Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 12 Episode 23
Aired on September 21, 2025
Main segment: Suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Other segments: 2025 state visit by Donald Trump to the United Kingdom, Bernd das Brot
Guests: H. Jon Benjamin (voice-over)
John Oliver discusses ABC’s move to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air, what it has to do with Brendan Carr and the FCC, what it means for free speech in the United States, and which broadcasting giant should open an Italian restaurant. Ok fine: it’s Tegna. With a name like “Tegna” you’ve just gotta serve complimentary garlic knots. End of discussion.
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JOHN: We’re going to dive straight in with our main story tonight concerning the fact that on Wednesday this happened:
Overnight, ABC pulling late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air hours after a threat from the head of the Federal Communications Commission. Brendan Carr called for Kimmel’s suspension over comments earlier this week on Jimmy Kimmel Live! about conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s death. ABC pulling the plug. A spokesperson for the network saying Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be preempted indefinitely. President Trump weighing in, calling the decision “great news for America.”
JOHN: Yeah, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show indefinitely. And the president apparently thinks it’s “great news for America,” which is just a weird response to have. Not to be fair, the weirdest response he had to anything this week, given that he described his dinner with the Royals by saying he ate, and I quote, “whatever the hell they served to us.” But still pretty fucking weird.
And look, Kimmel is now one of many who faced consequences for comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder 11 days ago, with workers being fired or placed on leave over posts about him. Very quickly, I was honestly inclined to wait to engage with the back-and-forth over who Charlie Kirk was and what his legacy will be, at least in part because we’re taping this on Saturday. His funeral hasn’t even taken place yet.
What I will say is a person getting shot is tragic and a person getting shot for their ideas is horrifying. That is true no matter what those ideas are. I also recognize that for many, especially those who were the targets of some of Kirk’s ideas, it has been hard to stay quiet as they see flags lowered to half staff and hear claims that he debated things the right way. But setting all of that aside, it does seem like some are now willing to weaponize Kirk’s death to do things they’ve been wanting to do for years—whether it’s going after liberal groups, trans people, or their remaining critics in the media—and under some shamelessly flimsy pretext.
All of which brings us back to Jimmy Kimmel. Because look, it is not news that the administration wants to get rid of shows like his. In fact, it’s such an open secret that last Sunday when we won an Emmy for writing, one of our writers opened his thank-you speech with a line that was followed by a camera cutaway that now feels pretty prescient.
Thank you so much. We share this category. We are honored to share it with all writers of late night political comedy. While that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.
JOHN: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That is pretty eerie. Now, obviously, our writer Daniel did not know the future. On some level, that is just a coincidence. Like when a young Shirley Temple accepted an Oscar in 1935 by saying, “Thank you very much for this. On January 28th, 1986, the spaceship Challenger will suffer a catastrophic failure, killing seven people.” You know, kind of spooky stuff.
But it’s not just a coincidence because everyone knew the administration had it in for Kimmel. Even Daniel knew that. And to be honest, he doesn’t know a ton of stuff. Two weeks ago, he was arguing that Alfred Molina is more famous than Bad Bunny. He’s a very good writer, but he’s wrong about a lot of things. And for what it’s worth, he will never be speaking publicly on our behalf ever again because we’re now terrified he’s going to drop another fucked-up fortune cookie.
But the pretext that’s been used to indefinitely suspend Kimmel’s show is just laughably weak. Because while you may have seen headlines saying he got in trouble for remarks about Charlie Kirk himself or even remarks about his death, that’s not strictly accurate. The comments that got him in trouble weren’t about Kirk. In fact, Kimmel’s first comments after his murder were a post reading:
“Can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents, and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
What got Kimmel in trouble was a passing reference on Monday night. Now, at the time, there were still rumors flying around regarding the killer’s motivations, including that he was on the far right, something that Kimmel alluded to, like this:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
JOHN: Yeah, that was it. Weirdly, I was actually a guest on his show that night and I didn’t even register that comment, and that’s only partly because I wasn’t really paying attention. And I’m not alone in that. After Kimmel’s suspension, many struggled to pick the offensive line out of his monologue. As YouTube is filled with comments under the video, like, “I’m still waiting for the offensive part. What did he say that got him fired? I’m re-watching the last week of episodes and haven’t heard it yet.” And one viewer from the Netherlands saying, “It is even in the Dutch news with a link to this. I watched this almost every day for a year now to stay covered for American news with a humoristic flow.”
