On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel commented that American politics had “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.” Kimmel seemed to imply that the man accused of killing the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a Donald Trump–supporting conservative. This was at best an unconfirmed rumor at the time, and as more evidence has emerged, seems flatly incorrect. Kimmel should have chosen his words more carefully.
Kimmel made a mistake. He said something that was not correct to an audience of millions. Although he is a comedian, not a journalist, it would have been appropriate for him to apologize to his viewers and correct the record, given the breadth of his platform as a late-night host on network television.
Instead, he was silenced by a government and its allies who want to control what you say, what you do, and what you think. The Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went on a conservative podcast and threatened Disney, which owns ABC, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” In 2023 Carr posted on X that “censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” At the time that was a criticism of censorship; now it reads like a statement of intent.
Charlie Kirk should still be alive. His wife should not be widowed. His children should still have their father. Political murder is an attack on the self-determination of the people, and it should always be condemned in the strongest terms. It is also true that the administration’s use of Kirk’s death as a pretext to censor its opposition is as cynical as it is destructive to fundamental American rights and freedoms. Conservative outrage over some of what was said after Kirk’s murder is understandable—people getting mad at each other over what they say is part of living in a free society. What happened to Kimmel is something different: a state-backed campaign of repression.
As Oliver Darcy reports, Nexstar, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, announced its intention to pull Kimmel off the air following Carr’s threat, after which ABC followed suit, announcing Kimmel was suspended “indefinitely.” Darcy points out that both Disney and Nexstar are pursuing business deals that require regulatory approval. Kimmel is only the latest comedian to be yanked off the air. In July, Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled—CBS insists for financial reasons—shortly after he criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for paying Trump to settle a lawsuit.
It is one thing for Trump loyalists like Carr to make threats. It is another for the targets of the threats to capitulate. In the early months of the second Trump administration, we have discovered that many American corporations, including companies that own media outlets, are ready to surrender their First Amendment rights as soon as Trump indicates the slightest displeasure with their politics. Whether they are capitulating because of fear or because they see a financial interest in aligning with the administration is ultimately irrelevant. Their rapid surrender to state coercion points to the absolute rot in these elite echelons, filled with people whose commitment to fundamental rights like free speech is utterly superficial.
Appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night, Carr clarified that not only was Kimmel targeted for violating conservative sensibilities, but that others might also be subject to similar punishment. “They went from going for applause, from laugh lines to applause lines. They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology,” Carr told Hannity. “Enforcing a narrow political ideology” is of course exactly what Carr is doing—a government official using state power given to him by the people to silence political expression disfavored by the president of the United States. The purpose, the very essence, of the First Amendment is the right to express oneself in ways others, but particularly those in power, might find distasteful. Those free-speech protections do not vanish because someone makes a mistake and angers the powerful.
The landmark 1964 free-speech case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was actually about a mistake. A civil-rights group had taken out an ad in The New York Times criticizing the state of Alabama’s handling of civil-rights protests, which contained some factual errors. The Montgomery public-safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, who had stood by idly while segregationist mobs attacked civil-rights protesters, filed a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous verdict in the civil-rights group’s favor.
As one of the justices wrote:
The theory of our Constitution is that every citizen may speak his mind and every newspaper express its view on matters of public concern, and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise, unfair, false, or malicious.
The larger context of the case was that segregationists frequently sought to use libel law to silence their critics. The Court properly recognized that free speech cannot survive if powerful officials can use flimsy pretexts to crack down on their opposition. You cannot have free speech if people fear being punished by the state because they misspeak or make an honest mistake.
As Carr’s comments make clear, the Trump administration does not subscribe to the theory that the Constitution protects speech opposed by people in power. For a long time, Republicans have adhered to a definition of free speech that could be simply summarized as: Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want. That is now the policy of the Trump administration.
Vice President J. D. Vance, who guest-hosted Kirk’s show after his death, urged conservatives to snitch on any potential thought crimes: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And hell, call their employer.” And conservatives have been doing just that, getting regular people fired from their jobs for celebrating Kirk’s death, or in some cases, for condemning his killing while also criticizing his views. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who previously styled himself a champion of free speech, has been using his account on X to demand the expulsion of a student for speech he finds offensive and to celebrate the arrest of another. The Pentagon has forbidden any criticism of Kirk from Department of Defense employees, while Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” a distinction the Constitution does not recognize, precisely because it would give the authorities too much power to dictate what views are acceptable.
It’s remarkable how quickly we went from “hate speech is free speech” (one of the few beliefs Kirk and I actually shared) to effectively having a blasphemy law. Nor will mere silence protect you—people have been attacked for committing the thought crime of failing to mourn Kirk publicly, NFL teams criticized for declining to hold a moment of silence, and businesses singled out for not lowering the flag to half-staff in his honor. The Trump-sympathizing Free Press castigated the Emmys for failing to honor Kirk. The self-styled “free-speech absolutist” and Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk, who owns the social-media platform X, has called for deplatforming, firing, and even imprisoning critics of Kirk.
What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian who said something he should not have said. The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning. You are not allowed to criticize the president’s associates. You do not even retain the right to remain silent; you must make public expressions of emotions demanded by the administration and its allies or incur its disfavor, which can threaten your livelihood. This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show.
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