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.
The problem with arguing with nihilism is that you are arguing with a black hole.
Teenagers and other losers love nihilism because it makes them think they have power in a world where they have none. If you're trying to get a teenager to care about ruining his future, and he responds "lol I don't care" and then you *try* to *argue* with him about it, for once in his life he realizes he has control over something. You want him to care, but you can't *make* him care. The more you try to make the nihilist care the more they get intoxicated by the fact they can deny you the thing you want. They can't deny anyone else anything -- like, they can't deny someone asking them on a date, or asking for a job, or asking for fries, since they have nothing to offer.
Eventually people grow up. But in the meantime just stay out of the blast radius.
I'm not arguing for nilhilism, I'm arguing for the trumpistas as being the lesser evil when given a binary choice between them and the racist transqueers. Which is the choice we are given at the ballot box.
I can't get on board with this kind of thinking that dictates that because Side A does bad things, I hope Side B crushes them into a fine paste. It is the same line of logic that leftists use when they say "well, Charlie Kirk wants us dead so why shouldn't I be happy he's dead?"
You're either against certain behaviour or you aren't. And if you're in favour of it when your side is doing it, then you aren't against it.
Maybe I'm reverting to nilhism here... But can I coherently and ethically hope the right crushes the left quickly, so that the left can be purged of bad ideas so something better can arise?
When I heard AGs and Congress were investigating fraud in gender meds, I was initially excited.
But not a whole lot has happen since then. Are they slow walking it? Gender affirming care and Judith Butlers gender ideology are the gift that keeps giving. Need to keep that bogeyman alive so as to bludgeon him rhetorically every election.
Brother there's no 'them', we're all getting crushed if this continues. We're all in the same boat, there's no point cheering because the other end has a hole in it
A reasonable suggestion. However we were told silence was violence and that if you are not with us you are against us. Everyone had to pick a side. They did
I feel your pain. I didn't experience it. But Im soo angry with the left cause the left is my team, and it betrayed me. I don't feel that way towards the right because there was never any betrayal! As a life long Dem voter, I was always aware the bad policies of the right. No surprises. But good luck! You will face an infinity of people from the left that will want to remind you of the horror show of the right, and can't understand you.
Please consider voting for the next Moderate Republican H!tler. My state (PA) is still chock full of Democrats. They vote for Trump, in the hopes that the Democrats will eventually get their act together.
The main problem here being that if Democrats regain power, we will all be doing so many DEI seminars that we won't have time to work. The government will close down any business that doesn't.
Yeah, I get it. What you’re experiencing is an important phenomenon.
Years ago, I tried to read _Between the World and Me_ and had to put it down halfway through because it was rapidly turning me into a racist. The hatred Ta-Nahisi Coates directed at me through those pages demanded reciprocation. But it was very instructive. Where had HIS hatred come from? Obviously a response to all that had been directed at him over his lifetime. His book made it easy to empathize and understand the cycle of hatred.
The same goes for authoritarianism. It echoes and feeds itself. That doesn’t make either side right or wrong; it’s just how humans work.
Someone made you write a piece of paper about how hiring people with different ethnic backgrounds is good, presumably because you were in a position to hire people. You were not censored and this is not the gates of Lefortovo. Enough with this troll nonsense.
I completely agree and fuck all those people that want to forget what these left cretins have done to our civil liberties beginning with before #MeToo and through the pandemic. The whataboutism is breathtaking. The tendency for this convenience moralizing is a sign of low cognitive capability (emotional short-term fears overriding calculated long-term risks).
Do they really not remember what the last 10-20 years felt like? These people like Kimmell that were gleeful in their position of snark and divisiveness against more than half the country… protected in their safe space by media mob cancel culture… are now facing consequences for all that malice, and we are supposed to feel sorry for him… to rise up to our highest principles to continue to support he and other’s ability to keep up the punch-down attacks without ever having to accept any responsibility for it?
He sucks. He is not even funny. But most importantly, he exceeds the guardrails of expected common decency that should be an expectation for someone in his position of influence. He is garbage.
“and we are supposed to feel sorry for him… to rise up to our highest principles to continue to support he and other’s ability to keep up the punch-down attacks without ever having to accept any responsibility for it?”
Yes, otherwise you don’t actually have any principles. That’s literally what having principles means.
So, if someone comes up to you and starts punching you in the face because you said that the mRNA drugs are not really vaccines and you don't support forcing people to take them, and starts threatening your family because they are associated with you... you would have no principles if punching back?
Do you think the censorship ends with the Bluesky crowd? Or are you fine with whatever dark path this takes us down, so long as the DEI crew are the first against the wall?
I'm not fine with it, I'd love to have a political party that actually believes in liberalism:
>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
But there is no such party in the US now. Both major parties are controlled by illiberal cults that oppose free speech, and no minor party is going to win any significant number of elections to state or national office.
So I have to live my life under the thumb of one illiberal cult or another. So do you. I'm responding by supporting the cult that will do the least harm to me. So are you.
