Trump is cancelling free speech and dissenting opinions using Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a pretext for imposing state censorship.
ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” after conservatives accused the longtime host of inaccurately describing the politics of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Mr. Kimmel and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of remarks the host made on his Monday telecast.
The network did not explain its decision, but the sequence of events on Wednesday amounted to an extraordinary exertion of political pressure on a major broadcast network by the Trump administration. [NYT]
TRUMP RAN FOR PRESIDENT TO GET BACK AT OBAMA
Donald Trump is notoriously thin skinned when it comes to jokes about himself. When Barack Obama humiliated Trump at the 2011 Correspondents Dinner as payback for Trump’s baseless assertion that Obama was not born in this country, Obama triggered Trump to run for president according to Roger Stone and others in Trump’s inner circle.
Here is what Obama said that night:
“Donald Trump is here tonight. I know he’s taken some flack lately, but no one is happier to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald,” Obama said, addressing the White House Correspondents dinner in April 2011. “And that’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing?… And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
In footage from the evening, Trump stares straight ahead, a cursory smile across his face, as America’s first Black president roasts him continuously for over two and a half minutes.
“Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he would certainly bring some change to the White House,” Obama continued, before cutting to an image of the building, reimagined as a hotel, casino and golf course, with two semi-naked women sitting in a hot tub out front. He also mocked Trump’s “credentials and breadth of experience” from working on his reality TV show The Apprentice, prompting further guffaws from attendees. [PBS]
DON’T YOU DARE SAY THINGS TRUMP DOESN’T LIKE
As part of his retribution tour against anyone who does not agree with him, Trump has been predicting the end of late night comics who make fun of him. First it was Stephen Colbert who got cancelled. Now Jimmy Kimmel has been cancelled based on Kimmel’s comment about Charlie Kirk’s assassination: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Then Kimmel showed a clip of Trump reacting to the question from a reporter – “How are you holding up after the death of Charlie Kirk?” and Trump said he was doing well and then immediately pivoted to talking about the grand ballroom he was adding to the White House. Kimmel said this was not the way you mourn the death of a good friend. That was what got Jimmy Kimmel Live yanked. Kimmel embarrassed Trump by exposing him as a man without empathy.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, criticized Kimmel’s remarks and threatened federal action against ABC affiliates who carried the show.
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said to podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
If you think Brendan Carr sounds like a mob boss enforcer for Trump, you would be right.
Trump is gunning for Seth Meyers and John Oliver next. He will go after anyone else who dares to makes fun of him or doesn’t agree with him. The message is loud and clear- you joke about Trump at your peril, you disagree with Trump at your peril and you assert your constitutional right to free speech at your peril. Trump is trying to cancel First Amendment rights in America but only for anyone who offends him.
THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT CHARLIE KIRK STOOD FOR
The MAGA crowd was rightfully furious that the Democrats required purity tests and imposed cancel culture on conservative thinking in universities. Charlie Kirk decided to fight cancel culture by showing up on campuses and convincing students he was right with his “Prove Me Wrong” tour. Kirk wasn’t into protecting himself from offensive ideas that contradicted his ideas. He just ignored them. He had faith in his own conviction about these right wing ideas even though they offended a lot of people. The result was that a whole lot of college age men showed up to vote for Trump in 2024 because they liked what Charlie Kirk was saying.
Trump and Brendan Carr and some others on the right are now engaging in cancel culture on a widespread basis. They are doing what they objected to by cancelling free speech and dissenting opinions using Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a pretext for their purge.
Education Week notes the breadth of the surveillance of educators: Teachers in “California, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas have been fired or placed on leave ahead of investigations into alleged social media comments critiquing Kirk and implying approval of Kirk’s death.” In Washington, D.C., at the State Department, Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary who essentially serves as the secretary’s number two official, wrote online that “I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” referring to Mr. Kirk’s killing. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” And a Republican lawmaker in Colorado called on the state’s Democratic governor to dismiss a state employee who posted that Kirk was “a white man who spews horrid shit against every marginalized community.” John Phelan, the Navy secretary, posted a message saying that sailors or Marines found to be “displaying contempt toward a fellow American who was assassinated” would be “dealt with swiftly and decisively.” [Washington Monthly]
This is the opposite of what Charlie Kirk himself stood for. “You should be allowed to say outrageous things,” he told the Oxford Union earlier this year.
