You're absolutely right about everything Jeff, but I still don't care.
The Bluesky Brains didn't need the government, they captured my employer and forced me to write paens to racial "diversity" that I did not believe in order to keep my job. (I had this weird notion that the best person for the job should have it regardless of skin color. But saying that out loud was strictly verboten.)
That's some real censorship.
So fuck them. Let Trump crush them. I don't care.
And I have been a registered Democrat for over 50 years.
I do. I care about eliminating the blatant anti-asian racism of our selective universities (see the Harvard-UNC case discovery material). I care about restoring free speech at those universities (see reports from FIRE). I care about winning back women's rights to single-sex spaces, especially prisons; see lawsuits by the Women's Liberation Front, to which all my political donation money goes. Most of all, I care about stopping the ongoing crime against humanity of pediatric "gender affirming care", which is based on pure medical quackery and which is blindly supported by every Democrat in office (minus a tiny handful of state legislators).
Are you interested in what FIRE has said about this FCC thing with ABC and Kimmel? Or do you only consider them an authority when they agree with your partisan preferences?
I completely agree with FIRE about Kimmel. But free speech is no longer on the table in this country. The racist transqueer Left (which completely controls the Democrats) and the trumpista Right (which completely controls the Republicans) are both cults that want to destroy free speech and impose their ideology top-down on the rest of us. And since my own speech was only suppressed by one of those two cults, I'm siding with the other. That's how it works: the personal is political.
I remember some self-censorship by social media during the Biden and first Trump administrations, but I don’t remember the Biden folks threatening the social media companies with anything. Maybe they were intimidated by congressional hearings, but who could ever get fired or suspended because of Biden? This seems like a whole new arena.
The Biden admin was dictating to the social media companies who should be censored. Read Taibbi on this. And the Bluesky Brains got plenty of people fired without the government being involved.
Taibbi is a red-pilled idiot who even fell for Tulsi Gabbard's recent bullshit about the Obama administration inventing the Trump/Russia scandal (which was transparent baloney).
His complicity in the fake "Twitter Files" scandal is just another example of how he's distorted the truth more and more as he's progressed down this dark hole of denial regarding the Trumpist right and Russia's designs against the Western world. He might as well be a Glen Greenwald sock puppet at this point.
He's too invested in his nonsense and inept "reporting" to make a course correction now. He should have zero credibility among serious people.
Government agents including a White House Chief of Staff _leaving an email trail_ demanding to know why Twitter hasn't banned/deamplified accounts = fake?
Perhaps the Biden administration influenced social media, but what was the regulatory threat hanging over the companies’ heads from the administration? It seems like much of the self-censorship was due to them wanting to seem like responsible citizens. That is a type of self-censorship I sympathize with, though it’s flawed because it can never really be bipartisan.
Thanks for providing the link, Valentine. This article talks about pressure, not about legal consequences. All administrations have a push-and-pull with private actors. An administration would not be doing its job if it did not exert some pressure. But who was ever threatened with regulatory/legal consequences?
There was the Disinformation Governance Board, headed by the “Hunter Biden’s laptop is misinformation must be purged” Nina Jankowitz, who sang that bizarre song about happy censorship or whatever it was. But judging by the rest of this thread you are fully on the “it’s different when we do it” train, so I’m sure this won’t count either
"Zuckerberg says" is hardly an indictment of what was a voluntary program to consult with the government on how to handle COVID misinformation. Zuckerberg has a history of making decisions and then later on acting like he was practically forced into doing it when things go sour. He's a mercurial buck-passer who always evades responsibility.
No, we get it. So long as the censorship is in favor of your priorities it’s totally cool. Obviously it didn’t mean anything when the social media companies themselves said that they felt pressure from the government to censor certain viewpoints - after all, now we’re talking about something said by the FCC! Totally different!
We have a president and administration that sues every media company that says something negative about him. I think the Republicans used to be about free speech, but that seems like a long time ago.
Republicans, like most people, are in favour of "free speech" when they lack power in the purely practical basis that they are the ones more at risk of suffering consequences for the things they say. Democrats were very worried about free speech under Bush, and Republicans suddenly became very worried about it under Obama. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way and you're seeing conservatives make literally the exact same arguments that they previously recoiled at to justify measures against free speech.
A very small minority of people genuinely care deeply about free speech, but they're too fringe to be politically relevant. In almost all cases, when Republicans of the last 10-15 years were upset about people suffering consequences for saying something that the left disliked and claimed it was about free speech, what they meant was "it's not fair that they're being punished for this specific speech which I agree with, or at least think is not really bad".
It doesn’t matter. By this standard (Kimmel lied about the shooter) Fox should have had its license revoked decades ago. The fact that it hasn’t - is all the evidence you need that free speech, including saying abhorrent things, is a protected right.
Dude. How stupid are you? Do you read your own links? A third party ASKED the FCC to not renew a license. They opened that request up the comments. In the end, did they acquiesce to the request, and deny the renewal? If so, that’s a huge problem. If not, then all your link describes is a process in transparency.
