It’s time to wake up, Los Angeles. We are all Jimmy Kimmel

Comics have long been on the front lines of democracy, the canary in the cat’s mouth, Looney Tunes style, when it comes to free speech being swallowed by regressive politics.

- ANITA CHABRIA COLUMNIST

GENARO MOLINA Los Angeles Times THE "JIMMY Kimmel Live" show, taped in Hollywood, is off the air indefinitely.

So Jimmy Kimmel is in good company, though he may not like this particular historical party: Zero Mostel; Philip Loeb; even Lenny Bruce, who claimed, after being watched by the FBI and backroom blacklisted, that he was less a comic and more “the surgeon with the scalpel for false values.”

During that era of McCarthyism in the 1950s (yes, know Bruce’s troubles came later), America endured an attack on our 1st Amendment right to make fun of who we want, how we want — and survived — though careers and even lives were lost.

Maybe we aren't yet at the point of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, but the moment is feeling grim.

Wake up, Los Angeles. This isn’t a Jimmy Kimmel problem. This is a Los Angeles problem.

This is about punishing people who speak out. It’s about silencing dissent. It’s about misusing government power to go after enemies. You don’t need to agree with Kimmel’s politics to see where this is going.

For a while, during Trump 2.0, the ire of the right was aimed at California in general and San Francisco in particular, that historical lefty bastion that, with its drug culture, openly LGBTQ+ ethos and PelosiNewsom political dynasty, seemed to make it the perfect example of what some consider society’s failures.

But really, the difficulty with hating San Francisco is that it doesn’t care. It’s a city that has long acknowledged, even flaunted, America’s discomfort with it. That’s why the infamous newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it “Baghdad by the Bay” more than 80 years ago, when the town had already fully embraced its outsider status.