It's really important to get this part right: Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was not insulting or even talking about Charlie Kirk when he said on Monday that last weekend we saw "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." Under pressure from the federal government, ABC, owned by Disney, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely, which is censorship by any measure. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, claimed that the real issue is that Kimmel "misled" people on the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, Kirk's murderer, and that's not allowed.
Except that's not what the actual words there are doing. What Kimmel and his writers were saying is that Donald Trump and the entirety of MAGA world is distancing itself from Robinson. We don't know what Robinson believes. We have various hints, but we don't know. Before we knew even the small amount we know now, the MAGA media machine, including the president and his administration, accused everyone from George Soros to Rachel Maddow to "Antifa" for being somehow responsible for the murder, and, again, with no evidence, called for organizations and individuals on the left to be declared terrorists and silenced, forced into poverty from lawsuits, and arrested. That wasn't misleading?
The other thing Kimmel said is simply undeniably true. Trump and his minions and accomplices are exploiting Kirk's death. Because I'm damned to be included on mailing lists, I've gotten multiple emails from right-wing organizations seeking to raise money off it. It's being used as a cudgel against anyone daring to do something as terrible as quote Charlie Kirk on Instagram. They are wallowing in the opportunities the murder has provided them. Indeed, they keep accusing the "left" of "celebrating" Kirk's death (and, yes, there have been some people who posted things cheering it), but the real celebration is on the right as they engage in an orgy of self-righteousness and performative outrage. Which is their First Amendment right, as it is the First Amendment right of anyone to say that what they're doing is scoring political points.
What makes the Kimmel suspension and Carr's promise that "we're not done yet" so insidious and, yes, frightening is that it lowers the bar from mocking Kirk's death to any criticism of Trump or the MAGA movement being reason enough for censorship, intimidation, and punishment. Even worse, as Greg Sergeant points out, is that Carr is making it clear that this really is about Trump by using the FCC's "public interest obligation" as a sledgehammer. But, see, "public interest" is now not about the Constitution or even, really, the public. The administration is saying that "public interest" tied to Trump, that if you attack Trump, you're undermining the public interest. The FCC is saying that what's good for Trump is good for America and everything needs to follow that.
It gets worse. Even as unlikely compatriots like Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson decry the federal government's insertion of itself into TV content moderation, we have a parade of right-wingers saying that maybe they don't think the First Amendment is all that great. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, who looks like she's waiting to see you drink the tea she put cyanide in, said, "Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore." So I guess our rights didn't come directly from God, as Republicans are fond of saying.
Trump himself threatened to strip networks' affiliate stations of their licenses to broadcast, saying, in essence, the hell with the right to free speech: "When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something—when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that."
Except they are. That's the whole point of the First Amendment. The freedom to shit-talk someone, even after death, even Charlie Kirk, is one of the founding principals of this country. The Declaration of Independence is a long shit-talk about King George III. The founders themselves regularly shit-talked each other (when they weren't, you know, dueling), sometimes in print, sometimes in debates. In a letter written for publication in 1800, Alexander Hamilton accused then-President John Adams of "disgusting egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” and “ungovernable indiscretion." That's just a little sample of vituperation leveled at Adams. There's nothing more American than shit-talking the president.
Indeed, you could argue that the real patriots are the ones willing to shit-talk Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and anyone else. And while, yes, obviously, there's a difference between suffering personal consequences for what you post on social media and the government demanding you be silenced, I'd argue that the government has a responsibility to come in and tell, say, a university that fired someone because a couple of trolls got a screenshot of single thing a professor wrote on Instagram that it's violating that professor's First Amendment rights. (I'm pretty sure that public universities, which are government institutions, will have this come up in lawsuits.)
Instead, what we're getting is everyone on the right cheering on the mass censorship of anyone who would dare suggest that Charlie Kirk said the things that he actually did say, which were awful and violent and degrading. But none of that matters because this is an opportunity for the totalitarian right to use this to force its demented control over the speech and actions of the country. It is, to put it simply, a chance to outlaw much of what the left says and stands for. It's a low-rent version of Naomi Klein's idea of the shock doctrine in action: using a "crisis" in order advance a harmful political agenda. Usually, it involves natural disasters or a terrorist attack. This wasn't the latter, but they're trying to make it into one and respond accordingly.
Look, I know that what's happened to Jimmy Kimmel pales in comparison to what the US government is doing to migrants (or what we're funding in Gaza, for that matter). Kimmel is a wealthy man with all kinds of resources at his disposal, and I'm hoping that he tells ABC, Disney, Trump, Sinclair, and everyone else to go fuck themselves as they try to force him to apologize to Kirk's widow (which would be weird since he didn't insult Kirk), give her money, and donate to Kirk's hate group (fuck you, that what it is when you're on the receiving end of the hate), Turning Point USA. I'm hoping that he says he wants to sue the Trump administration and goes for it. Hell, Disney is a big damn, wealthy corporation run by rich pukes who, of course, want to protect the bottom line for their investors because that's all the morality capitalism can muster.
But surely they have to know that it's never going to be enough for these monsters in the White House. ABC paid Trump off and had George Stephanopoulos apologize for saying that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, which, you know, he did. It wasn't enough. Kimmel didn't say a damn thing about Kirk's politics and even sent out sympathies to Kirk's family and expressed horror over the shooting. It still wasn't enough. There is no satiating them, there is no end point, and they will always, always, always find another way to extort and threaten and blackball and punish. People with the means to do something need to fucking well do something. As I and many others have said, what's the use in having "fuck you" money if you don't occasionally say, "Fuck you"? It's not even that big an ask. George Soros just gave $10 million for the redistricting effort in California. The money's there. Whatever a lawsuit would cost will be far, far less than the next round of extortion.
Meanwhile, the rest of us without deep pockets or portfolios that would allows us to retire are left to wonder how we can react to this. I have friends in red states who feel like they're risking their jobs if they express an opinion on Facebook that isn't "Charlie Kirk is the awesomest human ever and I will bless him every night in my prayers which I definitely say before bed." I wanted to write something savage about the whole situation, but I didn't because I didn't want to wonder if I'd become the next target of Libs of Suck My Cock or whatever (sorry - I'm not going cold turkey).
That's the way this works. It starts with Jimmy Kimmel and some professors and other workers, and it causes fear in others in media, entertainment, and anyone who writes or posts. That's of a piece with how this administration wants to spread fear, whether by picking up people in the country legally for protesting the war in Gaza or drone-murdering a boatload of Venezuelans or by deporting migrant children in the middle of the night or deporting migrant adults to countries they have no ties to or sending masked goons out to terrorize communities. It's the same with detention facilities and defunding universities and suing law firms. Fear and compliance are their tools. The counter to that is courage and protest and refusal, but that is far easier said than done.
We need some leaders here on this, but, sadly, we are bereft of them. There's a line that's been haunting me from Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day, a frighteningly prescient play about artists facing the rise of Hitler in Germany. A character comments on how he and his circle are not ready for what's coming, "This age wanted heroes. It got us instead." Maybe Kimmel can be that hero. Maybe AOC, who delivered a hell of a speech on who Charlie Kirk really was while most Democrats just acquiesced to a vote on an official day of remembrance. Hell, maybe it's you or me. Just know that this fight is gonna be hard and it's gonna end up hurting a lot of us as they contort all the tools of the government to serve themselves and wreck the rest of the country. You should be scared now. But not too scared to act.
