I put up an American Spectator column last night trashing ABC and suggesting that its broadcast licenses ought to go under scrutiny, and of course the horrific lies failing late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel put on the network’s air was part of the argument.

By the time the column went live, ABC had dumped Kimmel. He’s technically suspended, but he isn’t going back on the air at ABC, ever. He’s done.

This has turned into a gigantic food fight, which is surprising since nobody actually watched Kimmel’s show. He loses about the same amount of money for ABC and its network affiliates that Stephen Colbert does, with worse ratings than Colbert gets and the same tired leftist commentary disguised, poorly, as humor.

Somehow, getting him fired as FCC chairman Brendan Carr is being accused of doing because Carr went on TV and made noises about Kimmel being unworthy of programming carrying a broadcast license, is a massive affront to the First Amendment.

And this is utterly idiotic. Worst argument I’ve seen made yet.

The thing is that Brendan Carr can’t really pull ABC’s broadcast license. ABC doesn’t actually have one as a network. It has them for its O&O stations (O&O is short for “owned and operated,” meaning that ABC actually owns a dozen or so local affiliate stations), but the vast majority of the TV stations broadcasting ABC’s programming and holding FCC licenses to do so are owned by others.

What Carr is talking about when he raises the specter of FCC sanctions, fines and killing broadcast licenses is that he’ll be going after local ABC affiliates. That’s a very big move, and it involves a whole lot of complicated actions. It’s really unlikely he’d actually be doing that. But just the possibility that the FCC chairman would go down that road scares the bejesus out of the affiliates. It’s a lever that Carr is uncommon among FCC officials in being willing to pull.

And, of course, the Left hates him for it. In the aftermath of Kimmel’s firing, Carr is becoming the anti-First Amendment bogeyman.

The thing to know about this is that those network TV affiliates who are purportedly in Carr’s crosshairs are happy as clams right now.

Two companies in particular who own a big fraction of ABC’s flock of affiliate stations, Sinclair and Nexstar, were the prime movers in getting Kimmel fired. Both told ABC they weren’t going to carry Kimmel’s show anymore, and the question of losing their broadcast licenses was raised.

Carr was on TV praising Sinclair and Nexstar for stepping up and forcing change.

In other words, don’t assume Brendan Carr is some heavy-handed tyrant riding herd on the TV networks. Something else entirely is likely true, which is that he’s playing the heavy in order to give the affiliate stations leverage against networks like ABC.

In the past, there was basically zero leverage for those affiliates. Particularly when it came to woke programming.

Do you think the operators of a network affiliate station in, say, Jackson, Tennessee or Cheyenne, Wyoming really want to carry a show like Will & Grace in prime time? A clue: not really. The Left says a show like that is revolutionary and it changes American culture. For the affiliates in flyover country, all it does is make for tougher ad sales in local markets.

That’s one reason why so many local affiliate stations around the country, which used to be locally owned, are being sold to syndicates like Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray TV and others. The ABC Disneys of the world deliver crappy programming that regular Americans don’t want, and so ratings stink compared to a half-century ago, the public looks to things like streaming as alternatives to watching broadcast TV, and a local TV station that used to be a gold mine is now hard as hell to turn a profit with.

The networks did this. And the network execs have for decades told the affiliates to stick their complaints about it where the sun doesn’t shine.

You think the local affiliates are worried that Brendan Carr is threatening their broadcast licenses? Think again. They love it. They finally have something they can use to tell the Disney suits – the Comcast (NBC) and Paramount (CBS) suits, too – that they’re through accepting woke trash programming.

This is what’s really going on right now.

And you’re upset about the fact Jimmy Kimmel has to sit home alone and count his money? Please.

There’s no such thing as free speech on network TV. That’s all paid speech. Nobody has the right to get paid to do a TV show. And it is absolutely not censorship for half the country regularly offended by the crap Jimmy Kimmel has put on the air for the entire time he’s been getting paid millions of dollars to supposedly entertain us to step up and say we’ve had it.

ABC could have stood by Kimmel. But he’s a loser and his show is a loser. And when you’re a loser you’re going to get fired sooner or later.

The Left doesn’t understand that you don’t have the right to lose your employer money. It’s amazing that they don’t understand this, but they don’t.

And it’s strange, because they always want to inflict losses on others. They’re always talking about boycotts which are almost never effective (just ask American Eagle in the wake of the Sydney Sweeney ads), and then they’re aghast when the Right wakes up every now and again and grinds up a company who pisses us off.

Like Bud Light or Cracker Barrel.

I’ll close with an old Hayride story which should give you a little bit of perspective why (1) I don’t have any use for this First Amendment talk and (2) I’m perfectly happy with Team Trump playing the heavy to stick it to Kimmel and ABC.

We’re going back a few years to when Steve Scalise was first coming up as a candidate to be the Republican whip in the House. This is over a decade ago. If you’ll remember, the cretinous Lamar White – is he even still around? – published something of an expose’ of Scalise as a white surpremacist because of a speech he gave as a state representative in 2002 advocating for the repeal of the stupid Stelly tax scheme. Scalise went all over the state giving these speeches, but one in particular that he gave was to what he thought was a neighborhood group from Jefferson, which is where Scalise lives. The issue was that the guy leading that neighborhood group worked for David Duke, and he piggybacked the group’s meeting on top of a Duke confab.

Scalise didn’t know that was what he was walking into, but he gave the speech and nothing much happened until White decided he had the opportunity to make a capital case out of it years later, and for about 15 minutes Steve Scalise was suddenly the Grand Wizard of the Invisible White Empire. Everything about this was an embarrassment, and it faded away pretty quickly because it was so absurd. Even Cedric Richmond, who’s the most partisan assclown in American politics, stepped in and defended Scalise’s honor as a non-racist.

But when I went off on White and the morons who were with him trying to take Scalise down over the idiocy of the “white supremacist” allegations, it was like kicking over an antpile, and amid the casual death threats and other unpleasantness, one of the funniest things I’ve seen in the 16 years of doing this site popped out.

I saw some clown on Facebook making a list of “major sponsors” of The Hayride that needed to be boycotted into dropping us.

None of them advertised with us, you understand. They bought digital ads through ad networks we belonged to along with every other commercial site on the internet, and their banners were served based on algorithms derived from demographics and psychographics fed by cookies on individual users’ computers. And this guy made a list of sponsors to boycott because he was clicking on pages on this site and those were the ads he saw.

They were the same ads he was seeing when he clicked on articles at Slate or the New Republic or HuffPo. And he had no clue how any of it worked.

To this day I still laugh at how stupid that guy was.

There’s a serious component to this, of course, which is that one reason you don’t see a lot of corporate advertising at this site despite its decent-sized and fairly influential readership is a fear of boycotts. We’ve had many conversations over the years about getting the big Louisiana brands on board as site sponsors and mostly the reaction was a pat on the head and words of encouragement for a great site, but they were terrified that if they advertised with us the Left would throw a fit and it would cost them more business than it would generate.

And these are conservative companies, by the way. It was conservatives telling us this.

So you’ll see candidates advertising here when an election is coming, and you’ll see a lot of PR firms doing advocacy campaigns. You won’t see restaurant chains or beer companies or home improvement stores and so on.

And that’s because the Left has done such a thorough job of mucking up the economics of paid speech they don’t agree with.

And I’m supposed to feel sorry for Jimmy Kimmel that he lost a multi-million-dollar gig because somebody on the Right made trouble for ABC?

I don’t have a violin that small, guys.