Jimmy Kimmel dedicated his monologue during Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 21 people dead, including 19 kids.
“Here we are again, on another day of mourning in this country,” Kimmel said, fighting back tears and full of anger. “Once again, we grieve for the little boys and girls whose lives have been ended and whose families have been destroyed wile our leaders on the right — the Americans in Congress and at Fox News and these other outlets — warn us not to politicize this. They immediately criticize our president for even speaking about doing something to stop it. Because they don’t want to speak about it. Because they know what they’ve done and they know what they haven’t done, and they know that it’s indefensible. So they’d rather sweep this under the rug.”
He later added, “So if you care about this — and we all do, doesn’t matter what party we vote for, we all care about this — we need to make sure that we do everything we can to make sure that unless they do something drastic that let’s make sure that not one of any of these politicians ever holds office again.”
If you were watching Jimmy Kimmel Live! in Dallas, however, you may have missed the monologue. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that “Kimmel’s six-minute monologue was cut off by a string of commercials, beginning with an in-house WFAA/Ch. 8 news spot. The ABC affiliate played several more commercials before cutting back into the end of the monologue, which Kimmel used for a three-minute Everytown.org commercial.”
A source at WFAA says the commercials aired and cut out part of the monologue because the 10 p.m. newscast ran long. It wasn’t just the monologue that received off-kilter cuts to commercials. An interview with Seth MacFarlane was chopped up into mangled segments between spots.
Kimmel tweeted about the cut-away, writing, “To my friends in Dallas who are asking: I do not know whether our @ABCNetwork affiliate @wfaa cut away from my monologue tonight intentionally or inadvertently but I will find out.” You can watch it above.