In this case, the freakin FCC chair threatened action against ABC unless….and then a few hours later ABC did what Carr wanted.
You are an expert in comparing apples and oranges it seems.
This says the FCC would hear comments on it. It didn’t pull the license or threaten to do so, though this does read as a veiled threat that I agree is inappropriately high-handed.
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."
There is no evidence he is MAGA. Even the alternative conspiracy theory people are peddling (that he was a groyper) doesn’t fit because groypers were pro Kamala Harris in the last election.
You're right. It would be more accurate for Kimmel to say both sides are desperately trying to say the killer isn't one of them. When there was no information this was true. Would that change have gotten him cancelled?
Personally I think this is also an example of how bad it is to have monopolies.
If he fundamentally changed what he said so it wasn’t a direct lie he probably would’ve survived yes. At least, until his contract was up in less than a year. Considering how much poor ratings late night television has nowadays he would’ve just lost his job then.
Interesting, so in your opinion, it's okay for the government to suppress speech if it's done to stop misinformation, is that correct? And presumably this is a standard universally applied. If a president Gavin Newsom were to get, say, Sean Hannity fired for saying something incorrect, this would also be something you'd get behind, right?
I agree with you completely. I also think it's irrelevant. Government censorship of lies is not a good thing, and already a far way down that slippery slope.
So what, lies like Kimmel’s are a dime-a dozen by influencers on both the left and right. It might not even be a lie, Kimmel’s brain is such a lefty mush, that he probably believes it. The question is why should the government be involved in this?
I don't see how a department that wasn't established could be a greater assault on free speech than a successful action like the one today.
My recollection, which I admit is hazy, is that the Biden administration put pressure on social media sites to ban supposed misinformation from the platform. What's your argument for that being a greater violation of free speech than the Trump administration telling ABC to take a talk show host off the air?
I'm surprised to hear that the FBI was involved with the "Hunter Biden's laptop" thing, since as I noted above that was under the Trump administration. Do you have a link?
> My recollection, which I admit is hazy, is that the Biden administration put pressure on social media sites to ban supposed misinformation from the platform. What's your argument for that being a greater violation of free speech than the Trump administration telling ABC to take a talk show host off the air?
I was just astounded. It speaks to a fundamentally concerning worldview - that somehow large corporations and famous people have a more important right to speech than regular people.
The suppression of unpopular COVID information and the Hunter laptop story were pretty bad. Worse than this? I'm not sure. They were more covert about it.
I think it's very important to distinguish why this isn't "cancel culture". Cancel culture, at least as it was used from 2020 (and maybe a bit before), is when you are ostracised for not being pure enough. It is an in-group phenomenon. Notice that figures such as Kyle Rittenhouse wasn't cancelled, and when it did come down on right wing people from the left, such as Riley Gaines, it's because she was in a left wing space.
Kimmel, and to a lesser extent (for the reasons laid out in both of Jeff's pieces here) Colbert, are victims of a different phenomenon - censorship. The differences are massive between the two, even if the effects and presentation are similar. The way they must be approached are different, censorship requires a legal approacht that is not appropriate or applicable to cancel culture.
I want to clarify, there is evidence that some of what took place on college campuses under this framework also is censorship. I think this actually strengthens the paradigm, as this shows why lawsuits sometimes work
I do hope there is a strong and quick legal response. Although I do fear, that although the main reason is clearly unconstitutional, they fired him for other reasons as well (like with Colbert), and so there will be no satisfactory remedy.
Kimmel’s cancellation made my day. He is an unfunny “comedian” masquerading as a politician. He fans the hate of TDS Ragers which turned into homicidal mania with Charlie’s assassination. Seth Meyers is next and I’m loving every minute of it.
Perhaps late-night will hire some comedians instead of politicians for a change.
This is not a 1st Amendment issue in any way whatsoever. Kimmel made a disgustingly insensitive remark and was cancelled BY HIS OWN EMPLOYER. That's a business decision. He can go on spewing whatever filth he wants to, but not in ABC’s dime or airtime.
Cite exactly how that violates the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. I have provided the text below for your reference:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note in particular the first five words:
“Congress shall make no law…”
Now please cite any law Congress made to force ABC to suspend one Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely, or withdraw your comment and apologize.
Those are your only two options if you have any integrity, and I don't expect either from you, so in that event readers of this exchange can draw their own conclusions about your character, or lack of same.
"So what?" That's your response to the government bullying a public broadcaster into doing its bidding? This is not how a democratic government works, this is how authoritarian governments operate. "Read this script. Report only what we tell you. Don't question us or make fun of us or there will be trouble."
The FCC’s job is to regulate what is broadcast over the public airwaves. Mere threats of regulatory action I've Kimmel’s distasteful comments, which angered millions on d Americans, are hardly a 1st Amendment issue as you TDS victims insist on tendentiously arguing.
Let me explain again:
Here's the text:
First Amendment (1791)
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Congress made no law.
There's no 1st Amendment issue.
QED.
If you have a complaint about the decision, I suggest you take it up with the network.
The FCC threatened to pull broadcast licenses. ABC “cancelled” Kimmel cuz the alternative was to be taken off the air entirely. That’s not much of a choice.
If the FCC threatened to pull Fox’s license (during a Dem admin) for something Hannity said, or something Fox and Friends said, or whatever, would you have been ok with that?
You do make a good point, as Maurer had…FCC will probably get sued for this, and I would expect them to lose.
An unfunny comedian got suspended. Apparently, he’s quitting because he's bragging he already has another gig, and you guys whine about a Constitutional crisis. Now that’s a joke. No wonder fewer and fewer people are taking you seriously.
1A covers “unfunny” people’s unfunny comedy bits, as far as I know.
What’s really funny is the lack of principle from the MAGA crowd. You guys want to defend the constitution, you say? LOL. Apparently not…or only when it’s convenient for you.
Broadcasts over the public airwaves are held to a much higher standard than media such as cable and streaming, including factors such as decency and political fair balance. I dare you to argue Kimmel was anything other than 100%
biased toward progressive Democrats. That alone is grounds for regulatory concern. His comments about Kirk’s assassination were highly offensive to millions of Americans, which also merited regulatory concern.
It should also be noted that no regulatory actions were taken and certainly no laws were passed by Congress related to Kimmel’s suspension.
ABC may have caved in the face of threatened regulatory reaction, but it probably just exacerbated internal management concerns about the outrageously distasteful and provocative remarks, which were certainly humorless on what is branded as a comedy show, but which hasn't lived up to that brand promise in years and is in fact a political propaganda exercise masquerading as late-night entertainment. If it's anything like Colbert’s tendentious political nightly screed, it was a money loser with cratering ratings. That's what happens when you alienate half the potential audience to secure your progressive credentials.
I debunk a lot of TDS Rager pretzel logic in my time here in Substack, but I must say this is the easiest nonsense I've had the pleasure of crushing.
Thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, an act doesn’t have to be taken directly by Congress to violate one’s rights, including one’s First Amendment rights. That’s why your city can’t pass anti-speech laws. So no, the FCC isn’t allowed to say that it will withdraw licenses from networks that say mean things about the Administration.
Is that like the penumbra under which the court found the right to privacy?
There's nothing in the First Amendment that even remotely applies to this.
An unfunny comic got fired and apparently already has another gig and you idiots think it's a constitutional crisis. Thank God you're out of power, hopefully permanently.
Come back when you have restored your common sense and common decency. Then maybe we can have a sane two-party system again.
Meanwhile, enjoy your time in the political wilderness.
No, it’s not really like that at all—it’s the basis of more than a century of jurisprudence, going back to 1897. Again, it’s why, say, the city of Berkeley can’t ban the practice of Christianity in its borders. If you’re of the belief that a First Amendment violation can only be triggered by an act of Congress, you should refrain from discussing constitutional issues, because that hasn’t been true since before your grandparents were born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights?wprov=sfti1
How exactly are they politicians? They don't hold political office and never have. They've also never run for anything. I assume you mean political commentators which are very different.
Surely you jest. They have been auxiliary members of the DNC for years. Their “humor” consists of bashing conservatives. As a result, they have forfeited about half of their potential audience.
Tell with a straight face that Kimmel is politically unbiased. I haven't had a good laugh in a while. I certainly wouldn't get any watching him.
No person is politically unbiased. Political commentators is a fair term, politician is not unless you also call every Tom, Dick, and Sue with a political podcast a politician.
Well at least you're not a liar. The fact is he was overtly political almost to the exclusion of all else because “orange man bad—-ha ha ha” is the easiest formula for Pavlovian laughs from a monolithically exclusive progressive studio audience for lazy, humorless TDS-rager writers.
These guys didn't just forget what funny is, they never knew.
If you forbade them from mentioning politics, they'd have to cancel the monologue.
So ABC just cancelled the whole show instead.
If as you say, there's no political or news value to the show, then it enjoys no more 1st Amendme r protection than Three Stooges reruns. The difference if course is that the Stooges are still timelessly funny.
They're political propagandists. If he wants to be a political commentator, let him go on the Sunday morning talk shows or cable news. Late-night TV is supposed to be what you watch to relax after a hard day, not an anger fest to rile you up so much you want to blow out Charlie’s jugular so he bleeds out into an ashen white corpse in front of his wife and kids.
It’s a paraphrase of this: “Kimmel’s cancellation made my day. He is an unfunny “comedian” masquerading as a politician. He fans the hate of TDS Ragers which turned into homicidal mania with Charlie’s assassination. Seth Meyers is next and I’m loving every minute of it.”
