The full monologue that got Jimmy Kimmel’s show suspended

Above is the full monologue by late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel that angered convicted felon/sexual abuser/President Trump enough to have his loyalist chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, threaten to yank the broadcast license of ABC and its parent company, Disney. (Note: broadcast licenses are actually held by local stations, not by national networks.)

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez made a statement Thursday, September 18, 2025 (pdf) about Brendan Carr’s threat to pull broadcast licenses over Kimmel’s monologue, saying the FCC has neither the authority, the ability nor the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech it doesn’t like.

Commissioner Gomez said,

“We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control. First, an ABC reporter was told that his coverage amounted to hate speech and that he should be prosecuted simply for doing his job. Then, the FCC threatened to go after this same network, seizing on a late-night comedian’s inopportune joke as a pretext to punish speech it disliked. That led to a shameful show of cowardly corporate capitulation by ABC that has put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger. This FCC does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes. If it were to take the unprecedented step of trying to revoke broadcast licenses, which are held by local stations rather than national networks, it would run headlong into the First Amendment and fail in court on both the facts and

the law. But even the threat to revoke a license is no small matter. It poses an existential risk to a broadcaster, which by definition cannot exist without its license. That makes billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency all the more vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands. “When corporations surrender in the face of that pressure, they endanger not just themselves, but the right to free expression for everyone in this country. The duty to defend the First Amendment does not rest with government, but with all of us. Free speech is the foundation of our democracy, and we must push back against any attempt to erode it.”

Conservative speech is treated entirely differently by the Trump administration

To better see the contrast in how the authoritarian Trump regime is treating speech by conservatives vs. speech by liberals, below is a statement Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade made on a morning show on the Fox Channel on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, just a few hours before Kirk’s assassination, in a discussion about people who are mentally ill and homeless.

Neither Trump nor his FCC Chair Brendan Carr said anything about Kilmeade’s statement, or saw any reason to threaten Fox’s broadcast license over it. Kilmeade is the host on the right: