ABC News pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air on Wednesday. Not for being painfully unfunny, and not even for having an opinion. No, Kimmel got yanked because he flat-out lied and claimed: “the MAGA gang desperately [is] 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.”
It was a pure lie. Following widespread criticism, Nextstar Media Group said its ABC affiliate stations would not run Kimmel’s show over the comments.
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr noted ABC could face repercussions, but he didn’t force ABC to do anything. ABC made the call on its own — whether to protect its bottom line or because it knew it would lose in court. Notably, FCC regulations prohibit news distortion or a hoax. A station’s broadcast violates the FCC’s rules if “the station licensee knew that the information was false” or if “broadcasting the false information directly causes substantial public harm…”
Nonetheless, the professional censorship class on the left has suddenly discovered the First Amendment.
Harry Sisson took to X to claim “We are witnessing the most brazen attack on free speech in modern American history. Elon, Trump, and MAGA said they were free speech warriors. It’s the exact opposite.”
Matt Yglesias wrote on an entire article about “MAGA’s scary clampdown on free speech.”
David French called Kimmel’s removal a “direct attack on free speech.”
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote Kimmel’s removal is the “most brazen attack on free speech yet.”
But where was this passion for “free speech” when ABC canceled the hit sitcom “Roseanne” in 2018 after Roseanne Barr referred to former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
The left cheered the cancellation, with French posting: “Roseanne canceled. Who could have possibly foreseen that a toxic person would be so toxic?”
No handwringing about censorship then.
Where were the hysterics when President Donald Trump was deplatformed in 2021? The “Twitter Files” even revealed that Twitter employees acknowledged on internal channels that Trump’s tweets after January 6 did not violate any policies — yet they banned him anyway.
The left celebrated.
Yglesias reportedly had no problem with the silencing of free speech, posting “It’s kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.”
French said it was an “actual exercise of liberty,” and called the suppression of free speech “appropriate.”
Vox’s Aja Romano reassured Americans that deplatforming Trump isn’t a free speech issue. Rather, it is “effective at rousting extremists from mainstream internet spaces. It’s not a violation of the First Amendment.”
When Megyn Kelly was fired by NBC in 2018 after Kelly questioned whether blackface Halloween costumes were always racist, The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix mocked her, writing: “But Kelly is shrewd in plenty of other ways. In the next phase of her career, perhaps she will use her firing to fashion herself into a martyr for the so-called suppression of free speech.”
No defenders of free expression, no cries about censorship, just applause.
And let’s not forget the Biden administration’s censorship machine, exposed in Missouri v. Biden — later known as Murthy v. Missouri. The administration and federal agencies coerced and colluded directly and indirectly with social media companies to censor things they didn’t like on a litany of topics, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, election integrity, and Covid-19. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later admitted on The Joe Rogan Experience that Meta was complicit in the censorship.
Speaking of the Hunter Biden laptop, no one raised any alarms when conservatives were being locked out of their Twitter accounts for sharing the New York Post’s bombshell story. In fact, left-wing media outlets gave cover to Big Tech, with NPR framing their reporting on the censorship as Twitter and Facebook merely limiting “the reach of an article with unconfirmed claims” before couching that with a note that so-called “experts warn that social media platforms are full of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
No one clutched the First Amendment when The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson was locked out of his Twitter account for stating the obvious fact that then-U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine is a man. It was near radio silence from the left when YouTube censored Sen. Rand Paul for disagreeing with the government about CDC guidance.
So why the sudden panic now when a private company makes a determination on its own to pull a host for spreading egregious lies (and possibly violating the law)?
Partially because it’s one of their own. But even more so because, as Barack Obama once said, never let a crisis go to waste. The left doesn’t really care about Kimmel or free speech. But by pretending that this is some unprecedented Trump crackdown, they get to smear Trump as a dictator or authoritarian to delegitimize his presidency. It’s not about defending free speech, it’s just about exploiting a convenient storyline to keep their narrative of Trump-is-authoritarian alive.