Honestly? No. I know what the censorship was like in the last administration. It's pretty bad, in general. I no longer watch the news, because 90+% of it became propaganda.
The DEI crew weren't the first against the wall. That was the "anti-vaxxers" where people were literally fired for having religious beliefs, to the point of nurses strikes, because they'd lost so many people.
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".
Yikes. Your two wrongs makes a right mentality is really fucked up. The only sane and reasonable thinking is that both Left and Right Wing assaults on free expression are equally abhorrent and government censorship violates the First Amendment
I respect people who can call out both sides like FIRE, but absolute partisan hacks who swear up and down that Biden and the progs never did anything as bad are people that should be opposed at all times.
I agree with you. But, however you slice it, that particular section of the left is clearly regretting all that sneering about "freeze peach" round about now. Or would be, if they had a shred of self-awareness.
Leftists started calling up peoples employers. Obama/Biden started up investigating nonprofits that are political nonprofits.
I don’t understand the point of trying to gaslight people who have directly lived through the insanity of the left. Like if you actually are concerned about the repercussions then surely being able to recognize who started these tactics is important.
All this gaslighting does is ensure people are actually correct about attempting to stamp out the left now while it’s still possible. Maybe once we wipe out the people who believe violence is an adequate answer to speech we can begin to heal.
Fair enough. I apologize. That said, the left deplatformed Trump on social media. They told Apple to take social media platforms they didn't like off the Apple iOS. They told the media to suppress truthful stories. They created NGOs to police media, and the security state monitored and censored social media content for partisan reasons.
Saint Barack threatened Fox with the FCC. A massive network of left-leaning organizations funded with tax dollars organized boycotts of Fox advertisers.
So, yes while this is unfortunate, it didn't happen in a vacuum. The left is finally, at long last, being held to the same rules they held everyone else to.
“The left” “they” “they” “they” Your boogeyman is an amalgam of every person you’ve heard on social media express an opinion that you didn’t like. What you said is bereft of any substantive analysis or even any claims that can be meaningfully litigated. Some sites “deplatformed” Trump because he’s a lying sack of shit with an audience of millions, the rage of which he was actively stoking with demonstrably factually incorrect claims at a daily, or even hourly basis.
You’ll notice that Fox News was not “deplatformed”. You’ll notice that neither OANN, nor the legion of ultra-conservative radio talk shows that exist only to sell gold to geriatric racists, nor CPAC, nor, in that case, the overwhelming majority of legal conservative activist groups (nor, frankly, most of the illegal ones) were restricted from propagating their bullshit by government action.
Trump tried to pull off a coup. Private entities didn’t like the look of supporting a failed usurpation of the democratic process, and their terms of service (of using their private services) — already in place prior to homeboy becoming a political figure — explicitly prohibited the kind of speech he was engaging in. Seems pretty cut and dry.
But now the head of the FCC, an agent of the government we rarely hear from except in front of a congressional committee, issues a threat in broad daylight to a private broadcasting entity because one of its employees uttered what was by any reasonable definition an utterly pedestrian opinion (that did not celebrate murder in any way, shape, or form, condone it, support political violence, or otherwise project some kind of positive gloss onto the shooting event itself)… and you’re crying alligator tears and complaining to the teacher that “the left started it!!!”
On that last part, boycotts are... tricky. I recognize that someone organising a boycott over statements they don't like is engaging in a form of cancel culture, which I'm far from a fan of. But at the end of the day, you can't tell people how to spend their money.
No-platforming, on the other hand, is pure intellectual cowardice.
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.
The thing that makes the legal case difficult is that Disney and the FCC can argue that Carr's comments were not the primary reason for the suspension. They have plausible deniability.
They have deniability, I'm not sure how plausible it is. Keep in mind, this wouldn't be a criminal trial, the standard isn't "beyond a shadow of a doubt". I think we're actually talking about strict scrutiny if it's a constitutional point (FCC) or preponderance of evidence if it's civil (Disney).
That's an interesting distinction to make, thank you. Astral Codex 10 had a piece a while back (specifically, after people on the right got that random woman fired from Target) pointing out, among other things, that cancel culture is normally friendly fire. Easier to purge someone for not adhering to your orthodoxy if their workplace or university is orthodox, after all. So perhaps what starts out as censorship tends to devolve* into cancel culture?
*"Devolve" because, while I'm opposed to both, censorship at least achieves the target of hurting your enemies, not your friends.
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?
Firstly, to be clear I don't think you're talking about the Twitter Files—you're referring to Jim Jordan's "Facebook Files" emails. And I'll acknowledge my part in muddying the waters by mentioning Zuckerberg; I have no idea what Taibbi said about the latter, though I can certainly imagine.
And I assume the chain your referencing is the "you're hiding the ball" emails. Which didn't involve the White House Chief of Staff (Ron Klain) but the director of digital strategy (Rob Flaherty) and a senior White House pandemic advisor (Andy Slavitt).
