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Should the nation suddenly find itself mired in a serious and lasting civil conflict, it will be in large part because both sides are determined to keep the other from speaking freely.
The extent to which government pressure caused ABC’s decision last week to pull its late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live! remains unclear. The backlash from Kimmel’s monologue on the Monday broadcast, during which the host deliberately misled his audience about the political orientation of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, may well have subsumed the show without government intervention.
KIMMEL CANCELLATION ISN’T ‘CANCEL CULTURE.’ IT’S CONSEQUENCE CULTURE
But Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr intervened in any event, threatening the use of regulatory action, a practice known as “jaw-boning,” if action wasn’t taken to remove Kimmel. Speaking on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show, Carr warned ABC, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
The unnecessary threat
The comment justifiably raised alarm among free speech advocates who viewed it as a government effort to silence opinions it doesn’t like. This included Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who characterized Carr’s comment as sounding as if it had been spoken by “a mafioso.”
Hours later, ABC announced the indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, leading many to believe that Carr’s “threat” had directly influenced the network’s decision.
The television executives responsible for the decision denied this, however. Andrew Alford of Nexstar, which owns a large number of ABC affiliates, said the decision to pull Kimmel was based solely on Kimmel’s false characterization about Robinson.
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” he said in a statement.
Critics from across the political spectrum have pointed out that ABC’s parent company, Disney, and other broadcast companies like Nexstar have significant business before the FCC, including major merger approvals, which require government approval.
But reports of how the decision unfolded appear to buttress Alford’s claim that it was an independent choice by the network. According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision was made following conversations between Kimmel and high-level executives, including Disney CEO Bob Iger and TV head Dana Walden, who feared that Kimmel’s planned Wednesday night monologue risked pouring gasoline on the public relations fire. Disney, whose brand has suffered from perceived political activism in recent years, appeared eager to protect its brand above all.
This would place Disney within the broader corporate trend of dialing back political involvement following President Donald Trump’s victory last November, which many viewed as a rebuke of cultural progressivism.
This trend, however, does not excuse Carr’s threat, which constituted a clear attempt by the government to silence speech and was, in this context, entirely unnecessary. Networks have begun to realize that highly expensive late-night shows are no longer worth making, and Kimmel’s ratings have been torpedoing for years. There was no need for Trump’s team to muscle ABC. Kimmel, it appeared, had just enough rope to hang himself. The Trump administration should have left the matter alone.
Free speech hypocrisy
The episode speaks to a larger hypocrisy for the Trump administration, which rode into power on a pro-free speech wave with promises to govern as free speech warriors. Trump signed an executive order in January to “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” To say that he’s failed to live up to his own order is an understatement.
In late August, Trump signed an executive order requiring the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute people for burning the American flag, which is an act the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld as a form of political protest protected under the First Amendment. Defenders of the president note that the order merely directs the attorney general to prioritize the prosecution of American flag desecration under existing laws.
But Trump exaggerated the nature of the order at the signing, saying, “If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail.” This alone was enough to have a chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech because it implied a direct, automatic penalty for the act itself, ignoring legal nuances and Supreme Court protections.
Defenders also argue that restricting flag burning does not restrict political speech in any other sense and that the point of free speech is to channel grievances into words, not destructive stunts in the name of dissent. These points are well taken. But for the self-styled free speech warriors of Trump’s White House, this unnecessary move, ostensibly made for the purposes of anti-woke virtue signaling, diminished their credibility on free speech in other areas.
The administration’s inconsistency on free speech took another turn last week, when Attorney General Pam Bondi, appearing on the Katie Miller Podcast, vowed to investigate and prosecute incidents of “hate speech.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” she said. “And there is no place — especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — [for that] in our society,” she said. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
The comment of Bondi’s, the nation’s top law enforcement official, demonstrated a troubling ignorance of the law — the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that even provocative or offensive speech, often labeled as “hate speech,” enjoys robust protection under the First Amendment — as well as a disregard for her party’s position on the issue. Sounding more like a woke-era Democrat than a Republican attorney general, Bondi received blowback from conservatives following her comments.
Though Bondi has attempted to walk back her statements, Trump has stood firm. Asked by Fox News host Martha MacCallum about Kirk’s own disdain for the idea of “hate speech,” Trump interjected, saying, “He might not be saying that now.”
It’s impossible to square these instances with Vice President JD Vance’s laudable speech in Munich earlier this year, where he said, “In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town, and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to speak in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Vance himself went on to defend both the flag burning order and Carr’s comments, saying of the latter, “the bellyaching from the Left over ‘free speech’ after the Biden years fools precisely no one.”
Bipartisan disregard
In this, Vance is correct: Democrats have no business positioning themselves as righteous defenders of free speech. Trump’s troubling moves on free speech are merely a continuation of policies and norms that flowered during the Biden administration.
The alarm expressed over Kimmel being disciplined for a “joke” stands in stark contrast to the silence that met the previous administration’s actions. Where was the outrage when Biden White House officials publicly and privately pressured platforms like Facebook and Twitter to remove what they deemed “harmful misinformation”? These efforts, too, extended all the way to jokes: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee of government demands to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”
This impulse to control the national narrative reached its institutional peak with the Biden administration’s short-lived and Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board.” Sold as an effort to combat “disinformation” seeded in the United States by Russia, China, Iran, and transnational criminal organizations, its political aims revealed themselves quickly. The board’s appointed head, Nina Jankowicz, exhibited extreme partisan bias in public comments, as well as a poor ability to spot legitimate disinformation. For instance, Jankowicz took the side of the intelligence community by characterizing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation,” calling it a “fairy tale.” The New York Post saw its account suspended from Twitter for correctly reporting the issue in a dark preview of what was to come if Jankowicz had her way.
The same legacy media that are apoplectic today over Carr’s comment enthusiastically defended former President Joe Biden’s abuses. CNN media watchdog Brian Stelter, who currently leads the charge against Carr’s comment — on Wednesday, he labeled it an example of “Orbanism” — was the chief defender of the Biden administration’s free speech crackdowns.
In a 2018 segment of his show Reliable Sources called “Reducing Information Pollution,” Stelter offered the following euphemism for government efforts to restrict constitutionally protected speech:
“But while some cry ‘cancel culture,’ let me suggest a different way to think about this: A harm reduction model,” he said. “This is not ultimately about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of reach.”
The cost of silence
Bipartisan efforts to use the government to control what can and can’t be uttered in public accelerate and intensify national discord. Such actions erode what remains of public trust in institutions, deepen polarization, and undermine the cornerstone of American identity. For a nation entering into a new, dark period of civic strife, nothing could be more destructive.
Kirk, whose life Republicans and conservatives celebrated in Arizona on Sunday night, understood well the dangers of clamping down on what opponents are free to say.
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” he posted on X last year. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”
WHAT PAM BONDI GETS WRONG ABOUT FREE SPEECH
And also, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.”
Kirk’s voice on the issue is needed now more than ever.