Shortly before his return to the airwaves after the Trump administration bullied ABC/Disney into suspending him, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel posted a photo of himself with the late legendary TV producer Norman Lear. “Missing this guy today,” Kimmel wrote.
Kimmel’s post was a moving tribute to his friendship with and admiration for Lear, who frequently battled efforts to censor conversation about challenging topics like racism, sexism, sexuality, and the Vietnam war on iconic television shows like “All in the Family.”
At the height of his influence, Lear stepped away from his career and recruited other civic, religious, and business leaders to join him in founding People For the American Way to defend First Amendment freedoms and other democratic ideals.
Over the years, Lear and People For the American Way challenged politicians, government officials, religious-right leaders, and corporate executives to defend freedom of speech, the freedom to learn, and freedom of artistic expression. He helped lead our opposition to book bans and efforts to silence artists, playwrights, and movie makers. He was an active People For board member until his death in 2023 at the age of 101.
A HuffPost article about Kimmel’s return cited a Lear quote from a 2015 interview that gives a sense of his fierce devotion to freedom and to his belief that such devotion should cross party and ideological lines:
During a 2015 interview, Lear said he considered himself a “bleeding heart conservative” because “you will not fuck with my First Amendment, my Bill of Rights, my Constitution, my Declaration, the promises my country made to me and everybody else here and elsewhere.”
Lear considered the defense of free speech and American ideals a patriotic duty. “I am a patriot, and I will not surrender that word to those who play to our worst impulses rather than our highest ideals,” he wrote in a Washington Post op ed on his 99th birthday.
I had the good fortune to work closely with Norman over many years, and I believe he would have loved the thoughtfulness and open-heartedness of Kimmel’s remarks on Tuesday night—and Kimmel’s use of humor to reach people in ways that pure argumentation does not.
Kimmel clearly repudiated political violence and expressed compassion for Kirk’s family. And he just as clearly defended freedom of speech as a defining American value:
What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from countries like Russia, countries in the Middle East who tell me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power. And worse than being thrown in prison. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country.
And that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That’s not legal. That’s not American. That is un-American and it is so dangerous.
Kimmel did not shy away from calling out Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr for threatening broadcast outlets whose coverage displeased the Trump administration. And Kimmel made it clear that the threat to free speech starts at the top:
The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS. Then he turned his sights on me, and now he’s openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week. We have to speak out against this because he’s not stopping.
And it’s not just comedy. He’s gunning for our journalists, too. He’s suing them. He’s bullying them. Over the weekend, his Foxy friend Pete Hegseth announced a new policy that requires journalists with Pentagon press credentials to sign a pledge, promising not to report information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized for release. That includes unclassified information. They want to pick and choose what the news is. I know that’s not as interesting as muscling a comedian, but it’s so important to have a free press, and it is nuts that we aren’t paying more attention to it.
Walter Cronkite must be spinning in his grave right now. (He’s dead, right?) Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this. I barely paid attention in school. But one thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American. That’s anti-American.
Norman would have appreciated that Kimmel was gracious in acknowledging and thanking conservative and right-wing voices who spoke out against government coercion even though their politics are very different from Kimmel’s. In 1982, Norman produced “I Love Liberty,” a two-hour television special that portrayed Americans’ love of freedom as something that could unite us across our differences—from Barry Goldwater to Jane Fonda. Not surprisingly, some of it feels dated more than 40 years later, but Norman loved it so much that in his final years he was thinking about how to produce an updated version.
Norman dropped out of college to fight fascism during World War II. He would not stand idly by while the freedoms he fought for in Europe were threatened at home. He was sometimes discouraged by developments like Trump’s election, but he was always inspired by the creative and committed people he worked with in Hollywood and as an activist. “Those encounters renew my belief that Americans will find ways to build solidarity on behalf of our values, our country and our fragile planet,” he wrote on his 100th birthday.
Jimmy Kimmel was one of the people who inspired Norman. Kimmel and Lear collaborated on television specials featuring live performances of classic Lear show episodes that won Emmy Awards in 2019 and 2020.
Big thanks to Kimmel, and to all the people, including thousands of People For members, who raised their voices to defend his freedom of speech—and ours. Norman would be proud of all of you.