You don’t like what they say, you’re glad they’re canceled, you hope more is to come, and your ominous “vibe shift” comment…whatever that’s supposed to be, you are not intimidating anyone.
💯 percent. Scary, unconstitutional shit. This is what cancel culture backed by an authoritarian government looks like.
Addendum: After plowing through many of the comments, a few additional thoughts. It’s really depressing how reader subjectivity underpins or dictates one’s views on free expression. That’s not how it’s supposed to work: whether I agree with Kirk’s politics or whether his killer was left or right wing is utterly irrelevant to the tragedy of his murder and the culpability of his killer. Full stop.By exactly the same token, whether you think Kimmel was excessively political or unfunny has no bearing whatsoever on the government’s (obvious) role in the very, very abrupt cancellation. Speaking of that, there’s a concept in First Amendment jurisprudence re: the chilling effect certain govt conduct can have on free expression. That threshold was easily satisfied here. Not even close, really.
Cancel culture practiced by the Left was infuriating. Censorship engaged in by the MAGA is horrifying. A pox on both.
Who has standing to sue in order to take this case all the way up to the supreme Court?
Sinclair is not going to sue. They probably have standing because they could claim that they are only taking Kimmel off because they are pressured. But they're not going to sue.
The ABC Network could claim that by pressuring affiliates the government is reducing the network's revenue stream. But the network, (in the form of ABC national news), has already demonstrated that they're willing to pay Trump 16 million dollars to go away. So they're not going to sue.
So that leaves Kimmel as the last man with standing.
Kimmel won’t sue because he’d have to admit he was a professional political comedian who didn’t bother to read even the mainstream media on this case. They have presented plenty of evidence the shooter is not MAGA like he declared, but a lefty. What exactly would he be defending here, his right to fool his viewers? Maybe he has a constitutional right to fool his viewers but that’s not easy to defend in a coherent way.
Yes, literally, maybe even figuratively, a million times worse, maybe even a billion times. One does wonder, though, how many more millions/billions ABC was willing to keep losing every year for the honor of hosting the incredibly and plungingly low-rated Kimmel? Maybe this particular and particularly blatant and obnoxious lie by Kimmel just gave the network reason to sigh in relief and pull the plug on what was already a brain dead financial albatross.
I'd rather simply let Kimmel rot with his low ratings. But we lost the debate when our free speech principles proved wholly unable to protect the right from left-wing cancel culture.
You're absolutely right about everything Jeff, but I still don't care.
The Bluesky Brains didn't need the government, they captured my employer and forced me to write paens to racial "diversity" that I did not believe in order to keep my job. (I had this weird notion that the best person for the job should have it regardless of skin color. But saying that out loud was strictly verboten.)
That's some real censorship.
So fuck them. Let Trump crush them. I don't care.
And I have been a registered Democrat for over 50 years.
I think you should care about things.
I do. I care about eliminating the blatant anti-asian racism of our selective universities (see the Harvard-UNC case discovery material). I care about restoring free speech at those universities (see reports from FIRE). I care about winning back women's rights to single-sex spaces, especially prisons; see lawsuits by the Women's Liberation Front, to which all my political donation money goes. Most of all, I care about stopping the ongoing crime against humanity of pediatric "gender affirming care", which is based on pure medical quackery and which is blindly supported by every Democrat in office (minus a tiny handful of state legislators).
Are you interested in what FIRE has said about this FCC thing with ABC and Kimmel? Or do you only consider them an authority when they agree with your partisan preferences?
I completely agree with FIRE about Kimmel. But free speech is no longer on the table in this country. The racist transqueer Left (which completely controls the Democrats) and the trumpista Right (which completely controls the Republicans) are both cults that want to destroy free speech and impose their ideology top-down on the rest of us. And since my own speech was only suppressed by one of those two cults, I'm siding with the other. That's how it works: the personal is political.
I remember some self-censorship by social media during the Biden and first Trump administrations, but I don’t remember the Biden folks threatening the social media companies with anything. Maybe they were intimidated by congressional hearings, but who could ever get fired or suspended because of Biden? This seems like a whole new arena.
The Biden admin was dictating to the social media companies who should be censored. Read Taibbi on this. And the Bluesky Brains got plenty of people fired without the government being involved.
Taibbi is a red-pilled idiot who even fell for Tulsi Gabbard's recent bullshit about the Obama administration inventing the Trump/Russia scandal (which was transparent baloney).
His complicity in the fake "Twitter Files" scandal is just another example of how he's distorted the truth more and more as he's progressed down this dark hole of denial regarding the Trumpist right and Russia's designs against the Western world. He might as well be a Glen Greenwald sock puppet at this point.
He's too invested in his nonsense and inept "reporting" to make a course correction now. He should have zero credibility among serious people.
Except he brings receipts.
Government agents including a White House Chief of Staff _leaving an email trail_ demanding to know why Twitter hasn't banned/deamplified accounts = fake?
And you call Taibbi an idiot?