The point is Kimmel didn’t denigrate Charlie Kirk or make light of his killing. The worst thing you could say is that he appears to have been wrong about the shooter’s ideology, which, okay. But he was also pointing out that many on the right seemed desperate to weaponize Kirk’s death, an argument that’s aged pretty well given, you know, everything that’s happened to Kimmel since.
Because that one line set off a firestorm in some corners of conservative media. And on Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC and James Cromwell, minus the raw sex appeal, went on a right-wing podcast and said this:
[Brendan Carr] “You know, when you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible. Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fine or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
JOHN: Yeah, “we could do this the easy way or the hard way.” As threats go, that is pretty clear. It’s like if someone threw a brick through your window with a message that said, “Shut up or else.” Then followed it up with more clarifying bricks saying, by or else we mean we will hurt you physically. Then, this is the mafia by the way, followed by, you know, like in Goodfellas.
Now, in the wake of those remarks, NextStar, one of the largest owners of TV stations in the country, announced it would be pulling Kimmel from its stations. That in turn seems to have triggered his suspension by ABC. And a key thing to know about NextStar is that they have a big incentive to keep both Carr and the Trump administration happy right now, because NextStar currently controls or provides services to 201 local tv stations. But they’re trying to buy Tegna, a major competitor, and need approval and regulatory changes from the FCC for that deal to go through, as it would mean their reach would grow to 80% of US households, which is more than double the FCC’s current 39% cap.
All of which is a little bit strange because neither company really sounds like they should be providing television at all. NextStar sounds like a bankrupt flip phone manufacturer and Tegna sounds like, I’m sorry to say, an absolutely gorgeous Italian restaurant. The point is NextStar badly needs FCC approval. So it is hardly surprising that when Carr specifically said companies should pull Kimmel off the air or face consequences, it quickly complied. Basically, Brendan Carr said jump and NextStar took his dick out of their mouth for just long enough to say, how high exactly?
Now, I should say NextStar insists that it acted unilaterally and that they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making their decision. But I will remind you they didn’t need to communicate directly. Carr essentially told them what he wanted to happen on a podcast. Then they unilaterally decided to do it.
And it wasn’t just NextStar. Because following that, Sinclair Broadcasting, another major owner of TV stations who were also apparently exploring merger options that would require FCC approval, announced that they too would not air Kimmel’s show. And Sinclair even cited Carr’s remarks in their statement, saying, “We appreciate FCC chairman Carr’s remarks today.”
And come on, Sinclair. As I believe Alandria once said to Hood on Love Island,“don’t embarrass yourself going too hard for a man.” And that’s just solid advice for the islands of love and for business.
And it is not like Carr himself was trying to dissuade people from connecting the dots here. As when one media reporter asked him for a comment, he sent back a smiley emoji. And when CNN did the same, this is what they got.
I don’t know if you saw the reaction, the response that Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, gave to Brian Stelter when Brian Stelter asked him for a reaction or response to ABC’s pulling Kimmel off the air. We’re putting it on the screen. It’s, uh, it’s a meme. It’s from The Office. And that was the actual response by the chairman of the FCC.
JOHN: Oh, very cool. Just when I thought this factory setting white man couldn’t get any hotter, he whips out The Office gifs. And look, I like The Office. Who doesn’t like The Office? Sure, I could have done without seasons 8 and 9, but if it’s on at a hotel, I’m not kicking it out of bed.
That said, I want you to run through your friend list in your head right now and pick out the person most likely to text you a gif from The Office. Do you have them in your mind? They’re your least favorite friend, right? Just be honest. They’re the one you invite to stuff just because you’re afraid no one else will show up. They’re a third-string friend. They’re your backup’s backup. And if you’re thinking there’s nothing wrong with sending Office gifs, I’m afraid that person might be you.
