consolidation — billions of dollars in mergers — hangs on one man’s desk: FCC chair Brendan Carr.

Normally, that approval process would focus on standard factors such as competition, market concentration, and the public interest. That’s how regulation is supposed to work.

Except this time, it didn’t.

The FCC chair, who had just gone after Jimmy Kimmel for “mocking” Charlie Kirk, was also the very person holding Disney’s fate in his hands. According to multiple reports, he made it clear: if Disney wanted its Nexstar merger to move forward, it had better get Kimmel under control.

“Freedom,” Kasparov writes, “is often lost under mountains of paperwork and crippling fines rather than in a cinematic showdown with a dictator.”

Think about what that means. Regulatory authority wasn’t being used to protect the public from monopoly power. It was being used to punish a network for airing political jokes. That’s not regulation. That’s extortion with a government seal. That’s state oppression.

And it crosses a constitutional line. The Supreme Court underscored this in NRA v. Vullo just last year: the government cannot try to coerce private companies into silencing speech it doesn’t like. Yet here we are, watching exactly that play out in real time.

We’ve seen echoes of this before. Nixon tried to sic the FCC on the Washington Post during Watergate. During his first term, Trump used his own DOJ to try to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner — an action widely seen as retaliation against CNN. But episodes like this are rare precisely because even presidents understood the risk of being caught weaponizing regulatory power.

Now it’s out in the open.

And the danger is obvious: if a billion-dollar merger can be dangled over a comedian’s head, what else can be? Today it’s a late-night host. Tomorrow it could be a preacher, a podcast, a show, a movie, or a neighborhood radio station. Once the government starts picking winners and losers in the marketplace of speech, everyone loses.

David Letterman said it plainly: “We all see where this is going, correct? It’s managed media. It’s ridiculous… You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian, criminal administration. That’s just not how this works.”

Except it is how it works in other countries. And we’ve seen the script before.

The Russian Playbook

I read a firsthand account by Garry Kasparov that felt less like history and more like prophecy. He described how Putin consolidated control in Russia not with dramatic purges at first, but with financial pressure, regulatory hurdles, and public threats. A few high-profile outlets were crushed, and everyone else got the message.

“Freedom,” Kasparov writes, “is often lost under mountains of paperwork and crippling fines rather than in a cinematic showdown with a dictator.”

The Russian oligarchs who thought they could buy protection through passivity eventually discovered otherwise. Appeasement wasn’t safety. It was suicide.

When I look at ABC executives caving to pressure, I can’t help but think they should call those Russian media owners — the ones who are still alive and free — and ask how appeasement worked out for them.

Two decades after the laughter was choked off, Russia has become a grim theater of war, its script written by a power-drunk oligarch. If we’re not careful, that script could be ours too.

America’s Own History of Silence

We don’t need to look overseas to know what’s at stake. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 criminalized criticism of the government. McCarthyism in the 1950s blacklisted writers, actors, comedians. Nixon kept an “enemies list” that included journalists. The lesson is always the same: when authoritarian governments fear ridicule, they don’t try to win the argument. They try to silence the voice.

The difference now is speed and scale. Regulatory power, corporate consolidation, and billionaire ownership can align and move faster than the slow, messy checks and balances the framers designed.

Why Comedians Are First

It’s not accidental that late-night comedians are the first targets. Comedy is democracy’s pressure valve. Lenny Bruce faced obscenity trials. Charlie Chaplin was surveilled and then effectively exiled. Jon Stewart was mocked for turning politics into entertainment, but what he really did was make hypocrisy visible.

Authoritarians understand that if people are laughing at them, they haven’t yet been conquered. That’s why they move quickly to script our laughter.

Comedy arrives at the truth in a single heartbeat; a 10,000-word treatise may take months to sink in. Punchlines land where editorials fail. That’s a threat to anyone trying to live by a script.

What They Want

They want to decide what books you can read, what history your children can learn, what medicines you’re allowed to take, what surgeries you can have, what gender you’re permitted to be, what sports you can play, which bathroom you can use, who you can love, and who you can marry. They want to own your library, your classroom, your hospital room, your bedroom — and now your television. They want to own the page, the pill, the joke, the chant, the kiss, the very pronoun in your mouth.

And then, with breathtaking cynicism, they’ll look straight at you and say it’s the Democrats who are coming for your freedom.

