Back in 2018, Roseanne Barr made a major and impressive television comeback. ABC was doing a reboot of her classic TV sitcom Roseanne with some of the old and a few new characters in an updated setting. To say this new Roseanne was a success is putting it mildly—she got massive ratings and was the most successful TV show at the time. The sit-com was based on characters and a story line she created during her years as a standup comic. The show was not particularly political, but it was not woke. The Conners family was a dysfunctional blue-collar family from the Midwest who scrambled from paycheck to paycheck. The Conners had bad jobs, their kids went to bad schools, and they all struggled to do the best they could do under the circumstances. A lot of America identified with the Conners. Roseanne, once a Hollywood leftist, was starting to drift more and more to the right in her personal life and in her on-screen namesake character.
Then in the middle of the night in 2018, Roseanne tweeted that she thought Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes.”
Roseanne’s tweet was called “shockingly racist” by People magazine. Roseanne got a call from network big shot Bob Iger who told Roseanne that “ABC does not tolerate comments like those.”
Barr apologized profusely and more than once. She offered to get off Twitter and stop tweeting altogether. Barr even described her tweet as “unforgiveable,” and explained she was “Ambien-tweeting” in the middle of the night. She said, “I made a mistake I wish I hadn’t but … don’t defend it, please.”
But the cancellation commenced. In fact, Roseanne practically defines the script of a true lefty cancellation:
Roseanne was fired at once, effective immediately, despite her apologies
The show was canceled
Later, ABC tried to rebrand her show as The Conners by killing of Roseanne’s character. That show flopped
Her Hollywood agent, ICM Partners, severed ties with Roseanne “effective immediately” after calling her tweet “disgraceful”
When The Conners got taken off the air for poor ratings, hundreds of cast and crew and writers and all the rest lost their jobs—for which Roseanne again apologized
The network even stopped reruns of the show (meaning nobody could earn residuals or payments off reruns)
For years, Roseanne could not find work. She was a pariah. She lost friends, no one would return her calls, she was mostly banished out of Hollywood society. Her life was ruined, or so they thought. Roseanne re-emerged on the standup circuit (her roots in show business) and launched The Roseanne Barr Podcast two years ago. With just over 100 installments to date, there are no reliable statistics on viewership, but Roseanne has overall had a successful life despite attempts to destroy her. Her net worth is around $80M. She laughs a lot. She looks good, too.
Cancel Culture
Cancel culture happens when the public—or some segment of the public—no longer supports an artist, a company, or even a product. The fall from grace can be abrupt and, as seen in Roseanne’s case, without remedy. Social media can amplify the shaming and bullying aspects of cancel culture. In some ways, cancel culture is a bit like a boycott, except cancel culture can be deeply personal. Roseanne was called a racist, a bigot, shamed, humiliated, and bullied. No matter how much she apologized, nothing stopped the attacks.
People hated her. People she had worked with hated her. People she had helped hated her. People who didn’t know her hated her. It’s hard to comprehend that kind of situation.
Boycotts often have an endpoint, but cancel culture can destroy a person with no way for the person to recover. In other words, Roseanne’s apologies were not enough to save her show. There was literally nothing she could do to fix things. Even murderers in our society are sometimes considered rehabilitated, but nothing could rehabilitat Roseanne.
When Roseanne the show and Roseanne the artist were canceled, they did not stop by taking away her life’s work in the sit-com. They tried to ruin her life. The symbolic killing of the title character Roseanne on her own sitcom was more than symbolic—it was the goal. They scripted Roseanne’s death as a drug overdose. The network said they just wanted to explain Roseanne’s departure, but it looked more like an emphatic middle finger to Barr, telling her she could never ever return.
Such cancellations can ripple through the personal world. John Goodman, who played Roseanne’s husband on the first Roseanne series and again in the Roseanne reboot said he had not spoken to her since 2018. In other words, around the time that Roseanne was cancelled, her long-time friend and colleague disappeared.
As a business move, cancelling Roseanne didn’t make much sense—but then woke people are not good at business. Roseanne was a ratings bonanza and the leading show on television; ABC was fortunate to have her on the air. To kill off a top-rated show is not sensible, particularly when the actress Roseanne not only apologized for her tweet but offered to quit going on Twitter altogether.
The vehemence and vengeance in the Roseanne cancellation was unprecedented but soon became part of the lefty playbook. People became afraid to say anything politically incorrect for fear it could lead to this type of shunning. And by “politically correct” they meant “not woke.” You could lie, defame, malign, and slander as much as you wanted, as long as you stayed in the left lane. You can call Trump Hitler all you want, just don’t say anything about Valerie Jarret’s appearance.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Jimmy Kimmel, of the Jimmy Kimmel Live! late-night show, said on September 15, 2025, that “the MAGA gang” was trying to score points from Kirl’s murder. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” In other words, Kimmel was stating a lefty talking point of the time, specifically that the person who assassinated Charlie Kirk was a MAGA person. Not only was there no evidence of that, it doesn’t make sense. (Why would a MAGA person want to kill Charlie Kirk?) And it wasn’t true. But Kimmel said it anyway.
Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin, is 22 years old and legally an adult, not “a kid” or minor as Kimmel implied. And it has been well established that Robinson was an ardent leftist and a supporter of the PRIDE movement, who disagreed with Charlie Kirk’s stance on transgenderism among other things.
Kimmel also criticized how Donald Trump was handling the death of Charlie Kirk and said Trump was mourning Kirk “like a four-year-old mourns a gold fish.” I’m not even sure what that means. Trump did order flags to be lowered in remembrance of Charlie Kirk, but I don’t think four-year-olds issue similar orders. This may be part of the old lefty trope that Trump is a baby. I think aging antisemite Roger Waters, the musician, flies a balloon at his never-ending comeback tours depicting Trump in a diaper. I don’t get it, but then I don’t get the appeal of geriatric rocker Roger Waters, either.
Why would a person on TV criticize Donald Trump for mourning Charlie Kirk the wrong way? I always hear people say everyone mourns in their own way. What did Trump do that made his grief so aberrant and childish?
Not only are those comments stupid and wrong, they aren’t even funny. Roseanne tweeted something hateful and mean about Valerie Jarrett, but at least it was funny. Kimmel can’t even do that.
As for Jimmy Kimmel, it wasn’t the first time he spewed anti-MAGA rhetoric. The show was known for it. Kimmel is reportedly furious for being “cancelled,” but his experience is nothing like what he and his compadres did to Roseanne.
Kimmel has been trash-talking MAGA for years; Roseanne just made one bad tweet
Kimmel’s MAGA-crushing rants do not make sense and are not even funny; Roseanne is at least funny
Kimmel has not apologized and probably never will; Roseanne apologized many times over for her tweet
Kimmel has not offered any way to remedy his false and slanderous statements; Roseanne offered to quit Twitter altogether
Kimmel has not been fired although he’s not longer getting his $16M annual salary; Roseanne was fired right away
Kimmel’s show was not hijacked from him and another guy put in his place; they did that to Roseanne with The Conners and then killed off her character to boot!
Kimmel’s show was not permanently taken off the air, just taken off “indefinitely”; Roseanne was exiled immediately with no way to ever return
Kimmel’s ratings are poor; Roseanne was canceled from the most popular and highest-rated TV show at the time
Jimmy Kimmel Live! had 1.1M viewers in August 2025 which represented an 11% drop from the prior month of July 2025. Considering that Kimmel is on ABC, these are pretty grim figures. Just to compare, in February 2014, the latest date for which there are records, the Tonight Show with Jay Leno had 14.6M viewers each evening. At its nadir in 2010, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno averaged around 3.8M viewers. So even in the darkest ratings period for Jay Leno, he had more than three times the viewers that Kimmel gets today.
Late-night competitor Greg Gutfeld pretty consistently logs >3M viewers. Even podcasters do better than Jimmy Kimmel. Just think of Joe Rogan with 14.5M viewers roughly per episode on a talk-show type podcast. So Kimmel’s rating are objectively poor. Kimmel is claiming persecution, cancellation, and other manners of grave injustices, but there may be a little more going on than just MAGA seeking revenge.
Although MAGA may be seeking revenge, that’s true enough.
The ABC Saga
The ABC network has taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air and said that this suspension is “indefinite.” The action came after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) criticized what Kimmel said about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. The head of the FCC is Branden Carr, and he’s a Trump appointee.
The media business in America is complicated. ABC has a lot of affiliate stations, the TV stations in local markets that play ABC programming. Your community no doubt has an ABC affiliate station for live news, weather, and the usual ABC lineup of programming. Across the country, ABC has about 250 ABC affiliate stations.
Some of these ABC stations in local markets are owned and operated by the parent company ABC; they call these O&Os (owned and operated). Most of the ABC affiliates are network affiliates, meaning they are privately owned and operated but with an agreement with ABC to broadcast exclusively ABC programming. Nexstar is a media company that owns a lot of network affiliates, including about 10% of all ABC affiliates. This is nothing unusual.
Nexstar wants to merge with TEGNA, one of those annoying companies that wants its name written in all caps. TEGNA was born when the old media conglomerate Gannett split into two companies. TEGNA also owns some of the ABC network affiliates, plus a lot more NBC affiliates, the True Crime Network, and some other networks.
About a month ago, Nexstar signed an agreement to acquire TEGNA for $6.2B.
This merger would give Nexstar over 930 television stations in the United States, making it the largest owner of TV stations in the country. This is a big deal in the broadcast world. Nexstar wants to buy; TEGNA wants to sell.