And once again, they were coordinating over reducing vaccine misinformation, not censoring political opinions they found distasteful. It was a matter of public health. I'll grant that Slavitt's statement in that email could have been worded in a better way so as not to be seen as implying a tacit threat. Or maybe he wanted it to seem that way, even though there's probably nothing he could've done.
It was a rough time—March of 2021, people dying by the tens of thousands, and they were trying to get the country vaccinated after Trump completely abandoned his responsibility while trying to overturn an election. People were wrestling with tough decisions and Facebook was rife with anti-vax garbage that was literally getting people killed.
All of this is an order of magnitude different from what the Trump administration just did—openly threatening action against TV stations that didn't do something about Kimmel. Just because Kimmel made a remark about Kirk's killer, demonstrating an opinion he had on the unresolved matter of the killer's political allegiance, if he even had one. That's outrageous and indefensible by any stretch of the imagination.
And yes, Taibbi's an idiot. I've seen numerous examples of his shoddy reporting and lousy judgement throughout the whole Trump saga, especially with regard to "Russiagate", and now he's given himself over as a tool of MAGA. The Twitter Files were nothing more than old, anecdotal correspondence showing Twitter employees wrestling with the same tough decisions that all of society was dealing with at the time. They were given to a specially curated group of journalists to advance Musk's narrative. Now, thanks to people like him, we have Trump 2.0 and our country is falling apart.
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?
"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!
Don't listen to the Zuck. Listen to Elon's rats running through Twitter's source code. Yes, "covid misinformation" (like the idea of vaccine passports) was on the government checklist of "things we don't want getting out."
The Biden Administration destroyed video evidence to quash news stories.
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.
There was this whole thing where a judge said "Yes you can buy this for a Dollar" (despite other people wanting to buy the media property for More Money). That's Alex Jones' site.
Just FOX??-ha . your disqualified already for not saying ALL LEGACY MEDIA LIE . 2) I dont watch Jimmy Kimmel to catch up on assassination investigations. Besides , I agree with Charlie Kirk -He’s Not Funny .
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.
whats worse is Government CENSORSHIP of the truth . Alex berenson formerly of the NY TIMES got fired and censored at twitter for a truthful tweet and the Hunter laptop story was truthful
"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.
He never said he was MAGA. He was referring to, among other things, the fact that Trump and others were certain that he was a leftist before they even caught the alleged killer. You cannot dispute this fact, but you can be in favor of a government interfering in free political speech.
The kid's part of an antifa cell created in 2020. 20 other people are under investigation by the FBI for "having known about this planned murder."
Yes, MAGA is trying to score political points from it. They DID score political points from some Ukrainian woman's murder. Scoring political points is the job of the politicos.
If you have a friend who is introducing their spouse to a group of people, and you say, before they get there, just a heads up, he's really sensitive about being called a sex offender, and will do everything he can to deny being one. Would you classify that as a neutral true statement? (assuming that the person in question is not a sex offender, and there is no reason to think he is?)
maybe Charlie was right on what he said .Thank You - Unfunny Jimmy Kimmel , for assisting In elevating Charlie Kirk to martyrdom exponentially QUICKER . A) Charlie deserves it , and B) T Y . Jimmy it just helps us all see you for the total DOUCH CANOE you are .
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?
Saying "There was no trump assassination" or "it was done by, say, Taiwan" from a bully pulpit is very different than saying "they're going to roll out vaccine passports!" (which, um, THEY DID).
I will defend free speech, even when people are being stupid. But I despair of the quality of our nation's discourse, when we think it's all okay to "Spread Conspiracy Theories" just to say "Our Side is Better Than Yours."
I mean, seriously, you can have all the conspiracy theories you want (I love them). But don't roll them out simply to make your side look bad.
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?
The Valentine guy is referring to the twitter files, which exposed communications between the FBI and twitter prior to the Musk takeover. Basically, before the election, the FBI told twitter that the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinfo and that they needed to censor or suppress the story, which they did. Then Biden won.
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.
💯 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.
The former governor of Vermont? I have no idea. Maybe before my time. My conception of cancel culture is the attempt to punish, dox, fire, demonetize or deplatform someone for expressing views within the Overton Window.
Every single late night host ran with the "Dean Scream." Now, if you know writer's rooms, that's a little much to be a coincidence. I'll accept "feeding off each other" -- but they all had the same material. And it was all used to sink his campaign.
If the government had not been so obviously involved in Kimmel’s cancellation I would be happy about it. Kimmel is a smug dishonest mouthpiece for the left, a propagandist. But this is an outrage, you’re right.
Thank you for your principled position, which I genuinely respect. I didn’t agree with a word Charlie Kirk uttered but I believe his murder was categorically heinous. It’s really not hard to share common ground.
Kimmel was once pretty funny. Like a lot of people, Trump and "RUSSIA!" broke his brain nearly a decade ago, and like Colbert, he became unwatchable to anyone other then other rapid Trump haters. Plus, late night TV dying anyway. His line about this kid being a MAGA! shows how uninformed he is - the evidence of the kid's tranny lover etc. was well-known prior to when this episode was filmed. And even if he knew better, but just wanted to lie to give his audience what they wanted to hear, so what?
