Luther Campbell, the front man for one of the most controversial rap groups in history, has advice for Jimmy Kimmel and for any media executives trying to decide how to respond to the Trump administration’s attempts to censor disfavored speech: You’ve got to fight. He would know. When the government came after him and his music, he fought, and he won, creating a legal precedent that still protects artists and entertainers who offend the sensibilities of those in power.
In 1989, Campbell’s Miami-based group, 2 Live Crew, released their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, which included the smash hit “Me So Horny.” The album went platinum, but its sexually graphic lyrics drew widespread condemnation from conservative politicians and activists on the Christian right. Florida Governor Bob Martinez asked the state prosecutor to bring obscenity and racketeering charges against 2 Live Crew, and the Broward County sheriff warned music retailers that they could go to jail for selling it. 2 Live Crew sued, but a federal judge ruled that the album was obscene. A record-store owner was arrested for selling the album in defiance of the judge’s ruling; Campbell himself was arrested for performing songs from the album at a Florida nightclub.
“I had Governor Martinez here in Florida going after me,” Campbell, who at the time was better known by the stage name Luke Skyywalker, told me. “I had the sheriffs going after me, pretty much every Republican municipality around the country.” Campbell found himself defending not just his own interests, but a larger principle. “I was fighting to protect free speech,” he said. “It became that fight, and I’m pretty sure that right now, Jimmy Kimmel is probably feeling something similar to it.”
Of course, Campbell’s story and Kimmel’s differ in some important ways. Campbell was targeted at a moment when the supposed menace of rap music was a major topic in the culture wars. (Around the same time, Vice President Dan Quayle also pressured Time Warner to pull Tupac Shakur’s album 2Pacalypse Now because a man who killed a Texas state trooper had been listening to the album when he was stopped by the officer.) Campbell felt that he had to resist efforts to demonize certain elements of Black culture. “I was fighting it from the standpoint of a young Black man taught by my dad and my uncle how history repeats itself on a consistent basis,” Campbell said.
Campbell and 2 Live Crew appealed the obscenity ruling. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with them, ruling that their music wasn’t legally obscene under First Amendment precedent. “We reject the argument that simply by listening to this musical work, the judge could determine that it had no serious artistic value,” the court wrote.
The Kimmel situation is not about obscenity per se, but about what views can and cannot be expressed on television—and who gets to decide. Several days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel commented on his show that “the MAGA gang” had been “desperately trying” to portray the accused killer “as anything other than one of them.” Conservative activists objected. Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, publicly criticized Kimmel’s remarks as “truly sick” and threatened to go after the networks that aired his program. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said in a podcast appearance. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
The companies heard the message. Hours later, Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would be pulling the show indefinitely, and ABC swiftly followed suit. (Perhaps relatedly, Nexstar is currently seeking FCC approval to acquire Tegna, another station group, for $6.2 billion.) Sinclair, which owns 38 ABC affiliates, also took Kimmel off the air and issued a statement demanding that Kimmel apologize and make a sizable donation to the Kirk family and to Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA.
Kimmel shouldn’t have implied that Kirk’s killer is a Donald Trump–supporting Republican. Nor should mistakes like that—or even worse ones—incur the selective wrath of government. Kimmel’s comments were clearly exploited as a pretext to take down someone whom the president had long considered an enemy. “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes,” Trump posted after CBS declined to renew Stephen Colbert’s late-night show earlier this year. “It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!” Similarly, he posted last week that he now wants NBC to get rid of its late-night hosts, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. Carr has warned, “We’re not done yet.”
Yesterday, however, the story took a surprising turn. After facing substantial backlash over its decision to suspend Kimmel, ABC announced that his show would return tonight (although Sinclair said it would continue to preempt Kimmel). Whether that reversal will dull the administration’s appetite for censorship or only inflame it further remains to be seen. (At an event earlier in the day, Carr seemed to be attempting to walk back his earlier comments, claiming that “the easy way or the hard way” was not intended as a threat.)
Given the unusual, high-stakes circumstances, one wonders what to expect from Kimmel once he returns. According to Campbell, Kimmel has only one option. “It’s like a boxing match,” he told me. “They threw the first punch, so now you’ve got to throw another punch. Because if you lay down, then they’re going to use this same thing against every other person on TV. This is now the precedent that they’ve set. He has to fight this to protect our free speech.”
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