For years, the left’s cancellation machine cranked full-throttle against anyone who violated progressive orthodoxy—Gina Carano’s career at Disney got torched over social media posts, JK Rowling has faced relentless boycotts for her views on gender ideology, and Roseanne Barr lost her reboot in a flash over a tweet. It wasn’t just about fresh offenses, either; Paula Deen was taken down in 2013 for using racial slurs decades prior.
When it comes to cancel culture, the left’s standard is unforgiving. Yet somehow, Jimmy Kimmel escaped the left’s hunger to cancel people for years. Why?
The Daily Mail published an extensive documentation of Kimmel’s “full, shameful past,” which included blackface, simulated public sex, and vile misogyny.
These weren’t one bad joke or a single lapse in judgment; it was a years-long pattern of behavior that would have ended the careers of most. His early-2000s impersonations of Karl Malone and Oprah used blackface under the fig leaf of “impressions,” a defense that never saved other targets of cancellation, and rings especially hollow given today’s standards on the left.
Kimmel tried to get ahead of that reckoning in 2020 with a carefully worded statement, apologizing to those hurt while insisting the intent was celebrity impersonation, not racial mockery. Roseanne apologized, too. But that didn’t save her.
Then there’s The Man Show era, which today reads like a time capsule of everything the left claims to abhor about “toxic masculinity”—beer-soaked chauvinism, objectification, homophobia, and gags that today’s leftists would call violence.
Anybody remember Jimmy Kimmel as the co-host of The Man Show?
— Mark (@MarkMizzouSteel) September 18, 2025
pic.twitter.com/S7cMLggZhi
A clip of @jimmykimmel back in the 1990s having women feel him up and guessing what’s in his pants. It was from a show called “The Man Show”.
— ❥❥❥ᗰoᒪᒪie❥❥❥ (@mollie_don) January 3, 2024
He even had to ask a girl how old she was. He’s worried about a smart a** remark Aaron Rodger’s said but this doesn’t concern him. Why… pic.twitter.com/t38CSehSy4
Pile on his 2018 feud with Sean Hannity that included homophobic barbs and another apology tour, and the pattern is set: conduct that would nuke a conservative’s career gets reprocessed as “edgy comedy” because the politics point the right direction. For years, the industry responded with promotions, not penalties—Oscars, Emmys, the full establishment embrace—because Kimmel spent his capital bashing Republicans, which bought him plenty of indulgences.
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What changed this week isn’t Kimmel’s past; it’s the cost of carrying him into the next cycle as audiences fracture and affiliates stare down a furious public. ABC’s suspension, Nexstar’s preemption, and the ripple of coverage about slipping ratings suggest a real calculus: keeping Kimmel on air now undermines the very “community standards” broadcasters say they serve, especially outside the coastal media bubble. That’s not cancel culture, it’s market reality finally catching up to Kimmel, whose show was bleeding viewers for years.
Make no mistake: Jimmy Kimmel didn’t dodge cancel culture by chance. He survived because the left decided he was too politically useful to take down. But after blatantly spreading a false narrative about Charlie Kirk’s assassin, that protective shield finally cracked under the weight of his own excesses and the backlash from broadcasters who had reached their limit. His suspension wasn’t really about what he said this week—it was a business decision. Disney and ABC recognized he had become a liability.