Fake twitter files? You can read them yourself, there is direct evidence of intelligence agencies censoring people.
From a former, even passionate admirer of Tiabbi this is so spot on.
Perhaps the Biden administration influenced social media, but what was the regulatory threat hanging over the companies’ heads from the administration? It seems like much of the self-censorship was due to them wanting to seem like responsible citizens. That is a type of self-censorship I sympathize with, though it’s flawed because it can never really be bipartisan.
The regulatory threat was “Russian misinformation” and COVID
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic
Thanks for providing the link, Valentine. This article talks about pressure, not about legal consequences. All administrations have a push-and-pull with private actors. An administration would not be doing its job if it did not exert some pressure. But who was ever threatened with regulatory/legal consequences?
By this logic Trump did nothing wrong here
But didn’t his FCC guy pressure Kimmel’s employer and act in a partial manner?
There was the Disinformation Governance Board, headed by the “Hunter Biden’s laptop is misinformation must be purged” Nina Jankowitz, who sang that bizarre song about happy censorship or whatever it was. But judging by the rest of this thread you are fully on the “it’s different when we do it” train, so I’m sure this won’t count either
"Zuckerberg says" is hardly an indictment of what was a voluntary program to consult with the government on how to handle COVID misinformation. Zuckerberg has a history of making decisions and then later on acting like he was practically forced into doing it when things go sour. He's a mercurial buck-passer who always evades responsibility.
No, we get it. So long as the censorship is in favor of your priorities it’s totally cool. Obviously it didn’t mean anything when the social media companies themselves said that they felt pressure from the government to censor certain viewpoints - after all, now we’re talking about something said by the FCC! Totally different!
You didn’t read the Twitter Files. The Biden administration definitely did that.
We have a president and administration that sues every media company that says something negative about him. I think the Republicans used to be about free speech, but that seems like a long time ago.
Republicans, like most people, are in favour of "free speech" when they lack power in the purely practical basis that they are the ones more at risk of suffering consequences for the things they say. Democrats were very worried about free speech under Bush, and Republicans suddenly became very worried about it under Obama. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way and you're seeing conservatives make literally the exact same arguments that they previously recoiled at to justify measures against free speech.
A very small minority of people genuinely care deeply about free speech, but they're too fringe to be politically relevant. In almost all cases, when Republicans of the last 10-15 years were upset about people suffering consequences for saying something that the left disliked and claimed it was about free speech, what they meant was "it's not fair that they're being punished for this specific speech which I agree with, or at least think is not really bad".
Turns out progressives shouldn’t have cracked so much against people’s speech.
Oh well, they’ll get what they deserve now.
Kimmel ran with a narrative that was 1000% false .( * the shooter was not a Right winger & far from it *) .
Not only did Kimmel not tell the truth -he purposely lied . I wonder what his goal of lying was meant to accomplish ?
It doesn’t matter. By this standard (Kimmel lied about the shooter) Fox should have had its license revoked decades ago. The fact that it hasn’t - is all the evidence you need that free speech, including saying abhorrent things, is a protected right.
… but Fox does run into legal trouble over claims though?
https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5256432/smartmatic-fox-news-trial-defamation-election-2020-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/business/media/fox-lawsuits-legal-cases.html
Did you genuinely not know this?
Cool non sequitur.
The difference is, did the FCC ever threaten to pull Fox’s license (or one of its affiliate’s licence)?
1A used to prohibit government incursion on freedom of speech.
The FCC threatened to pull ABC’s license unless Kimmel was taken off the air.
How do you square this FCC action with 1A?
For affiliates, literally - yes?
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-will-release-public-comments-bid-deny-fox-tv-station-license-renewal-2023-08-23/
I’m surprised at how much you people literally do not know.
Dude. How stupid are you? Do you read your own links? A third party ASKED the FCC to not renew a license. They opened that request up the comments. In the end, did they acquiesce to the request, and deny the renewal? If so, that’s a huge problem. If not, then all your link describes is a process in transparency.
In this case, the freakin FCC chair threatened action against ABC unless….and then a few hours later ABC did what Carr wanted.
You are an expert in comparing apples and oranges it seems.
It’s worse than what happened here. The FCC didn’t allow open public comments until FOX.
The group that made those public comments, was the one who also pushed for the FCC to change its rules.
https://thedesk.net/2023/08/fcc-wxft-license-renewal-public-comment-fox/
Again - you don’t know.
This says the FCC would hear comments on it. It didn’t pull the license or threaten to do so, though this does read as a veiled threat that I agree is inappropriately high-handed.
The FCC didn’t hear comments on license renewals until it changed it’s rules to allow it to do so for FOX.
https://thedesk.net/2023/08/fcc-wxft-license-renewal-public-comment-fox/
Here's what he said; what part is not true?
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."
There is no evidence he is MAGA. Even the alternative conspiracy theory people are peddling (that he was a groyper) doesn’t fit because groypers were pro Kamala Harris in the last election.