Business people say the merger makes sense because Nexstar will save money by combining and streamlining the enterprise. The only problem is this kind of deal requires a signoff from the FCC.
Under normal circumstances, the Trump administration would likely greenlight this sort of business deal. The Trump administration favors deregulation of media companies and also likes smart business solutions. Add that to the fact that Nexstar already has the financing lined up to buy out TEGNA and you can see, everyone thought Nexstar would get the thumbs up from FCC head honcho Brendan Carr.
The problem is that Brendan Carr was a little distressed by Kimmel’s remarks. I’m not sure if he objected to the mischaracterization of the Kirk assassin as a MAGA person or the fact that Trump was mourning Kirk the way a four-year-old mourns a goldfish. Carr thought some sort of action ought to be taken against ABC.
The way the FCC looks at it, the airwaves in America are public. They belong to the American people and, as such, independent companies cannot use them to broadcast lies or propaganda. From a strictly regulatory-political viewpoint, Kimmel describing the Kirk assassin as a MAGA person—a known falsehood—could lead to the revocation of ABC’s broadcast license. You don’t get to keep your license to broadcast on public airwaves if you broadcast false, malicious, defamatory, or misleading information. At least you don’t any more.
ABC, Nexstar, and TEGNA all want the merger to happen, but if ABC lost its broadcast license or if their license was even in serious jeopardy, the merger could be on thin ice. Why would Nexstar shell out over $6B to buy some ABC stations if those stations could no longer broadcast?
Nexstar, in an effort to show good faith and make the deal work, offered to pre-empt the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show on the O&Os it owns now. This is not good news for Jimmy Kimmel who needs every last viewer he can get—if he gets taken off a series of the largest ABC affiliates, his rating will tank even more. (The O&Os are usually big stations in major markets.)
And just to make this more complicated, bear in mind that ABC is owned by Disney and some insiders say it’s Disney rather than ABC that is wanting to pull the plug on Kimmel. Add Disney to the list that also wants the Nexstar deal to go through.
In other words, nobody wants Kimmel to mess up the pending merger, and his remarks could quite possible suffice to lower the boom. Kimmel was probably oblivious that his blatant and reckless lying was going to jeopardize a major business deal. Considering he’s making $16M a year in a media company, that’s pretty clueless behavior. But then again, nobody ever said Jimmy Kimmel was a smart man.
Suits
There is also the fear of litigation.
In the past, Donald Trump has sued ABC for on-air comments. To be fair, he’s also sued CBS, but who’s counting? In the case of ABC, Trump sued because George Stephanopoulous stated that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape.” This was false and considered by the court to be defamation. Stephanopoulous was likely referring to the E. Jean Carroll case, in which a woman stated Donald Trump sexually assaulted her (but did not rape her—she even said that herself). Carroll claims this happened in a department store years in the past (she couldn’t remember when). This was a civil and not a criminal case and Trump was never convicted of rape anywhere. Trump won that case and got $15M (which was donated to charity) and $1M to pay his legal expenses.
Not only did Trump win $15M from ABC, he proved that it could be done. Networks could be held responsible for broadcasting lies. But $15M was a sustainable loss for ABC.
So Trump has since slapped a $10B lawsuit against CBS over its deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. That case has not yet come to court. This sort of lawsuit could wipe out CBS. Think it can’t happen? Just ask Alex Jones about lawsuits.
Knowing these two cases—one won and one in the queue—it is not a wild leap to think that a lawsuit filed against ABC and Jimmy Kimmel just might just prevail in court. Not only that, Charlie Kirk’s widow could sue as well. I don’t think there are any limits as to how many people can file lawsuits against ABC. Charlie Kirk’s widow could claim incredible damages when she was forced to hear her recently murdered husband defamed and mocked as he was—before they even had his funeral!
But let’s come back to the merger. ABC can’t afford to enter into this merger deal with TEGNA and Nexstar looking down the barrel of some high-dollar lawsuits.
So there have been some business insiders speculating that Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk just gave Disney/ABC the chance to do what they already wanted to do—jettison a losing show and get rid of a loose cannon like Jimmy Kimmel. While it seems like poetic justice for a wokester to get cancelled by the very machinery he helped to build—the truth may be that Kimmel is not the sort of person that ABC or any other network wants to keep subsidizing. It’s not because of his politics, it’s because of his recklessness and low ratings.
They’re not the same. Roseanne made a terrible tweet and they tried to destroy her. Kimmel lied, jeopardized his network and the parent company, and is crying like a four-year-old mourning a dead goldfish.
Great post. Very interesting comparison of treatment. And it proves that ABC/Disney is as much if not more the problem than Kimmel. He would be nothing without them.
When the Roseanne show was cancelled, it had over 21 million viewers. That's a bit more than Kimmel had.