This was bad, and I think it ranks up there with what the Biden Admin did to the social media companies and Trump during the early days of his admin.
Sadly, it probably wasn't even necessary. The blowback from consumers would had done it anyway. Disney has done yeoman's work alienating vast swaths of America.
Kimmel is vile. He’s promoting hate and division. Companies like Disney don’t have to put up with that. Companies have policies. Kimmel was not speaking in a public square. He was paid to entertain with some comedic commentary. He can be fired for a whole host of reasons. He was fired because he’s not funny. He’s not entertaining and he’s a jackass. They had every right to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except for the part where the FCC doesn't have nearly as much regulatory authority over cable as the networks that broadcast over the public airwaves.
That scenario is unimaginable and that's why Kimmel will probably end up on cable.
If MSNBC was smart and had any money (two impossibilities) they would sign him up and steal the bitter spiteful TDS audience from ABC and CBS. In fact, they could get Colbert too if they could get them to work for a percentage of the gross as a labor of hate and put together a TDS Rager clickbait empire that could incite nationwide riots and a spate of conservative assassinations for fun and profit.
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.
There haven't been any good late night hosts since Letterman. I say this despite the fact this Substack from Mr Maurer is stupendously funny and deeply perceptive. Any of the few times I have sampled the recent (last 20 years) batch of late night hosts I have found them unfunny, uninteresting, sleazy, etc. I doubt I've seen many of them though. Again, Letterman was very funny and had interesting guests. Carson had his moments and I did like Dick Cavett.
I don't think I've turned on a TV for 15 years or more though. Internet has far more and better options.
I guess jawboning is a 1A concern now that the right is doing it?
Yeah, Jeff, you're probably right about this. It's just that a big part of me is thinking about all the pro-censorship rhetoric Kimmel has engaged in and having to repeatedly resist the temptation to trot out the old "Paradox of Tolerance" canard the left uses all the time to justify censorship.
To quote John Stewart, from back when he seemed to be a moral beacon: "if you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies".
Jeff, I totally agree with you. Do you remember when former president Biden apparently pursued ways to completely shut down Fox News? And, later, the Biden administration began setgting up an agency to determine what was "misinformation" and what wasn't? Did those things bother you as much as the present situation does? Pressure by the government isn't the way to correct incredibly biased reporting of the news. However, if the republicans completely stopped this kind of pressure, would democrats resume their own pressuring as soon as they got back in office? Will you also comment on the Biden administration's efforgs to direct social media platforms such as Face Book to deliberately slant content heavily in favor of democrats? Perhaps the way to stop some of this would be to find out who specifically, in both parties, is guilty of this, and call for them to be punished. But, if you only get upset when republicans do this, your own credibility was weakened. Both sides need to stop this stuff.
I think an important point is that the examples you gave for Biden didn't work. Fox News didn't get shut down, and "misinformation" still was disseminated. It's not just that Trump is a bad actor, as you point out, so was Biden. It's that Trump is effective.
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.
The problem with arguing with nihilism is that you are arguing with a black hole.
Teenagers and other losers love nihilism because it makes them think they have power in a world where they have none. If you're trying to get a teenager to care about ruining his future, and he responds "lol I don't care" and then you *try* to *argue* with him about it, for once in his life he realizes he has control over something. You want him to care, but you can't *make* him care. The more you try to make the nihilist care the more they get intoxicated by the fact they can deny you the thing you want. They can't deny anyone else anything -- like, they can't deny someone asking them on a date, or asking for a job, or asking for fries, since they have nothing to offer.
Eventually people grow up. But in the meantime just stay out of the blast radius.
I'm not arguing for nilhilism, I'm arguing for the trumpistas as being the lesser evil when given a binary choice between them and the racist transqueers. Which is the choice we are given at the ballot box.
This. 1000 times this.
The left is simply incapable of understanding this position.
Trump is bad. The left is worse.
I can't get on board with this kind of thinking that dictates that because Side A does bad things, I hope Side B crushes them into a fine paste. It is the same line of logic that leftists use when they say "well, Charlie Kirk wants us dead so why shouldn't I be happy he's dead?"
You're either against certain behaviour or you aren't. And if you're in favour of it when your side is doing it, then you aren't against it.
Maybe I'm reverting to nilhism here... But can I coherently and ethically hope the right crushes the left quickly, so that the left can be purged of bad ideas so something better can arise?
When I heard AGs and Congress were investigating fraud in gender meds, I was initially excited.
But not a whole lot has happen since then. Are they slow walking it? Gender affirming care and Judith Butlers gender ideology are the gift that keeps giving. Need to keep that bogeyman alive so as to bludgeon him rhetorically every election.
Have you never heard of “the prisoner’s dilemma”?
Brother there's no 'them', we're all getting crushed if this continues. We're all in the same boat, there's no point cheering because the other end has a hole in it
Correct. I'm not cheering, I'm laughing the laughter of the doomed.