You're right. It would be more accurate for Kimmel to say both sides are desperately trying to say the killer isn't one of them. When there was no information this was true. Would that change have gotten him cancelled?
Personally I think this is also an example of how bad it is to have monopolies.
If he fundamentally changed what he said so it wasn’t a direct lie he probably would’ve survived yes. At least, until his contract was up in less than a year. Considering how much poor ratings late night television has nowadays he would’ve just lost his job then.
Interesting, so in your opinion, it's okay for the government to suppress speech if it's done to stop misinformation, is that correct? And presumably this is a standard universally applied. If a president Gavin Newsom were to get, say, Sean Hannity fired for saying something incorrect, this would also be something you'd get behind, right?
I agree with you completely. I also think it's irrelevant. Government censorship of lies is not a good thing, and already a far way down that slippery slope.
So what, lies like Kimmel’s are a dime-a dozen by influencers on both the left and right. It might not even be a lie, Kimmel’s brain is such a lefty mush, that he probably believes it. The question is why should the government be involved in this?
> This might be the most blatant violation of the First Amendment in my lifetime.
If you ignore the height of peak woke and attacks by the government on “misinformation”.
What's one such attack that you would say was a greater violation of the First Amendment?
Literal departments of disinformation that Biden attempted to establish.
The FBI directly targeted individual speech on Twitter.
Stories that reflected negatively on Biden like the laptop story were also censored heavily from all social media (again, from the FBI).
This stuff isn’t that old.
I don't see how a department that wasn't established could be a greater assault on free speech than a successful action like the one today.
My recollection, which I admit is hazy, is that the Biden administration put pressure on social media sites to ban supposed misinformation from the platform. What's your argument for that being a greater violation of free speech than the Trump administration telling ABC to take a talk show host off the air?
I'm surprised to hear that the FBI was involved with the "Hunter Biden's laptop" thing, since as I noted above that was under the Trump administration. Do you have a link?
> My recollection, which I admit is hazy, is that the Biden administration put pressure on social media sites to ban supposed misinformation from the platform. What's your argument for that being a greater violation of free speech than the Trump administration telling ABC to take a talk show host off the air?
…
You cannot be serious.
Weird reply! I am serious. Why did you quote my whole paragraph just to say I can't be serious?
Ignore him. There's always one troll who has to spam the thread and just hassle people. I'd block and move on.
I was just astounded. It speaks to a fundamentally concerning worldview - that somehow large corporations and famous people have a more important right to speech than regular people.
The suppression of unpopular COVID information and the Hunter laptop story were pretty bad. Worse than this? I'm not sure. They were more covert about it.
The Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't a government action, and in fact it happened during the Trump administration.
It was a government action, it was explicit orders from the FBI.
Link?
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
Intelligence officials in general but the point stands.
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1432
Do you think something is less bad just because less people know about it?
I think it's very important to distinguish why this isn't "cancel culture". Cancel culture, at least as it was used from 2020 (and maybe a bit before), is when you are ostracised for not being pure enough. It is an in-group phenomenon. Notice that figures such as Kyle Rittenhouse wasn't cancelled, and when it did come down on right wing people from the left, such as Riley Gaines, it's because she was in a left wing space.
Kimmel, and to a lesser extent (for the reasons laid out in both of Jeff's pieces here) Colbert, are victims of a different phenomenon - censorship. The differences are massive between the two, even if the effects and presentation are similar. The way they must be approached are different, censorship requires a legal approacht that is not appropriate or applicable to cancel culture.
I want to clarify, there is evidence that some of what took place on college campuses under this framework also is censorship. I think this actually strengthens the paradigm, as this shows why lawsuits sometimes work
I do hope there is a strong and quick legal response. Although I do fear, that although the main reason is clearly unconstitutional, they fired him for other reasons as well (like with Colbert), and so there will be no satisfactory remedy.
Gosh I can’t wait to hear Twitter Files warrior Matt Taibbi who is surely to be outraged by this blatant in your face government censorship.. right?
His show with Walter Kirn airs every Friday. I'm sure it will be mentioned then.
Kimmel’s cancellation made my day. He is an unfunny “comedian” masquerading as a politician. He fans the hate of TDS Ragers which turned into homicidal mania with Charlie’s assassination. Seth Meyers is next and I’m loving every minute of it.
Perhaps late-night will hire some comedians instead of politicians for a change.
The vibe shift is seismic. Feel it?
The vibe shift where we throw away the first amendment for the lolz and tribal victories? You guys aren't even pretending to have principles anymore.
This is not a 1st Amendment issue in any way whatsoever. Kimmel made a disgustingly insensitive remark and was cancelled BY HIS OWN EMPLOYER. That's a business decision. He can go on spewing whatever filth he wants to, but not in ABC’s dime or airtime.
Cite exactly how that violates the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. I have provided the text below for your reference:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note in particular the first five words:
“Congress shall make no law…”
Now please cite any law Congress made to force ABC to suspend one Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely, or withdraw your comment and apologize.
