As we’ve been following, last week Jimmy Kimmel uttered some truths about MAGAland’s behavior around the man charged with the murder of Charlie Kirk, which prompted Trump’s FCC toady to bait Kimmel’s network ABC and their parent company Disney to take Kimmel off the air, which they did by way of an indefinite suspension. But where The Mouse cowered, we the people stood tall, swiftly canceling subscriptions to Disney and all their affiliated channels. The power of the consumer is HUGE, if we wield it strategically! (Meaning not on Labubus, but I digress…) Also standing up for Kimmel were his Hollywood colleagues, 400 of whom signed an open letter of protest penned by the ACLU, putting themselves in opposition to a major studio that has employed them all at some point in their careers. We learned of this letter hours before the announcement that ABC/Disney and Kimmel had reached a truce and that Kimmel would be returning tonight.
Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston, Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Bateman and Martin Short are among the members of the Hollywood community who have signed an open letter with the American Civil Liberties Union protesting Disney’s decision to pull late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show off of its schedule and warning of its ramifications on Americans’ right to speak freely.
The letter says that efforts to pressure artists, journalists, and others with retaliation for their speech “strike at the heart of what it means to live in a free country” and closes by calling on all Americans to defend the right to speak freely.
“We immediately find ourselves in a modern McCarthy era, facing exactly the type of heavy-handed government censorship our Constitution rightfully forbids. The silencing of Jimmy Kimmel and jawboning of media outlets through lawsuits and threats to their licenses evoke dark memories of the 1950s,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which organized the letter, in a prepared statement. “We must remember, however, that Senator McCarthy was ultimately disgraced and neutralized once Americans mobilized and stood up to him. We must do the same today because, together, our voices are louder and, together, we will fight to be heard.”
The list of signatories also includes Ariana DeBose, Jane Fonda, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Regina King, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Diego Luna, Lin-Manual Miranda and Natalie Portman, among others.
…The list includes some actors whose work is distributed by Disney. Martin Short, for example, is a star of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” in which Meryl Streep has a recurring role. Both Florence Pugh and Julia Louis-Dreyfus starred in the recent Marvel release “Thunderbolts,” have also signed the letter. Jamie Lee Curtis has a prominent recurring role in the FX series, “The Bear.” Kathryn Hahn recently starred in the Marvel streaming series “Agatha All Along.”
Madame President Former Vice President Kamala Harris has a new book out today — 107 Days, the length of her 2024 campaign — and she appeared on Rachel Maddow’s show last night for her first TV interview to promote it. One quote from the book that Rachel highlighted was, and I’m paraphrasing, “I expected everything we’ve seen from Donald Trump; I wasn’t expecting the total capitulation from our biggest institutions.” This line was especially potent coming off the free speech crisis of the past week. And I’ll be honest, my most cynical self was worried that the ACLU publicly calling Disney/ABC a modern-day McCarthy would land like water off a Donald Duck’s back. But in this instance it worked, huzzah! Still, it’s obvious that big corporations are all too eager to capitulate, like Harris pointed out, unless we push back. Which means we’re going to have to keep doing this over and over and over again. Also, this is a separate conversation, but the protests of the last week really exposed a problem with these mega mergers going around Hollywood; instead of just boycotting ABC, we also had to look at Disney and ESPN and FX and Hulu, etc.
Header image is a photo Kristen Bell posted in July, 2023, from a dinner rave Jimmy Kimmel held at South Fork Lodge in Idaho, which he owns. Other photos credit: Sadou Faye/Avalon
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