Howard Stern Says He Has Canceled Disney+ in Protest of Jimmy Kimmel Suspension

One of Jimmy Kimmel‘s longtime Hollywood friends is supporting the late night host publicly … and with his pocketbook.

Howard Stern, the legendary talk radio host, said on his SiriusXM show Monday morning that he is canceling his subscription to Disney+ in a show of support for Kimmel.

“Someone’s gotta step up and be fucking saying, ‘Hey, enough, we’re not gonna bow,’ Stern said on his eponymous talk show. “Now it might sound stupid, but the thing I did this morning, I’m canceling my Disney+. I’m trying to say with the pocketbook that I do not support what they’re doing with Jimmy.”

Stern told his listeners that he has spoken to Kimmel since the suspension, but that he did not ask whether the late night host hopes to return: “I just asked him how he was doing personally.”

But Stern, of course, knows a thing or two about FCC crackdowns. While Stern was a frequent target of the FCC during his time on terrestrial radio, it was a series of fines after the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast that ultimately forced him to leave broadcast radio and move to satellite radio, where he still holds court today.

The Kimmel dispute features the FCC and chairman Brendan Carr at the heart of it, with Carr suggesting that station owners like Nexstar and Sinclair should push back on content from networks that they find objectionable. Nexstar and Sinclair ultimately took action to preempt Kimmel’s show, and ABC suspended the show shortly thereafter.

“I just know when the government begins to interfere, when the government says, ‘I’m not pleased with you, so we’re gonna orchestrate a way to silence you,’ it’s the wrong direction for our country,” Stern said. “And I should know, I’ve been involved in something like this and now ABC is put in the same position and it’s unfortunate that ABC even has to be in this position. They shouldn’t have to be in this position. I feel for them, too, in this.”