After an outpouring of leftist rage over its suspension, Disney subsidiary ABC has lifted the suspension on money-losing late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.
As a reminder, Jimmy Kimmel’s ratings trail behind Stephen Colbert, and Stephen Colbert’s show will be wrapping up soon because it is losing CBS a whopping 50 million a year.
In fact, Kimmel’s audience was down 43% from earlier in 2025, averaging only 1.1 million viewers in August 2025.
Is ABC really going to bring back a huge financial liability because Barack Obama and a bunch of liberal elites got mad? Did advertisers think a week-long suspension was enough? Did the woke executives at Disney not actually find Kimmel’s lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassination offensive?
Will Kimmel even be required to apologize?
So liberals were finally able to prevent consequences for one liberal for their horrible lies over Charlie Kirk, and the hill they chose to die on was…Jimmy Kimmel.
The question is: Why? Obviously, the answer is that the left thinks none of their ranks should ever be allowed to be cancelled for anything nasty they’ve ever said about anyone on the right, no matter how dishonest and slimy, ever. But the deeper question is: Why Jimmey Kimmel? Why was this failing talk show, the one that ratings show the vast majority of them don’t even watch, the Khazad-dûm upon which the hate-filled orcs of the left brandished their pre-printed talking points and screamed “You shall not pass!”?
Nexstar and Sinclair have confirmed that Jimmy Kimmel Live will not be returning to the air on their affiliates after Kimmel’s lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, so all Disney/ABC will do by bringing it back is to temporarily mollify outraged leftists while losing even more money.
It’s rather like French general Henri Eugene Navarre fixing his hopes of defeating the Viet Minh on establishing an isolated fortress at Dien Bien Phu, some 120 miles from the nearest French base and resupplied solely by air, to interdict supply lines running into Laos. It was a tremendously bad idea, as Dien Bien Phu had no strategic value on its own, French forces did not control the highlands, and Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap declined to engage in the all-out climatic battle by which Navarre sought to shatter Viet Minh forces. Instead, Giap conducted a methodical siege, hauled in artillery to pound French positions, and used sappers to undermine the French perimeter. This strategy gradually contracted the French perimeter until air resupply became impossible, and French forces surrendered after just under two months of siege on May 7, 1954, a decisive defeat that resulted in them abandoning Vietnam entirely, resulting in the partitioning of French Indochina and setting the stage for American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Like Dien Bien Phu, Jimmy Kimmel Live is of no particular strategic importance of its own. It’s a money-losing show that’s lost 72% of its audience over the last decade, an increasingly irrelevant legacy media leftover on a network whose ratings fall behind not only Fox, but Fox News and ESPN, and part of a media conglomerate that’s already acquiesced to conservative demands to end its DEI programs.
It’s likely all the leftwing shouting and foot-stomping will accomplish is to delay the unemployment of Kimmel and his murder horny crew to a few months down the road. My guess is that they will quietly cancel the show over the Christmas holidays and have a less controversial replacement ready to go in January.
Quite an accomplishment…
Tags: ABC, Charlie Kirk, Dien Bien Phu, Disney, Henri Eugene Navarre, Jimmy Kimmel, Media Watch, Military, Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Social Justice Warriors, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Vo Nguyen Giap
May he be on the air until Disney goes bankrupt.
P.S. He deserves a raise, Disney, or we will boycott you!
Well done. Sad you have to devote a paragraph to a bit of history that should be as known as the Hot Gates. But that’s how you get Kimmel in the first place I guess.
“Why Jimmey Kimmel?”
Occam’s razor suggests they have no one/nothing else to fill the time slot. They are buying time until they hit upon something else that will be more profitable.
That may explain why ABC is willing to bring him back (though I suspect reruns of The Andy Griffith Show would actually be more profitable that jimmy Kimmel in the same time slot). But why was the vast elderly hordes of the terminally online left so concerned with keeping Kimmel on the air?
I’m sure all regular BattleSwarm readers at least know what Dien Bien Phu was. But since modern America’s education system has done such a woeful job teaching world history, and since Dien Bien Phu predated America’s involvement in Vietnam, I’m sure a lot ordinary Americans never heard of it, or even know that there even was a “French Indochina.”
General Navarre selected Điện Biên Phủ as the site to recreate the shattering French success at Nà Sản, where a small French force, using identical hedgehog tactics, wiped out a very large Viet Minh force at a negligible cost. Navarre’s problem was General Giáp carefully studied his failure at Nà Sản during the intervening 15 months and successfully revised his tactics.
Do you think ABC hit the pause button a week ago so they could study the situation, revise their tactics, and wise up Kimmel?
According to the Pentagon papers, in 1954, the US funded 78% of France’s military expenses in Vietnam. Bizarre.
1. Brenden Carr’s remarks let them pretend this was a First Amendment issue. I’m not saying I could’ve done better than Carr — I’m prone to that sort of mistake — but with hindsight, it was a mistake.
2. Their feeds were filled with reports from Kirk’s memorial, posts from independents/former leftists remarking on how many leftists cheered Charlie’s death, and conservatives noticing the former. They’d welcome any distraction that let them pretend that they’re ackshully the oppressed underdog and that Kirk & conservatives are the baddies.
3. To a lesser extent, the above applies to people who consider their status as contrarians/independents as a facet of their identity, rather than a conclusion based on philosophy, history, current events, etc. It’s a marginal effect, but social media is a network, and a lot of network phenomena are prone to thresholds.
4. I read somewhere (possibly here) that Disney pushed social justice so hard because their CEO wanted the Democrat nomination for president. If so, he probably also handed out patronage positions to prominent politicians and activists. Bob Iger’s probably realized that he’s not “diverse” enough to get the nomination by now, but the folk who got those cushy jobs are probably mostly still there. For the online people, that let them comment on the event “as a Disney employee”, giving a bonus to the dopamine hit from their hot take. As for Colbert remaining fired while Kimmel got reinstated, those employed were in a better position to advocate his return… again, assuming the “Iger wants to be president” hypothesis is correct.
I don’t think it is Jimmie Kimmel, per se. It is that they hope by making a stand at Kimmel, they will prevent any further firings over Kirk grave-dancing. Not sure it will, but that is what they hope.
Either way they will declare victory and hold a parade.
“Sad you have to devote a paragraph to a bit of history that should be as known as the Hot Gates.”
I think Lawrence is trolling a bit here, as he knows that Điện Biên Phủ is one of my areas of interest…
Hell in a very small place.