You are an unprincipled charlatan.
A reasonable suggestion. However we were told silence was violence and that if you are not with us you are against us. Everyone had to pick a side. They did
I feel your pain. I didn't experience it. But Im soo angry with the left cause the left is my team, and it betrayed me. I don't feel that way towards the right because there was never any betrayal! As a life long Dem voter, I was always aware the bad policies of the right. No surprises. But good luck! You will face an infinity of people from the left that will want to remind you of the horror show of the right, and can't understand you.
They don't get betrayal.
But on this substack you may get more empathy.
Please consider voting for the next Moderate Republican H!tler. My state (PA) is still chock full of Democrats. They vote for Trump, in the hopes that the Democrats will eventually get their act together.
The main problem here being that if Democrats regain power, we will all be doing so many DEI seminars that we won't have time to work. The government will close down any business that doesn't.
Yeah, I get it. What you’re experiencing is an important phenomenon.
Years ago, I tried to read _Between the World and Me_ and had to put it down halfway through because it was rapidly turning me into a racist. The hatred Ta-Nahisi Coates directed at me through those pages demanded reciprocation. But it was very instructive. Where had HIS hatred come from? Obviously a response to all that had been directed at him over his lifetime. His book made it easy to empathize and understand the cycle of hatred.
The same goes for authoritarianism. It echoes and feeds itself. That doesn’t make either side right or wrong; it’s just how humans work.
This is a very childish response
Someone made you write a piece of paper about how hiring people with different ethnic backgrounds is good, presumably because you were in a position to hire people. You were not censored and this is not the gates of Lefortovo. Enough with this troll nonsense.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
A job I had once made me wash my hands before serving customers. If only I’d known I could appeal to the words of Havel.
Whom you clearly did not understand.
I completely agree and fuck all those people that want to forget what these left cretins have done to our civil liberties beginning with before #MeToo and through the pandemic. The whataboutism is breathtaking. The tendency for this convenience moralizing is a sign of low cognitive capability (emotional short-term fears overriding calculated long-term risks).
Do they really not remember what the last 10-20 years felt like? These people like Kimmell that were gleeful in their position of snark and divisiveness against more than half the country… protected in their safe space by media mob cancel culture… are now facing consequences for all that malice, and we are supposed to feel sorry for him… to rise up to our highest principles to continue to support he and other’s ability to keep up the punch-down attacks without ever having to accept any responsibility for it?
He sucks. He is not even funny. But most importantly, he exceeds the guardrails of expected common decency that should be an expectation for someone in his position of influence. He is garbage.
“and we are supposed to feel sorry for him… to rise up to our highest principles to continue to support he and other’s ability to keep up the punch-down attacks without ever having to accept any responsibility for it?”
Yes, otherwise you don’t actually have any principles. That’s literally what having principles means.
So, if someone comes up to you and starts punching you in the face because you said that the mRNA drugs are not really vaccines and you don't support forcing people to take them, and starts threatening your family because they are associated with you... you would have no principles if punching back?
Is not punching back one of your principles? Then yes.
Whose families were ever threatened, honestly?
Vote, if you've balls enough to save the Democratic party. Vote Trump (or the next Moderate Republican H!tler).
Do you think the censorship ends with the Bluesky crowd? Or are you fine with whatever dark path this takes us down, so long as the DEI crew are the first against the wall?
I'm not fine with it, I'd love to have a political party that actually believes in liberalism:
>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
But there is no such party in the US now. Both major parties are controlled by illiberal cults that oppose free speech, and no minor party is going to win any significant number of elections to state or national office.
So I have to live my life under the thumb of one illiberal cult or another. So do you. I'm responding by supporting the cult that will do the least harm to me. So are you.
Honestly? No. I know what the censorship was like in the last administration. It's pretty bad, in general. I no longer watch the news, because 90+% of it became propaganda.
The DEI crew weren't the first against the wall. That was the "anti-vaxxers" where people were literally fired for having religious beliefs, to the point of nurses strikes, because they'd lost so many people.
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 down so much against people’s speech.
Oh well, they’ll get what they deserve now.
Yikes. Your two wrongs makes a right mentality is really fucked up. The only sane and reasonable thinking is that both Left and Right Wing assaults on free expression are equally abhorrent and government censorship violates the First Amendment
Yikes bro yikes.
I respect people who can call out both sides like FIRE, but absolute partisan hacks who swear up and down that Biden and the progs never did anything as bad are people that should be opposed at all times.
You can see it all over the comments here.
I agree with you. But, however you slice it, that particular section of the left is clearly regretting all that sneering about "freeze peach" round about now. Or would be, if they had a shred of self-awareness.
This is eventually going to affect everybody regardless of political affiliation. When the First Amendment falls, everything else follows.
Yeah. We can force artists to put Charlie Kirk's head on a cake.
(Whether a halo or blood around his neck is purely up to the cake-buyer's preference).
Leftists started calling up peoples employers. Obama/Biden started up investigating nonprofits that are political nonprofits.
