Jimmy Kimmel's cancelation is an outrage in a torrent of outrages

The Trump administration tactic of flooding the zone is on spectacular display this week, but using federal pressure to cancel a comedian will chill speech far beyond comedy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was barbaric. Most Americans condemned it. But in the culture war frenzy that ensued, partisans of nearly every stripe immediately went hunting for a storyline that would make the killer a member of their opposition. Although many assumed, not unreasonably, that a controversial right-wing figure would be targeted by someone from the left, a chunk of the press nevertheless strained to imply the shooter might actually be MAGA.

During his show’s opening monologue on Sept. 16, Jimmy Kimmel joined that chorus — stating that the “MAGA gang” was trying to portray the shooter as “anything other than one of them.”

However, the “MAGA gang” turned out to be correct. The emerging evidence, including messages sent by the shooter to his partner, confirmed his left-wing motivations: The shooter targeted Kirk because he’d “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.”

In a sane culture, with a scrupulous and constitutionally literate administration, this ends with a clear correction and apology on the part of Kimmel and, perhaps, ABC.

Instead, the federal government leaned on the network with not-so-thinly-veiled threats from FCC chairman Brendan Carr — and ABC pre-emptively suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely.

Then came the victory laps. The president cheered Kimmel’s removal as “great news for America.” Brendan Carr condemned Kimmel, invoked the “public interest” standard as a justification, and reminded ABC who grants broadcast licenses. The FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gómez, warned (correctly) that a lone act of political violence must not become a pretext for broader speech controls.

Meanwhile, major affiliates began to peel away — with Sinclair, the country’s largest affiliate group, calling on the FCC and ABC to “take additional action.”

Officials brandish regulatory leverage, allies echo the pressure, and a company caves. This is the anatomy of jawboning — the government’s use of intimidation tactics and threats of reprisals to unconstitutionally coerce private entities into doing their bidding.

The law here is not murky, either. Congress has explicitly denied the FCC any “power of censorship” and barred it from interfering with free speech. That guardrail exists because licensing power invites abuse.

For decades, the Supreme Court has condemned government “suggestions” backed by coercive leverage. Bantam Books v. Sullivan, decided in 1963, is the classic warning. In that case, the Supreme Court held that Rhode Island violated the First Amendment when it had a governor-appointed commission pressure booksellers to stop selling publications it considered indecent — and suggesting those booksellers might be prosecuted if they didn’t cooperate.

The Court saw through the government’s attempt to obfuscate its role in the censorship: “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around…”

Just last term, in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, the Court reaffirmed that regulators cannot strong-arm private actors into punishing disfavored speakers. That case involved the State of New York pressuring banks to not do business with the NRA. Permitting the NRA’s case to go forward, a unanimous court reminded: “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

Even when officials avoid formal orders, viewpoint-based retaliation is forbidden. Nor is there a First Amendment carve-out for “hate speech,” a label politicians dust off when convenient; cases like R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (ruling against a city ordinance against burning crosses) and Matal v. Tam (ruling against a regulation that prohibited registering slurs as trademarks) make that clear.

Unless speech crosses lines into narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech (for example, true threats or incitement to imminent lawless action), the remedy for bad commentary is more speech — not state punishment and control.

President Trump’s defenders now suggest intervention was justified because Kimmel allegedly lied. But as far as I can tell, he didn’t. He said the MAGA right was “trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” and that’s true.

However, I was personally taken aback by how hard many mainstream outlets seemed to be trying to find that he was conservative, given he came from a conservative family. I strongly suggest you watch the 1980s sit-com Family Ties, which is about how kids tend to have the opposite politics of their parents — or at least often do, at that age.

Still, despite the obvious and reasonable assumption that the person who killed a conservative commentator was unlikely to also be a conservative, the truth was actually still unclear at the time. The worst you can say about Kimmel’s comment is that he seemed more sure than he should have been about how wrong “the MAGA gang” was — because they weren’t. But that doesn’t make it a lie.

Brendan Carr and others also justify this move by claiming Kimmel and ABC must be held accountable for spreading “misinformation,” which is pretty rich. During the last administration, many of these same voices understood that this is an infinitely malleable concept — one that turns whoever wields it into the arbiter of truth.

And they were right to worry. Last year, another case about government coercion reached the Supreme Court. Murthy v. Missouri was a lawsuit arguing that the government pressure on social media companies to suppress some viewpoints about COVID-19 and the 2020 election made those private moderation decisions a form of government censorship. Ultimately, the plaintiffs lacked standing, but the case pressed the core principle correctly: The government cannot do through coercion of private platforms what the First Amendment forbids it to do directly.

But it seems Carr and his colleagues have conveniently forgotten this point.

Ari Cohn

, my colleague at the FIRE, has it exactly right: The government pressured ABC, and ABC caved. The timing — coming right after the FCC chair’s “easy way or the hard way” pledge — tells the story. We cannot be a country where late-night hosts serve at the pleasure of the president, but until institutions grow a spine and resist political pressure, that is the country we are becoming.

And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Since the Kirk assassination — and really since the start of this second Trump administration — we’ve seen a spree of efforts to punish speech. The attorney general floated a fictitious “hate speech” exception; the president suggested going after ABC and hostile journalists; senior officials praised corporate suspensions and firings of people who said vile things online; powerful figures called for employers to “cancel” those who “celebrated” Kirk’s murder; a deputy attorney general mused about using RICO against protesters for “vile words”; a massive, scattershot defamation suit landed against a major newspaper; and the nation’s chief broadcast regulator used licensing rhetoric to menace a network over a monologue.

Add it all up and the picture is unmistakable: a growing appetite to wield state power — and the credible threat of it — to police speech that offends the party in charge, with private actors learning to anticipate and obey.

Americans don’t have to like Jimmy Kimmel to see the danger of letting this pass. Licensing is precisely the lever the First Amendment is meant to neutralize because it tempts officials to make speech contingent on compliance. If a host’s joke can trigger a credible licensing threat, producers and editors will learn the obvious lesson: The safest path is the quiet path.

Kimmel’s ouster proves that our speech is already being chilled, with every action of administrative censorship dropping the temperature another degree. That chill won’t stop at the late night talk shows; it has already seeped into newsrooms, and will no doubt spread into documentaries and local programming decisions everywhere.

ABC can still prove this was its own, independent call by putting Kimmel back on the air and saying so plainly. And the FCC chair, if he cares about the law he’s sworn to uphold, should make equally clear that the commission will not police monologues, speculation, or satire — and that broadcast licenses are not leashes to yank when the president is angry. We don’t need the government playing network executive and determining who and what Americans get to watch.

The rest of us — whatever we think of Kimmel — should resist the delicious temptation to cheer a critic’s comeuppance. Liberty is not a team sport. If we only defend the speech we like, we will soon have none left worth defending.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

It was great to join Armstrong & Getty this morning to talk about my recent article in

The Free Press

, Charlie Kirk’s legacy, and the Cancel Culture fallout from his assassination — including the recent suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!