Our great national censorship nightmare is over — but only for about three-quarters of the ABC stations in America.

Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air Tuesday night after Disney, the parent company of ABC, reversed its decision last week to suspend his talk show over comments he made about MAGA supporters’ response to the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That initial pause came after increasing pressure from the Trump administration and two TV station groups — Nexstar and the conservative-leaning Sinclair — which said last week they would not air Kimmel’s show.

Whether or not you like Kimmel, his show’s return Tuesday night was a triumph for a few reasons. First, it was a victory for free speech: the return of a show that was taken off the airwaves in part because of oblique threats from the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission’s leadership, and the rebuffing of what my colleague Zack Beauchamp has called a “climate of fear and censorship” in the wake of Kirk’s death, championed by conservative activists.

Second, it was also a new kind of (partial) victory for liberals and their resistance efforts in the second Trump term.

Led by celebrities, podcasters, influencers, and the grassroots — as opposed to any institutions, corporations, billionaires, or political parties — it managed to get a major corporation to resist Trump and restore Kimmel, even though his show is only returning to about three-quarters of the ABC-affiliated TV stations in America.

While a variety of voices pushed back against this attempt at corporate censorship, Nexstar and Sinclair continued to boycott Kimmel’s show last night — airing local news segments instead of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the nearly 25 percent of local ABC affiliates across the country that they own. They don’t show signs of reversing course yet. And it’s not clear what mechanism — if any — Kimmel supporters have to influence either corporation to change its policy for now.

Kimmel goes “full resistance”

Tuesday night’s monologue might end up being the moment Kimmel revived this new type of resistance — or it might get lost in another wave of Trump-induced news and scandal. It will surely be one of his best rated shows. He came out swinging against Trump, his efforts to punish his critics, and the FCC’s chief Brendan Carr. Kimmel didn’t directly apologize — and instead made an impassioned case for further Trump resistance, called in surprise guest (and Trump arch-enemy) Robert De Niro, and joked about Trump’s physical appearance and the likelihood of an Epstein files drop “to distract us from this now… He tried his best to cancel me, instead he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly.”

His case against Trump was simple.“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 said, holding back tears throughout the address. “A government threat to silence a comedian the President doesn’t like is anti-American. There is some solidarity on that from the right and........

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