I don’t understand the point of trying to gaslight people who have directly lived through the insanity of the left. Like if you actually are concerned about the repercussions then surely being able to recognize who started these tactics is important.
All this gaslighting does is ensure people are actually correct about attempting to stamp out the left now while it’s still possible. Maybe once we wipe out the people who believe violence is an adequate answer to speech we can begin to heal.
Were you asleep the past 15 years? None of this shit happens in a vacuum.
No need to be nasty. If you disagree, you can articulate why instead of taking pot shots.
Fair enough. I apologize. That said, the left deplatformed Trump on social media. They told Apple to take social media platforms they didn't like off the Apple iOS. They told the media to suppress truthful stories. They created NGOs to police media, and the security state monitored and censored social media content for partisan reasons.
Saint Barack threatened Fox with the FCC. A massive network of left-leaning organizations funded with tax dollars organized boycotts of Fox advertisers.
So, yes while this is unfortunate, it didn't happen in a vacuum. The left is finally, at long last, being held to the same rules they held everyone else to.
“The left” “they” “they” “they” Your boogeyman is an amalgam of every person you’ve heard on social media express an opinion that you didn’t like. What you said is bereft of any substantive analysis or even any claims that can be meaningfully litigated. Some sites “deplatformed” Trump because he’s a lying sack of shit with an audience of millions, the rage of which he was actively stoking with demonstrably factually incorrect claims at a daily, or even hourly basis.
You’ll notice that Fox News was not “deplatformed”. You’ll notice that neither OANN, nor the legion of ultra-conservative radio talk shows that exist only to sell gold to geriatric racists, nor CPAC, nor, in that case, the overwhelming majority of legal conservative activist groups (nor, frankly, most of the illegal ones) were restricted from propagating their bullshit by government action.
Trump tried to pull off a coup. Private entities didn’t like the look of supporting a failed usurpation of the democratic process, and their terms of service (of using their private services) — already in place prior to homeboy becoming a political figure — explicitly prohibited the kind of speech he was engaging in. Seems pretty cut and dry.
But now the head of the FCC, an agent of the government we rarely hear from except in front of a congressional committee, issues a threat in broad daylight to a private broadcasting entity because one of its employees uttered what was by any reasonable definition an utterly pedestrian opinion (that did not celebrate murder in any way, shape, or form, condone it, support political violence, or otherwise project some kind of positive gloss onto the shooting event itself)… and you’re crying alligator tears and complaining to the teacher that “the left started it!!!”
Grow up.
On that last part, boycotts are... tricky. I recognize that someone organising a boycott over statements they don't like is engaging in a form of cancel culture, which I'm far from a fan of. But at the end of the day, you can't tell people how to spend their money.
No-platforming, on the other hand, is pure intellectual cowardice.
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.
The thing that makes the legal case difficult is that Disney and the FCC can argue that Carr's comments were not the primary reason for the suspension. They have plausible deniability.
They have deniability, I'm not sure how plausible it is. Keep in mind, this wouldn't be a criminal trial, the standard isn't "beyond a shadow of a doubt". I think we're actually talking about strict scrutiny if it's a constitutional point (FCC) or preponderance of evidence if it's civil (Disney).
Good point. Yeah, we'll see what happens...
That's an interesting distinction to make, thank you. Astral Codex 10 had a piece a while back (specifically, after people on the right got that random woman fired from Target) pointing out, among other things, that cancel culture is normally friendly fire. Easier to purge someone for not adhering to your orthodoxy if their workplace or university is orthodox, after all. So perhaps what starts out as censorship tends to devolve* into cancel culture?
*"Devolve" because, while I'm opposed to both, censorship at least achieves the target of hurting your enemies, not your friends.
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?
Firstly, to be clear I don't think you're talking about the Twitter Files—you're referring to Jim Jordan's "Facebook Files" emails. And I'll acknowledge my part in muddying the waters by mentioning Zuckerberg; I have no idea what Taibbi said about the latter, though I can certainly imagine.
And I assume the chain your referencing is the "you're hiding the ball" emails. Which didn't involve the White House Chief of Staff (Ron Klain) but the director of digital strategy (Rob Flaherty) and a senior White House pandemic advisor (Andy Slavitt).
And once again, they were coordinating over reducing vaccine misinformation, not censoring political opinions they found distasteful. It was a matter of public health. I'll grant that Slavitt's statement in that email could have been worded in a better way so as not to be seen as implying a tacit threat. Or maybe he wanted it to seem that way, even though there's probably nothing he could've done.
It was a rough time—March of 2021, people dying by the tens of thousands, and they were trying to get the country vaccinated after Trump completely abandoned his responsibility while trying to overturn an election. People were wrestling with tough decisions and Facebook was rife with anti-vax garbage that was literally getting people killed.
All of this is an order of magnitude different from what the Trump administration just did—openly threatening action against TV stations that didn't do something about Kimmel. Just because Kimmel made a remark about Kirk's killer, demonstrating an opinion he had on the unresolved matter of the killer's political allegiance, if he even had one. That's outrageous and indefensible by any stretch of the imagination.