Those are your only two options if you have any integrity, and I don't expect either from you, so in that event readers of this exchange can draw their own conclusions about your character, or lack of same.
Ask yourself one question. Would ABC have done this without the threat of FCC action? I'm pretty sure the answer is, no.
So what?
"So what?" That's your response to the government bullying a public broadcaster into doing its bidding? This is not how a democratic government works, this is how authoritarian governments operate. "Read this script. Report only what we tell you. Don't question us or make fun of us or there will be trouble."
The FCC’s job is to regulate what is broadcast over the public airwaves. Mere threats of regulatory action I've Kimmel’s distasteful comments, which angered millions on d Americans, are hardly a 1st Amendment issue as you TDS victims insist on tendentiously arguing.
Let me explain again:
Here's the text:
First Amendment (1791)
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Congress made no law.
There's no 1st Amendment issue.
QED.
If you have a complaint about the decision, I suggest you take it up with the network.
The FCC threatened to pull broadcast licenses. ABC “cancelled” Kimmel cuz the alternative was to be taken off the air entirely. That’s not much of a choice.
If the FCC threatened to pull Fox’s license (during a Dem admin) for something Hannity said, or something Fox and Friends said, or whatever, would you have been ok with that?
You do make a good point, as Maurer had…FCC will probably get sued for this, and I would expect them to lose.
An unfunny comedian got suspended. Apparently, he’s quitting because he's bragging he already has another gig, and you guys whine about a Constitutional crisis. Now that’s a joke. No wonder fewer and fewer people are taking you seriously.
1A covers “unfunny” people’s unfunny comedy bits, as far as I know.
What’s really funny is the lack of principle from the MAGA crowd. You guys want to defend the constitution, you say? LOL. Apparently not…or only when it’s convenient for you.
Well then you don't know much.
Broadcasts over the public airwaves are held to a much higher standard than media such as cable and streaming, including factors such as decency and political fair balance. I dare you to argue Kimmel was anything other than 100%
biased toward progressive Democrats. That alone is grounds for regulatory concern. His comments about Kirk’s assassination were highly offensive to millions of Americans, which also merited regulatory concern.
It should also be noted that no regulatory actions were taken and certainly no laws were passed by Congress related to Kimmel’s suspension.
ABC may have caved in the face of threatened regulatory reaction, but it probably just exacerbated internal management concerns about the outrageously distasteful and provocative remarks, which were certainly humorless on what is branded as a comedy show, but which hasn't lived up to that brand promise in years and is in fact a political propaganda exercise masquerading as late-night entertainment. If it's anything like Colbert’s tendentious political nightly screed, it was a money loser with cratering ratings. That's what happens when you alienate half the potential audience to secure your progressive credentials.
I debunk a lot of TDS Rager pretzel logic in my time here in Substack, but I must say this is the easiest nonsense I've had the pleasure of crushing.
I think Charlie would be proud.
Thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, an act doesn’t have to be taken directly by Congress to violate one’s rights, including one’s First Amendment rights. That’s why your city can’t pass anti-speech laws. So no, the FCC isn’t allowed to say that it will withdraw licenses from networks that say mean things about the Administration.
Is that like the penumbra under which the court found the right to privacy?
There's nothing in the First Amendment that even remotely applies to this.
An unfunny comic got fired and apparently already has another gig and you idiots think it's a constitutional crisis. Thank God you're out of power, hopefully permanently.
Come back when you have restored your common sense and common decency. Then maybe we can have a sane two-party system again.
Meanwhile, enjoy your time in the political wilderness.
No, it’s not really like that at all—it’s the basis of more than a century of jurisprudence, going back to 1897. Again, it’s why, say, the city of Berkeley can’t ban the practice of Christianity in its borders. If you’re of the belief that a First Amendment violation can only be triggered by an act of Congress, you should refrain from discussing constitutional issues, because that hasn’t been true since before your grandparents were born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights?wprov=sfti1
What law did Congress pass that required the network to suspend Jimmy Kimmel?
Read the text of the amendment as I suggested and cite me how the suspension of an unfunny comic by his employer violates it. You can't.
Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news, but the current SCOTUS does not suffer convoluted legal theories like yours gladly.
Why don't you mount a legal challenge to ABC’s personnel action?
One reason is you don't have standing. Tell me who does?
So if no party has standing for a personnel standing by a private company, how do you propose to assert your theory?
It was literally an action taken by the federal government to enact viewpoint discrimination, you dunce.
Mad-libs out the proper nouns, and this is indistinguishable from a peak-woke, fire-this-guy-over-a-Halloween-costume argument.
“It’s fine to censor people when they say things I don’t like!”
Who are you quoting? Certainly not me.
How exactly are they politicians? They don't hold political office and never have. They've also never run for anything. I assume you mean political commentators which are very different.
