The announcement came just after 6 pm Eastern on Wednesday: Disney/ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air. There was no detail on how long this would last or why it happened. Kimmel didn’t provide any statement. Within moments, the Democratic Party and Hollywood unions were frantically posting on X, reacting as though their industry was in crisis.

Ignoring the social-media drama, this moment is a clear test of American power, spanning cultural, corporate, and governmental sectors in the fresh political landscape following the post-Charlie Kirk era.

This issue revolves around speech and who ultimately governs it. It involves regulatory power and how a simple comment from a federal official can influence decisions in private boardrooms. It also concerns affiliate influence, a powerful force that can swiftly remove a network star, bypassing directives from corporate executives. Additionally, it involves Donald Trump’s drive to disrupt the entertainment industry that has mocked his supporters for years.

The left quickly crafted their narrative: ABC succumbed to pressure. Media executives everywhere are bowing to Trump’s alleged ‘bullying.’ Accusations of cowardice abound. However, if you think this is the complete story, you haven’t been observing how the current administration operates and don’t grasp the broader cultural dynamics at play. The administration doesn’t need to directly control speech; instead, it fosters an environment where companies self-regulate.

Let’s look at the sequence of events. Brendan Carr, the current FCC chair, who is known for his innovative and strategic industry remarks, issued a series of strong, clear warnings about content and licenses. In mere hours, major affiliate groups, including those with significant center-right ownership, began expressing their reluctance to air Kimmel’s show. Nexstar was the first to act, removing his show from their controlled stations. Consequently, ABC and Disney faced a fragmented network situation. The ‘indefinite suspension’ soon followed. ‘Indefinite’ essentially translates to ‘until we assess the outcome,’ and the resolution remains uncertain.

This situation isn’t a typical First Amendment court case; rather, it’s an example of managing regulatory pressure and taking preventive measures. Companies anticipating regulatory challenges—be it licenses, mergers, spectrum, or consent decrees—often act preemptively to avoid trouble.

The White House knows this. It is not censoring; it is engineering a climate of self-censorship, where a single threatening line in a speech produces a week of corporate compliance memos. The left can’t counter this with hashtags. You need institutional power to fight institutional pressure. And they no longer have much of that power, certainly nothing like in the olden days.

Meanwhile the backlash has real breadth — the WGA, AFM, Gavin Newsom, Ben Stiller, the ACLU and more are on the way, including the comedian class, which will rally perhaps even more strongly than it did over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert.

Their complaint is straightforward: a comedian is out because politics collided with television. But that complaint elides a second reality: for years, broadcast networks shoved a one-sided cultural sermon into living rooms and told the other half of the country to smile through it. ABC ran two daily hours — ‘The View’ and Kimmel — that treated Trump with unrelieved hostility and insultingly treated Trump voters as a punch line. If you’re looking for reasons tens of millions migrated into the president’s camp, that steady contempt is as good an Exhibit A as you will find.

Which brings us to Disney CEO Bob Iger. He now presides over a company forced to navigate Trump’s America, a marketplace where viewers, advertisers and affiliates are no longer willing to bankroll programming whose sensibilities read like an issue of ‘The Nation.’

Iger’s problem isn’t just political; it’s structural. Broadcast networks still rely on affiliates — many owned by groups whose profits depend on audiences far from Los Angeles and Manhattan. When those owners see a regulatory gun on the table and a restive customer base at the door, they act — fast. The supposed omnipotence of the network and the big studios is suddenly constrained by the reality of stations that can refuse the feed.

There’s another thread here that Hollywood and the progressive commentariat won’t like and about which they are clueless: the culture war is no longer a one-way battle. For decades, the left held the megaphone: late night, awards shows, prestige dramas, streaming algorithms. The right’s tools were talk radio and a few corners of cable news. But this is a different time. 

Team Trump has learned that you don’t need to own Hollywood to break its chokehold (although the Ellisons are altering that reality, too, with an inside-the-tent play); you need to make studios and networks understand that the costs of sneering at half the country now exceed the benefits. The FCC can’t outlaw mockery; it can make the business model expensive. Affiliates can’t script the punch lines but they can pull the pipe.

None of this excuses heavy-handed rhetoric from government overseers. Conservatives who cheered the Kimmel suspension should be honest about the dangers of jawboning. Power changes hands. The tactics you applaud today can be used against you tomorrow. A healthy speech culture requires clear rules, transparent standards and a regulator who doesn’t play coy enforcer from a podium or podcast mic. If the FCC has concerns, better to say them plainly, publish the rationale, invite scrutiny and stop the wink-and-nudge routine that leaves corporations guessing — and silencing.

But it also requires an entertainment industry that remembers it is a business, not a ballot initiative or a propaganda operation. You want the broadest audience in a fractured country? Try something radical: respect them. Not with forced neutrality or mealy ‘both sides’ scripts, but with a simple rule — no nightly contempt for the people who pay the bills. If Disney wants to keep Kimmel, it can; it just has to own the choice and carry the cost. If it wants to win back affiliates and viewers, it might ask why the mock-the-rubes format feels tired at best and hostile at most outside coastal zip codes.

So where does this go? We don’t know; the company won’t say how long ‘indefinite’ lasts, and Kimmel hasn’t spoken. But the message from the suspension is already clear. Free speech is being reframed as corporate risk, and corporate risk is being recalculated by regulatory threat and affiliate clout. The Charlie Kirk tragedy scrambled emotions and politics; this episode shows how quickly it scrambled protocols as well.

I don’t like censorship or comedians losing their jobs over jokes. But one of the most significant guardians of the prerogatives of liberal Hollywood — Bob Iger — has now not just blinked, but shut his eyes tight and bent the knee, yet again, toward the MAGA point of view. The Mouse House topper, more than most Hollywood liberals, knows what time it is, willing to outrage many of his own employees and constituents to try to stay one step ahead of the new reality.

We are watching something unprecedented, set in motion by both Trump’s re-election and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It is possible Kimmel will return to the air and he certainly won’t leave the metaphoric stage without a fight. But we have not seen the last of this whirlwind. As much social and political change as Kirk manifested in life, more upheaval is clearly being caused by his death.