And yes, Taibbi's an idiot. I've seen numerous examples of his shoddy reporting and lousy judgement throughout the whole Trump saga, especially with regard to "Russiagate", and now he's given himself over as a tool of MAGA. The Twitter Files were nothing more than old, anecdotal correspondence showing Twitter employees wrestling with the same tough decisions that all of society was dealing with at the time. They were given to a specially curated group of journalists to advance Musk's narrative. Now, thanks to people like him, we have Trump 2.0 and our country is falling apart.
Actually, scratch the part about me mentioning Zuckerberg, which it seems I didn't; I was confusing that with another reply to someone else's comment.
Fake twitter files? You can read them yourself, there is direct evidence of intelligence agencies censoring people.
“Read Taibbi on this” is like saying “read this Kleenex I just blew my nose into and crumped up.”
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?
"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!
Don't listen to the Zuck. Listen to Elon's rats running through Twitter's source code. Yes, "covid misinformation" (like the idea of vaccine passports) was on the government checklist of "things we don't want getting out."
The Biden Administration destroyed video evidence to quash news stories.
You didn’t read the Twitter Files. The Biden administration definitely did that.
Do you mean the letter requesting Twitter enforce its own policies? I remember that pretty well, and I think there are a few differences.
No, I mean the direct requests from Biden’s cabinet to take down specific posts. I’m not going to go back and read it for you.
The Biden Administration breeched "First Amendment Rights" so hard there were nurses strikes. Or don't you remember the "compulsory covid vaccines"?
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.
There was this whole thing where a judge said "Yes you can buy this for a Dollar" (despite other people wanting to buy the media property for More Money). That's Alex Jones' site.
This is probably illegal.
But then another judge overturned it and the sale didn’t go through. Right?
Fox doesn’t lie the way the Left routinely lies. You think otherwise because you use left-wing claims as your standard of truth.
https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/as-jimmy-kimmel-becomes-a-speech?r=18qgkw&utm_medium=ios
Just FOX??-ha . your disqualified already for not saying ALL LEGACY MEDIA LIE . 2) I dont watch Jimmy Kimmel to catch up on assassination investigations. Besides , I agree with Charlie Kirk -He’s Not Funny .
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.
https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/as-jimmy-kimmel-becomes-a-speech?r=18qgkw&utm_medium=ios
whats worse is Government CENSORSHIP of the truth . Alex berenson formerly of the NY TIMES got fired and censored at twitter for a truthful tweet and the Hunter laptop story was truthful
Cool. And?
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.
He never said he was MAGA. He was referring to, among other things, the fact that Trump and others were certain that he was a leftist before they even caught the alleged killer. You cannot dispute this fact, but you can be in favor of a government interfering in free political speech.
The kid's part of an antifa cell created in 2020. 20 other people are under investigation by the FBI for "having known about this planned murder."
Yes, MAGA is trying to score political points from it. They DID score political points from some Ukrainian woman's murder. Scoring political points is the job of the politicos.
If you have a friend who is introducing their spouse to a group of people, and you say, before they get there, just a heads up, he's really sensitive about being called a sex offender, and will do everything he can to deny being one. Would you classify that as a neutral true statement? (assuming that the person in question is not a sex offender, and there is no reason to think he is?)
No, you just said he wasn't a sex offender so obviously it's false. At that time we didn't know if the shooter was MAGA or not
Fine. Delete the fact that he isn't a sex offender, and jus leave it as there is no reason to think he is.
maybe Charlie was right on what he said .Thank You - Unfunny Jimmy Kimmel , for assisting In elevating Charlie Kirk to martyrdom exponentially QUICKER . A) Charlie deserves it , and B) T Y . Jimmy it just helps us all see you for the total DOUCH CANOE you are .
Douch canoe lol
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'm going to say something here.
Saying "There was no trump assassination" or "it was done by, say, Taiwan" from a bully pulpit is very different than saying "they're going to roll out vaccine passports!" (which, um, THEY DID).
I will defend free speech, even when people are being stupid. But I despair of the quality of our nation's discourse, when we think it's all okay to "Spread Conspiracy Theories" just to say "Our Side is Better Than Yours."
I mean, seriously, you can have all the conspiracy theories you want (I love them). But don't roll them out simply to make your side look bad.
https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/as-jimmy-kimmel-becomes-a-speech?r=18qgkw&utm_medium=ios
The Government didnt get Jimmy fired . Jimmy got Jimmy fired . the Government got ALEX BERENSON fired , where you vocal on that too ?
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?
Man this comment section is funnier than Jeff. We're gonna put him out of business.
"What's the bigger violation that the FCC threatening to revoke a license?"
"The time Biden tried to establish something."
Comedy. Gold.
> 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.
The Valentine guy is referring to the twitter files, which exposed communications between the FBI and twitter prior to the Musk takeover. Basically, before the election, the FBI told twitter that the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinfo and that they needed to censor or suppress the story, which they did. Then Biden won.
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.