Surely you jest. They have been auxiliary members of the DNC for years. Their “humor” consists of bashing conservatives. As a result, they have forfeited about half of their potential audience.
Tell with a straight face that Kimmel is politically unbiased. I haven't had a good laugh in a while. I certainly wouldn't get any watching him.
No person is politically unbiased. Political commentators is a fair term, politician is not unless you also call every Tom, Dick, and Sue with a political podcast a politician.
Well at least you're not a liar. The fact is he was overtly political almost to the exclusion of all else because “orange man bad—-ha ha ha” is the easiest formula for Pavlovian laughs from a monolithically exclusive progressive studio audience for lazy, humorless TDS-rager writers.
These guys didn't just forget what funny is, they never knew.
If you forbade them from mentioning politics, they'd have to cancel the monologue.
So ABC just cancelled the whole show instead.
If as you say, there's no political or news value to the show, then it enjoys no more 1st Amendme r protection than Three Stooges reruns. The difference if course is that the Stooges are still timelessly funny.
This Kimmel stooge never was and never will be.
But, of course, Three Stooges reruns do In fact enjoy first amendment protection.
They're political propagandists. If he wants to be a political commentator, let him go on the Sunday morning talk shows or cable news. Late-night TV is supposed to be what you watch to relax after a hard day, not an anger fest to rile you up so much you want to blow out Charlie’s jugular so he bleeds out into an ashen white corpse in front of his wife and kids.
Want to make a joke about that?
It’s a paraphrase of this: “Kimmel’s cancellation made my day. He is an unfunny “comedian” masquerading as a politician. He fans the hate of TDS Ragers which turned into homicidal mania with Charlie’s assassination. Seth Meyers is next and I’m loving every minute of it.”
You don’t like what they say, you’re glad they’re canceled, you hope more is to come, and your ominous “vibe shift” comment…whatever that’s supposed to be, you are not intimidating anyone.
In dealing with me you will find that if you put words in my mouth I will spit them right back in your face. Grab a hankie.
Your reading comprehension seems to be sorely lacking. Nothing in my comment remotely resembles your lie.
I suspect it's a symptom of the TDS brain rot you're suffering.
Imagine a left wing government orchestrating the firing (or arrest) of an unfunny troll like Jeff Guttfeld . Does that also make your day? Not mine.
💯 percent. Scary, unconstitutional shit. This is what cancel culture backed by an authoritarian government looks like.
Addendum: After plowing through many of the comments, a few additional thoughts. It’s really depressing how reader subjectivity underpins or dictates one’s views on free expression. That’s not how it’s supposed to work: whether I agree with Kirk’s politics or whether his killer was left or right wing is utterly irrelevant to the tragedy of his murder and the culpability of his killer. Full stop.By exactly the same token, whether you think Kimmel was excessively political or unfunny has no bearing whatsoever on the government’s (obvious) role in the very, very abrupt cancellation. Speaking of that, there’s a concept in First Amendment jurisprudence re: the chilling effect certain govt conduct can have on free expression. That threshold was easily satisfied here. Not even close, really.
Cancel culture practiced by the Left was infuriating. Censorship engaged in by the MAGA is horrifying. A pox on both.
Who has standing to sue in order to take this case all the way up to the supreme Court?
Sinclair is not going to sue. They probably have standing because they could claim that they are only taking Kimmel off because they are pressured. But they're not going to sue.
The ABC Network could claim that by pressuring affiliates the government is reducing the network's revenue stream. But the network, (in the form of ABC national news), has already demonstrated that they're willing to pay Trump 16 million dollars to go away. So they're not going to sue.
So that leaves Kimmel as the last man with standing.
Kimmel won’t sue because he’d have to admit he was a professional political comedian who didn’t bother to read even the mainstream media on this case. They have presented plenty of evidence the shooter is not MAGA like he declared, but a lefty. What exactly would he be defending here, his right to fool his viewers? Maybe he has a constitutional right to fool his viewers but that’s not easy to defend in a coherent way.
As with Karen Attiah, I wonder if Kimmel was told to retract/apologize and refused. If that's not what this is, this is lousy.
Those in charge can flex and enforce existing rules.
Political capital doesn’t appear out of thin air. The People “hath” voted.
Yes, literally, maybe even figuratively, a million times worse, maybe even a billion times. One does wonder, though, how many more millions/billions ABC was willing to keep losing every year for the honor of hosting the incredibly and plungingly low-rated Kimmel? Maybe this particular and particularly blatant and obnoxious lie by Kimmel just gave the network reason to sigh in relief and pull the plug on what was already a brain dead financial albatross.
“This is not fasism something far dumber” is a banger - and I think this comes down to them being very performative Online movement.
All they have in their headspace is how Online far right wackos react and everything else is noise or NPC I assume…
I'd rather simply let Kimmel rot with his low ratings. But we lost the debate when our free speech principles proved wholly unable to protect the right from left-wing cancel culture.
It is what it is.