And look, it didn’t stop there. When someone posted, “This is all in Project 2025,” Carr replied with this meme of Jack Nicholson grinning and nodding. Fun fact, this is true. The person he was replying to, Arty from Glee. And what a fun detail for historians. I can picture future textbooks now: After the FCC chair took a shit on the First Amendment, he trolled a former Glee cast member on X, a social media platform owned by the richest man in the world and father to most of you reading this.
And at this point, I should probably formally apologize to Ajit Pai, FCC chairman during Trump’s first term, who I repeatedly made fun of for being the dorkiest man ever to hold that job. I simply did not know how much worse things could get. So, I am sorry I made fun of your big dumb mug. And I’m sorry that we even made this even bigger mug as a joke. From now on, I promise we’ll only use it in the appropriate way — to hold the amount of alcohol I now need to get through each news day.
And while Carr clearly had fun, winking at his involvement and firing off gifs once Kimmel was suspended, he went on TV to suggest this was actually a spontaneous grassroots movement.
[Brendan Carr] This action today by NextStar and Sinclair, frankly, it’s unprecedented. I can’t imagine another time when we’ve had local broadcasters tell what we call a national programmer like Disney that your content no longer meets the needs and the values of our community. So, this is an important turning point.
JOHN: Okay. Everything he just said there is wrong. First, there’s actually a long history of local broadcasters refusing to carry national programs, and it’s not an especially pretty one: from a station in the South refusing to carry Sesame Street because it had a multiracial cast to one that refused to show Ellen sitcom when she came out as gay. Those decisions don’t tend to date well.
More than that, claiming this is simply local broadcasters responding to their community values is pretty hard to take given that this wasn’t a bunch of independent stations taking a stand. It was two of the biggest local TV ownership groups in the country making sweeping decisions for all the affiliates they own. Calling these companies “local broadcasters” is like describing Coca-Cola as a neighborhood soda shop or Boeing as a mom-and-pop plane crash business. It makes no sense.
Look, the sequence of events here could not be clearer because it was all done in plain view. Carr leaned on broadcasters to take down Kimmel. They did that, sometimes even directly citing Carr while doing so, and then Carr celebrated with a fun gif. That sure seems like a pretty clear case of the government pressuring companies to censor speech, and it is not like even Trump is trying to hide it — on Thursday he said this to reporters:
[Trump] “My host is on network television. There is a licensing. I’ll give you an example. I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me. I get 97% negative and if they’re 97% against they give me only bad publicity or press. I mean they’re getting a license — I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr”
JOHN: Wow. That is probably not something you should say out loud. But then this is a man who doesn’t seem to have an internal monologue. In fact, he ended that press gaggle on the plane saying, “Fly safely.” You know why I say that? Because I’m on the flight. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care. No message has ever entered his head without being delivered through his lips. And look, I am not the only one who sees a huge problem here.
Anna Gomez, now the lone Democrat-appointed member of the FCC, said what the administration is doing violates the First Amendment. And even Ted fucking Cruz, to use his full name, talked on his podcast about concerns regarding what Carr had done while also having some fun with voices.
[Verdict with Ted Cruz, Sept. 19, 2025] And I got to say, he threatens it. He says, “We can do this the easy way, but we could do this the hard way.” Yeah. And I got to say that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, “Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
JOHN: Look, let’s all agree Ted Cruz is an incredible vocal talent, and he should definitely quit his job right now and go do that instead. But he was actually on his way to making a much bigger point.
[Verdict with Ted Cruz, Sept. 19, 2025] I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said. I am thrilled that he was fired. But let me tell you, if the government gets in the business of saying what you, the media, have said, “We’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,” that will end up bad for conservatives.
JOHN: He’s right. He’s just right. And I’ll say this: I still don’t like that man, Ted Cruz. But in this unique clip of news, on this one thing, I must admit, he’s not completely full of shit. The point is, a lot of people seem to think Brendan Carr went too far. And it is worth talking about exactly how he’s been taking action and what the legalities of it are.
Because, as he alluded to on that podcast interview, the FCC does have a very narrow ability to police content on broadcast television in cases of what’s called news distortion. Now, it’s hardly ever used — the bar to do so is incredibly high, carving out things like mere inaccuracy and errors stemming from mistakes, which seem to more than cover what Kimmel said. And honestly, I don’t think Carr wants what Kimmel said to be the standard here. And I’m not sure that Sinclair does either, because we’ve talked on this show before about Sinclair and its long-standing tendency to push right-wing talking points. It is not like they’ve been consistently careful in their delivery of news.