SPEECH YOU HATE IS PROTECTED SPEECH UNDER THE 1ST AMENDMENT
Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would target people engaging in “hate speech,” despite the First Amendment’s broad protections. She had to walk back that comment after getting massive push back from both the right and the left. Someone must have pointed out to her that even arch conservative Justice Samuel Alito recognizes that speech YOU HATE, is protected speech.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. set out the settled view, saying the government had no business “preventing speech expressing ideas that offend.” “That idea,” Justice Alito wrote, “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. [NYT]
Even Karl Rove recognizes how this suppression of free speech is bad: “Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it. It is also an insult to his memory.”
And Tucker Carlson is calling out the right wing free speech warriors for its hypocrisy saying this: “A human being, with a soul – a free man – has a right to say what he believes.”
SPEECH THAT FOMENTS IMMINENT VIOLENCE IS NOT PROTECTED
Protected speech crosses the line into the realm of speech you can be indicted for if what you say incites a riot or some other immediate violence. Hmm. For example–when Trump encouraged his followers to storm the Capitol he said this:
“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …
“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
After saying these things and promising to join his followers at the Capitol with the intent of stopping the final ballot counting by Congress, Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol. There was a riot. Hand to hand combat with bear spray and flag poles as weapons. A noose was set up to Hang Mike Pence and possibly other lawmakers they intended to capture. Some members of the Capitol Police died and many people were injured as a result. Trump’s words were the basis for his second impeachment.
GOVERNOR PRITZKER CALLS FOR PROTEST
The Chicago Tribune reports:
Pritzker said of Carr’s remarks that “it’s intimidation, clearly. And this is what we’re seeing across the board from the Trump administration.” He referenced Trump’s lawsuits against media outlets as well as multimillion-dollar settlements with Paramount, CBS-TV’s owner, over the editing of CBS’ “ 60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in October, and a defamation suit against ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“They’re using the power of the government to go after businesses, to get them to do things that they need or want, right, either to pay them, as we have seen, or to fire people, as we have seen,” Pritzker said.
“If people will write letters, write e-mails, post online, speak up, protest, that’s what I’m calling for … I think that it may be that ABC and Disney see that they may have made a mistake and they would reverse that decision,” he said. “By the way, if they do that, you can see what happens when organizations and people stand up and push back. You can actually accomplish something. You can move the ball.”
BARACK OBAMA CALLS OUT THE HYPOCRISY
Obama also spoke up today calling the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel “government coercion”. He urged media corporate giants to stand up to this administration.
INVESTIGATION BY HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE
Representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, announced that their committee will investigate who gave the order to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and why. The Democrats may be joined by some Republican colleagues if they are not too chicken to stand up for the right to free speech which they used to believe in.
WHAT I SEE COMING
At this point the Trump administration has been rapidly implementing the 2025 playbook as well as the autocrat’s playbook. They are not in the early stages of this coup– they are far along. They are moving at breakneck speed to try to turn this country into a Christian Nationalist police state where the constitution is irrelevant and the law is whatever Donald Trump says it is.
I am not being histrionic. This is what I see happening and I am doing my best to tell it like I see it. If Americans, including American run companies, law firms, institutions, associations, former presidents, and religious organizations do not protest and rise up to counter this threat in a more muscular way, Trump’s prediction that he made to Christians before the 2024 election will be true: “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” Only he should have said “you’re not gonna get to vote again.” No more free and fair elections. No more choices about the news you read or watch: it’ll be Trump approved information 24/7. We will all be forced to live in the alternate universe that Trump pretends is reality.