FCC Chair Revels as MAGA TV Conglomerate Refuses to Air Jimmy Kimmel

With Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning to the air Tuesday evening, the Federal Communications Commission chair who jawboned ABC and companies that own its stations into censoring Jimmy Kimmel can’t keep himself from weighing in on the affair.

While ABC on Monday reversed its decision to cancel the show, Sinclair Broadcast Group, followed by Nexstar Media Group, announced that they will not air the show on the roughly 70 ABC affiliates owned across the country between them.

The companies first pulled Kimmel’s show last week, after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened those who platform the comedian following a joke he made about Trump and MAGA’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk. Both companies have business before the FCC, which helps explain their swift and ongoing capitulation to Carr. (Nexstar is pursuing a multibillion-dollar merger that would expand its reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country—a number so large that it would require the FCC to lift the existing 39-percent cap limiting companies’ reach.)

Carr, who has spent the past week trying to paint the incident as anything other than a patent instance of a government official applying pressure to influence private decision-making, was delighted by the news that Sinclair and Nexstar won’t change their stance.

Carr took to X to lash out against Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, who reacted to the news of Sinclair’s decision to keep Kimmel censored despite ABC’s reversal by proposing breaking up the massive conglomerate. “Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy,” Wiener wrote, in a post published before Nexstar followed in Sinclair’s footsteps.

Carr argued that Wiener’s statement showed that it’s Democrats—not Republicans—who are the censorial ones. Nexstar and Sinclair, he claimed, had decided independently that suspending Kimmel “made sense.”

Wiener responded in disbelief at the FCC chair’s hypocrisy: “Do you people hear yourselves?? BREAK UP SINCLAIR.”

Carr fired off another tweet, in which he attempted to describe the incident—in which two of the country’s largest, and ever consolidating, media conglomerates, are truckling to an agency whose approval they need—as a heartwarming underdog story. Democrats, he said, “simply can’t stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer” in ABC.

President Trump repeatedly blamed the United Nations for his teleprompter issues and a malfunctioning escalator in a spiteful Tuesday speech to the General Assembly. But it seems that both issues were caused directly by his own team.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump said after claiming to have brought so much peace and prosperity to the world without any international assistance. “If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape … and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

But according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri, an anonymous U.N. official said the escalator in question was actually stopped prematurely by someone from Trump’s group, who ran ahead of the group and accidentally triggered a stop mechanism. The official added that the teleprompter that Trump was so upset about was also being operated by his White House.

Trump’s churlish speech—and his faulty finger-pointing—only further display how isolating his presidency has been on an international level. Trump’s constant hammering of the U.N. may cause countries that once depended on us as allies to go elsewhere, or strengthen their relationships without us.

A Guatemalan family says immigration enforcement agents held their autistic 5-year-old daughter outside their home in Leominster, Massachusetts, last week in order to induce her father to surrender to them.

As Telemundo reported Monday, the father—a man named Edward Hip, who has lived in the country for more than two decades and has an active asylum application—was reportedly driving with his daughter when he called his wife at home and said someone seemed to be following them. When they got home, Hip “managed to run back into the parking lot of my house,” his wife said, but agents got hold of the child.

Video footage obtained by Telemundo shows the father and mother pleading with several men, apparently federal agents, surrounding the girl in a driveway. “They took my daughter, she’s 5 years old. She has autism spectrum,” the woman can be heard shouting in the recording.

“We didn’t take your daughter,” one of the agents said, to which the mother replied, “OK, give me my daughter back.”

In another portion of the video, agents can be seen gesturing for the parents to come over. “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs,” one asked. Hip responds that he can “give it through the door,” but the agent, pointing in front of him, says, “You can do it right here.”

The local police department apparently intervened, rescuing the girl from the federal agents. Arriving at the scene, NBC Boston reports, “Leominster police recovered the child and returned her to the family.” Two days later, though, federal agents returned, arresting Hip out of his car.

Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin called the story “a disgusting smear,” on X, alleging that Hip had prior arrests, “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over,” and “abandoned” his daughter in the car as he fled inside. 

“Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment,” McLaughlin wrote.  

A statue depicting President Donald Trump and deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein frolicking hand in hand appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

The 12-foot-tall statue—made mostly of foam and wire, but painted bronze—is accompanied by three plaques. The middle plaque reads “In Honor of Friendship Month: We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein.” It then directly references the introduction to the strange letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for the pedophile financier’s 50th birthday book: “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.”

The other two plaques have Epstein’s name and the corresponding lines of the poem, and vice versa for Trump’s.

This statue represents the ongoing public fascination and outrage over the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to suppress further investigation into the Epstein files given his close friendship with the notorious sex predator.

The statues seemed to have struck a nerve within the Trump administration, as they responded almost as quickly as the statues were erected.

“Liberals are free to waste their money however they see fit—but it’s not news that Epstein knew Donald Trump, because Donald Trump kicked Epstein out of his club for being a creep,” a White House spokesperson told TMZ. “Democrats, the media, and the organization that’s wasting their money on this statue knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”

This response is pretty insufficient. Trump has recently said he kicked Epstein out because he “stole” workers from him. There have also been reports that they fell out over a real estate deal. Either way, this story that Trump was some white knight who defended the honor of the women of Mar-a-Lago doesn’t hold up with his own words.

Additionally, the Trump administration has not been transparent. The overwhelming majority of thee “thousands of pages of documents” the Justice Department released on Epstein were already mostly public information. It’s clear that these paltry excuses from the president aren’t going to make any of this go away.