One of their regular commentators is Armstrong Williams, who also actually owns a handful of stations operated by Sinclair, and he can be pretty conspiratorial. Among other things, he suggested on air that unexplained drone sightings last December might have been evidence of a plot by the deep state against Donald Trump and may have been an attempt to cancel the inauguration. He’s also spread wild allegations that Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil knew ahead of time about the events of October 7th and may even have been “at the dead center of planning it.” And if Brendan Carr’s standard, which Sinclair has cheered on, is that someone cannot go on broadcast TV in the wake of a high-profile murder and inaccurately characterize who might have been responsible for it, then I have some terrible news for them.
Because in the wake of Luigi Mangione’s arrest for shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Williams was on broadcast TV with this analysis of the footage of the shooting:
“It is obvious that when Mangione was on the phone for 10 minutes, someone was giving him the location of Brian. So obviously somebody else was involved and law enforcement is not telling us everything. So obviously someone was giving him very detailed, insightful information on his whereabouts. I’m sure that will be revealed in time. But obviously you could almost surmise that it was an inside job to a certain extent.”
Oh wow.
JOHN: Yeah. Wow. That ad on nearly two dozen Sinclair stations, and I’ve been told repeatedly this week that speculating on broadcast television about the motivations for someone’s murder without having all the facts is grounds to have your license revoked. And I’ll say this for Kimmel: at least he didn’t say the word “obviously” four fucking times while doing it.
And look, most experts will tell you if Carr goes after stations that air Kimmel for news distortion, he’s extremely unlikely to succeed on the merits. But even the threat of an investigation or a delay in reviewing a merger can be enough to get companies to comply. As one former FCC chair has said, Carr has been very artful in not making formal decisions that are appealable to the court, but instead having these informal coercive activities that are not appealable.
And the thing is, Kimmel is by no means the first casualty in Trump’s attacks on free speech. He’s just the latest canary in the coal mine — a mine that at this point now seems more dead canary than coal. In fact, if I may quote my Sesame Street SVU crossover that no one will take seriously, we are knee-deep in dead birds right now. But this Kimmel situation does feel like a turning point, and not because comedians are important, but because we are not. If the government can force a network to pull a late night show off the air and do so in plain view, it can do a fuck of a lot worse.
And I should say, we are very lucky at this show to be in a different situation. We’re not on broadcast TV. We’re on cable. And our parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, doesn’t own broadcast networks, meaning that we are much less susceptible to pressure from the FCC than, say, ABC’s parent company Disney, or CBS’s parent company Paramount Skydance. That is obviously very good news for us. And I really don’t see why that situation should change anytime soon.
We are back with what could be a colossal media merger. According to people familiar with the matter, Paramount Skydance is preparing a bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery.
JOHN: Fuck! Shit! Fuck! Fucking shit! Fucking shit! Fuck it! Okay. Look, it was… it was fun while it lasted, guys. Whatever happens next, let me say now, it has been the honor of my life to age like a haunted painting before your very eyes. Look, whatever happens to us or to our parent company, it should be clear to everyone that the First Amendment is absolutely critical in this country. That is something even Brendan Carr knows, given that he once tweeted, “Free speech is the counterweight. It is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” And I’m guessing that Trump is currently enjoying that dream so much he could break his bed sheets in half.
As many have pointed out, there are chilling precedents all over the world for what is happening right now. In Hungary, for instance, Viktor Orbán steadily took over the media since coming back to power in 2010. One of the first things his party did was adopt new media legislation as a corrective for leftist bias. This required media to be balanced, but the provisions were deliberately vague and equivocal, and violating them could attract steep fines. And if that is starting to sound familiar to you, it should. It’s frankly no wonder Trump’s a fan of Orbán, describing him as a great man, a great leader, a very strong man whom some people don’t like because he’s too strong. And I have never been more sure that someone told Trump that Orbán is a strongman and he just couldn’t get his head around how that could possibly be a bad thing.
And in Russia, when Putin rose to power, TV satirists were among his first targets.