Small government?

My f**ing ass.

This isn’t small government. This is government in your bloodstream, in your dictionary, in your bed, and now in your goddamn remote control.

Constitution Day Irony

To have all this unfold on Constitution Day feels like a cruel joke. The document signed in 1787 was built on the premise that no single person could control the nation’s narrative. Yet on September 17, 2025, one person’s administration proved it could silence a comedian with a few public threats, and dare others to resist.

The framers did not write a guarantee on parchment; they wrote a system that depends on citizens to uphold it. Today’s system is being tested in a way the founders could hardly imagine — by regulatory jawboning, by corporate kowtowing, by ownership consolidation.

A Personal Reckoning

I moved here nearly three decades ago. I came with the wide-eyed belief that America’s messy, noisy, pluralistic media was proof of its strength. I watched 9/11 unfold on CNN. I saw Jon Stewart make us laugh through the Iraq War. I followed late-night monologues during the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump years as a nightly pulse check on the country’s mood.

Never once did I believe that a president could, with a few tweets, a tacit regulatory threat, and a bank of billionaire allies, knock a comedian off the air — effectively deciding for all of us what ‘freedom of speech’ means.

Until now.

That realization feels like a line being crossed. Not slowly, not in shadows, but in daylight. It is not simply professional sorrow for one show. I don’t even watch Jimmy Kimmel regularly.

It’s a personal alarm: the cultural space I came to love and to trust now looks more precarious than I thought.

The Probe

The Kimmel suspension is a probe — a test balloon to see how much pushback exists. Will journalists rise up? Will corporate boards defend their talent? Or will they calculate short-term profit and preserve access by surrendering principle?

If the answer is “very little,” then this will not stop with comedians. First come the jokes. Then the columns. Then the editorials. Eventually, the curricula. Eventually, the textbooks.

This is not theory. Garry Kasparov’s account of Russia shows the architecture of attrition. It is bureaucratic, patient, and devastating precisely because it gives you time to convince yourself that capitulation is the sane option.

I don’t have a manifesto. But I do know what weakness looks like: silence, obfuscation, the assumption that this is “just business.” I also know what small acts of resistance can look like:

• Readers demanding transparency from media companies about editorial independence and ownership influence.
• Journalists refusing to self-censor and reporting without looking over their shoulders.
• Corporate boards recognizing that a reputation for integrity is not collateral damage to be casually exchanged for short-term calm.
• Citizens supporting independent journalism — subscribing, donating, amplifying reporting that matters.
• Legislators reinvigorating independent regulatory checks so that an FCC chair can’t weaponize licensing threats with impunity.

Resistance isn’t dramatic. It’s boring and sustained: subscriptions, donations, legislation, boycotts when principled, and fierce public conversation. It is the slow, persistent work of renewing civic institutions rather than assuming they will outlast our apathy.

The Curtain Call

We are not sleepwalking into authoritarianism. We are already inside parts of it. The Kimmel suspension is not the finale. It’s a dress rehearsal. If we allow it to become the new normal, the curtain will not fall only on late-night comedy. It will fall on classrooms, clinics, libraries, and bedrooms.

I don’t want to live in that theater. I don’t want my children or neighbors to live under it either. I don’t think you do.

So yes: call your local stations. Ask your newspaper why they are silent. Subscribe to independent outlets. And unsubscribe from these corporations that are allies in the suppression of freedom of speech. Tell your friends why this matters. Protest when it’s strategic. Vote as if your media environment depends on it — because it does. Do any of the above. All of the above, if you can.

Author’s Note

My whim was to write a post as soon as I learned this news Wednesday (Sep 17, 2025) evening. Maybe because this felt like a personal threat to me —people like me — writers who put their thoughts and criticisms out on public platforms like this — regardless of the readership count.

But I decided to take some extra time to write a longer post, for I didn’t want to write something from a place filled only with anger.

I wrote this not as a pundit but as someone who has watched a country I love reveal its fragile seams. I moved here with an appetite for argument, for noisy plurality, for media that insulted and amused and challenged me. For almost 27 years that impulse sustained me. Watching a regulator’s threat and a corporate capitulation erase a voice overnight made me feel smaller and angrier than I expected.

This is why I wrote: to remind myself and anyone who will listen that constitutional guarantees are not talismans. They are habits maintained by citizens.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.