Do you think something is less bad just because less people know about it?
This article seems to have attracted a lot of people who I'm guessing aren't regular readers. I think it struck a nerve?
Came here to say that exact thing. Way too many people (but not Jeff) are still stuck in 2020 Mode.
💯 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.
What's your view on the demise of Howard Dean's campaign? Is that cancel culture, as it appears orchestrated by the late night hosts?
The former governor of Vermont? I have no idea. Maybe before my time. My conception of cancel culture is the attempt to punish, dox, fire, demonetize or deplatform someone for expressing views within the Overton Window.
Every single late night host ran with the "Dean Scream." Now, if you know writer's rooms, that's a little much to be a coincidence. I'll accept "feeding off each other" -- but they all had the same material. And it was all used to sink his campaign.
If the government had not been so obviously involved in Kimmel’s cancellation I would be happy about it. Kimmel is a smug dishonest mouthpiece for the left, a propagandist. But this is an outrage, you’re right.
Thank you for your principled position, which I genuinely respect. I didn’t agree with a word Charlie Kirk uttered but I believe his murder was categorically heinous. It’s really not hard to share common ground.
Kimmel was once pretty funny. Like a lot of people, Trump and "RUSSIA!" broke his brain nearly a decade ago, and like Colbert, he became unwatchable to anyone other then other rapid Trump haters. Plus, late night TV dying anyway. His line about this kid being a MAGA! shows how uninformed he is - the evidence of the kid's tranny lover etc. was well-known prior to when this episode was filmed. And even if he knew better, but just wanted to lie to give his audience what they wanted to hear, so what?
This was bad, and I think it ranks up there with what the Biden Admin did to the social media companies and Trump during the early days of his admin.
Sadly, it probably wasn't even necessary. The blowback from consumers would had done it anyway. Disney has done yeoman's work alienating vast swaths of America.
Kimmel is vile. He’s promoting hate and division. Companies like Disney don’t have to put up with that. Companies have policies. Kimmel was not speaking in a public square. He was paid to entertain with some comedic commentary. He can be fired for a whole host of reasons. He was fired because he’s not funny. He’s not entertaining and he’s a jackass. They had every right to do it.
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.
They aren't going to sue because they are scared shitless of discovery.
That is why they settled in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“It’s fine to censor people when they say things I don’t like!”
Who are you quoting? Certainly not me.
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.
Maher is good and has had a political epiphany. His comments about Charlie’s assassination were perfectly pitched.
ABC ought to hire him to replace Kimmel at twice little Jimmy’s salary.
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.
Except for the part where the FCC doesn't have nearly as much regulatory authority over cable as the networks that broadcast over the public airwaves.
That scenario is unimaginable and that's why Kimmel will probably end up on cable.
If MSNBC was smart and had any money (two impossibilities) they would sign him up and steal the bitter spiteful TDS audience from ABC and CBS. In fact, they could get Colbert too if they could get them to work for a percentage of the gross as a labor of hate and put together a TDS Rager clickbait empire that could incite nationwide riots and a spate of conservative assassinations for fun and profit.
Good thing they're not smart.
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.
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?
Have you looked into the death of Howard Dean's presidential campaign?
There haven't been any good late night hosts since Letterman. I say this despite the fact this Substack from Mr Maurer is stupendously funny and deeply perceptive. Any of the few times I have sampled the recent (last 20 years) batch of late night hosts I have found them unfunny, uninteresting, sleazy, etc. I doubt I've seen many of them though. Again, Letterman was very funny and had interesting guests. Carson had his moments and I did like Dick Cavett.
I don't think I've turned on a TV for 15 years or more though. Internet has far more and better options.
I guess jawboning is a 1A concern now that the right is doing it?
Yeah, Jeff, you're probably right about this. It's just that a big part of me is thinking about all the pro-censorship rhetoric Kimmel has engaged in and having to repeatedly resist the temptation to trot out the old "Paradox of Tolerance" canard the left uses all the time to justify censorship.
To quote John Stewart, from back when he seemed to be a moral beacon: "if you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies".
Jeff, I totally agree with you. Do you remember when former president Biden apparently pursued ways to completely shut down Fox News? And, later, the Biden administration began setgting up an agency to determine what was "misinformation" and what wasn't? Did those things bother you as much as the present situation does? Pressure by the government isn't the way to correct incredibly biased reporting of the news. However, if the republicans completely stopped this kind of pressure, would democrats resume their own pressuring as soon as they got back in office? Will you also comment on the Biden administration's efforgs to direct social media platforms such as Face Book to deliberately slant content heavily in favor of democrats? Perhaps the way to stop some of this would be to find out who specifically, in both parties, is guilty of this, and call for them to be punished. But, if you only get upset when republicans do this, your own credibility was weakened. Both sides need to stop this stuff.
I think an important point is that the examples you gave for Biden didn't work. Fox News didn't get shut down, and "misinformation" still was disseminated. It's not just that Trump is a bad actor, as you point out, so was Biden. It's that Trump is effective.
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.