[“Frontline: Putin’s Revenge” (2017) WGBH]
One of the first things he did was to take control of television because more than 90% of Russians got all their news from television.
During the Yeltsin years, independent television channels like NTV flourished.
NTV had a comic show called Kukly (Puppets). And when Putin comes to rise in public life, it features a Putin puppet as well. And he’s never portrayed very flatteringly.
[Music]
Putin apparently was driven to madness by the show and by the way he was portrayed on it, the way he was mocked on it.
JOHN: And that is so pathetic. I don’t know how anything a puppet show could possibly do could end up being more embarrassing for a world leader than them freaking out about it so much that years later a journalist solemnly says the man was driven to madness by puppets. But Putin did hate that show and that independent network to the point that he eventually sent armed operatives to raid their parent company’s offices and forced it to sell the TV station to a Kremlin-friendly oligarch. Today some Russians look back at that as one of the key moments when they should have stood up. Like this journalist who eventually left the country:
The first alarm that we should have noticed was in 2001 when NTV, the independent channel, was taken over.
Staff arriving for work were told their offices and studios were off limits unless they signed an oath of loyalty to NTV’s new managers.
I remember how frustrated and angry we were and we even went to the protest rally, but then it was cold and we had so many other independent TV channels. So we just went home and forgot about that.
JOHN: Yeah, that’s tough to hear in hindsight, isn’t it? But the lesson there is it is not safe to let attacks on one show slide because there are currently others. And I know I’ve literally said these exact same words about the cancellation of Doctor Odyssey, but I promise this situation is genuinely worse.
And it is important to remember that as of taping, Kimmel is just suspended, not actually canceled. So ABC and its parent company Disney still have a chance to do the right thing here. I get that the easier path for them right now is to keep him off the air and keep the administration off their back. Though I will point out that was the apparent argument for ABC paying Trump $15 million last year. And how did that work out for them?
If the Trump administration overplays its hand and this winds up in court, Disney would probably win. While Carr is usually pretty cautious, the mistake he’s made in this case is doing everything out in the open. There’s strong precedent here. Just last year in a 90 ruling, the Supreme Court found that a government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech. That is from this Supreme Court, remember. All of them. Yes, even that one.
So what needs to happen? Ideally, Congress should pass legislation sharply limiting the FCC chair’s ability to sit on things like license transfers or mergers so that that can’t be used as a means of controlling content. Until that happens, Carr will still have tools with which he can pressure companies. But as for Disney, they need to stand by Kimmel and his staff. There are ways you can encourage them to do that. You could exert pressure by canceling Disney Plus or Hulu. Google searches on how to do that have skyrocketed in the past few days, and you can be specific about it because there’s actually a box when you cancel where you can tell them exactly why you are doing it. So you could write, say, “cowardice in the face of pressure” or “refusing to protect freedom of speech” or “Donald Duck’s corkscrew penis.” Also the Kimmel thing. Mostly Disney’s silence regarding Donald Duck’s anatomically accurate corkscrew penis, which I will remind you looks like this. We made that for a show years ago—this is true—about China’s one-child policy. We are not going to stop bringing it up at every possible opportunity.
But it really shouldn’t take the threat of lost revenue to bring Disney to its senses here. Given that I still happen to have this desk, I would like to speak directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger. Hi there, Bob. We haven’t met, but you probably know me as America’s third-favorite Zazu. Congratulations on recasting that role, by the way. One day the history of the time we’re living through is going to be written. When it is, I’m not sure it’s those in this administration who will come off the worst. They will come off terribly, but history is also going to remember the cowards who definitely knew better but still let things happen, whether for money, convenience, or comfort.
This is a tough sell and anathema to risk-averse business leaders, but if we’ve learned anything from this administration’s second term so far, it’s that giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time. They have literally said that openly. After Kimmel’s suspension, Trump posted, “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC.” Carr has hinted that The View might be next. The fucking View! At some point you’re going to have to draw a line. Why not draw it right here?
When they come to you with stupid, ridiculous demands—picking fights you know you could win in court—instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school: not “Okay, you’re the boss,” not “whatever you say goes,” but the only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away: “Fuck you, make me.”
