Late-night television quit telling jokes years ago and started handing out Democrat talking points instead.
Jimmy Kimmel hauled his show to Brooklyn and gave a socialist Senator the microphone with the midterms weeks away.
And Bernie Sanders tossed out one figure about President Trump that falls to pieces the second anybody checks the receipt.
What Sanders told the Brooklyn crowd about November
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! wrapped a week of shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a rare end-of-week episode, and the guest of honor was US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters posted the transcript, and it reads less like a talk show than a campaign stop with a house band.
Sanders didn’t pretend he came to swap stories. “If I may get political here for a moment if I have to,” he said. Kimmel waved him right through: “Sure, go ahead.”
“We have to elect strong progressives to the United States Congress who have the guts to take them on the oligarchs,” Sanders told the crowd.
He named his favorites by first name only: “People like Abdul in Michigan and Peggy in Minnesota and Angie in Florida.” NewsBusters described the three as far-left Senate candidates.
Then came the second half of the order. “We have to make sure that Democrats control the House and the Senate so we can hold this guy accountable,” Sanders said.
Americans have heard that word before. Democrats talked about accountability ahead of the 2018 midterms, won the House, and went on to impeach President Trump twice in partisan proceedings.
Kimmel’s $5,000 question and the answer that followed
Kimmel turned to the President’s pledge of a payment to American households. “And he has offered every American $5,000 if the GOP wins,” Kimmel said.
For about four seconds, the host wandered toward a real question. “I mean, it’s kind what they accuse you of, right? Handing out money randomly,” he said to a man who built an entire career promising free college and free health care.
But Kimmel never followed that thought to the end of the block. He asked Sanders, “Do you think he will pay that $5,000 if they win?”
Sanders skipped the question and reached for the stump speech. “These guys have already given $1 trillion in tax breaks to the one percent,” he said. “They have thrown 15 million Americans off their health care, low-income and working-class people. Thousands of those folks are going to die.”
And then he got to Iran. Sanders told the audience the conflict cost “hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” and he finished with a warning: “do not trust what Donald Trump says.”
Kimmel let every word of it sail by.
The receipt Sanders hoped nobody would pull
NewsBusters checked the Iran figure, and the outlet reported the cost at $43.6 billion. Sanders inflated the bill several times over on national television, and the host sitting across from him never blinked.
That takes some nerve coming from this particular Senator. Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated that Sanders’ Medicare for All Act would add roughly $32.6 trillion to federal spending across its first 10 years.
Blahous also found that doubling federal individual and corporate income tax collections wouldn’t cover the tab. The left-leaning Urban Institute landed on a similar 10-year number, and the National Taxpayers Union noted that Sanders himself once pegged his plan at $1.38 trillion a year.
So take the lowest estimate on the table, the one from Sanders’ own mouth. Government-run healthcare on his terms would cost more every single year than 30 Iran conflicts at the price NewsBusters reported.
And the man lecturing America about wasted taxpayer money wants working families to hand Washington, DC that check forever.
The health coverage claim has a hole in it too. Sanders counted 15 million Americans losing coverage, but NewsBusters pointed out that Democrats wrote the law that set the expanded, taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies to expire, and they sold those subsidies during the Biden years as temporary COVID relief.
Sanders left that part on the cutting room floor. A temporary program ran out on the schedule his own caucus voted for, and he blamed the other party for the calendar.
“Thousands of those folks are going to die” is the oldest closer in the socialist playbook. Every time anyone trims a federal program, somebody on the Left predicts a body count, and the audience in a Brooklyn opera house claps on cue.
But the people clapping don’t live where most of the country lives. A late-night host with a network contract and a Senator who has drawn a government paycheck for decades are about the last two men in America qualified to explain grocery bills to a retired machinist in Ohio.
Viewers figured that out a while ago. Fox Business, citing data from the trade site LateNighter, reported that the big network late-night shows shed between 70% and 80% of their viewership since 2015, the same stretch in which the hosts traded monologues for left-wing sermons.
ABC even pulled Kimmel off the air for a stretch in 2025 after his comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He came back and picked up right where he left off.
Maybe that’s the tell in all of this. Kimmel had the question half-formed in his mouth, the one about politicians buying votes with other people’s money, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask it of a socialist.
And socialism’s record doesn’t need a late-night host to defend or expose it. Every country that handed its economy to central planners got shortages, shrinking paychecks, and a political class that never missed a meal.
Expect more of this before November. The entertainment industry treats its stages as an extension of the Democrat Party, and a comedian who can’t spot a number that’s off by hundreds of billions isn’t going to start checking the next guest’s math.
Sources: NewsBusters, “Kimmel and Bernie’s Midterm Pitch: Vote Democrat Or People Die”; Fox Business, “Was ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ a moneymaker for ABC? The decline of late-night points to no”; Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Charles Blahous, “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System”; National Taxpayers Union Foundation, “Medicare for All: Buyer Beware”