The Censors Come for Kimmel

In a week where the administration also targeted the New York Times, they're not even pretending to care about free speech.

Jimmy Kimmel on August 18, 2025 in New York. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images.)

It’s not like we needed any more proof that we’re living in the most depressing of all possible timelines, yet here we are. The latest salvo in the endless discourse following the assassination of Charlie Kirk was almost comical in its stupidity—and in the dark twist it has already taken.

On Monday evening, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, delivered an on-air monologue that arguably framed Tyler Robinson—Kirk’s alleged assassin—not as a left-wing terrorist, but as a right-wing one:

The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it … In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.

It was a dumb thing to say. When Kimmel delivered this monologue, there was no serious reason to believe that Robinson, though from a Republican family, was motivated by right-wing beliefs. Since then, strong evidence has emerged that he had recently drifted to the far left. (For example, Robinson seems to have confessed to murdering Kirk because of his belief that “some hate can’t be negotiated out,” likely a reference to Kirk’s views about transgender people).

Trump supporters reacted to Kimmel’s words with predictable fury. “Jimmy Kimmel LIED to his audience by claiming Charlie Kirk’s assassin is MAGA,” tweeted former West Virginian politician and self-declared “former Jan 6^th political prisoner” Derrick Evans in a post that’s been viewed over 4 million times. “I’m tagging @jimmykimmel @JimmyKimmelLive so we can all demand he apologize & tell his audience the truth.”

While calls for Kimmel to correct the record are understandable, the fury over his remarks quickly took a more sinister turn. “It appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible,” Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told a right-wing podcaster on Wednesday. He went on to claim that there is a “strong case” for the agency to take punitive action against ABC and its owners, Disney. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr warned.

ABC quickly bowed to the threat. Last night, the network announced that it was taking Kimmel’s show off the air “for the foreseeable future.” We don’t know what discussions might have taken place behind the scenes; what we do know is that the government gave ABC good reason to fear retaliatory action if the network did not ditch one of its biggest stars—and that it got the outcome it hoped for.

---

There is no need to defend Kimmel’s words.

A lot of progressives were desperate to paint the Kirk assassination as some sort of intramural warfare among the far right. For example, Heather Cox Richardson, writer of the largest political Substack, asserted that “The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Richardson and others who made similar arguments have come out of the last days looking deeply foolish.

But here’s the thing: people should be allowed to say foolish stuff without the government getting involved. That’s a bedrock principle of the First Amendment—as, in an ironic twist, Carr himself explained the day before he threatened ABC with legal action. “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech,” he told Politico’s Alex Burns.

---

Machiavelli Would Hate Trump

---

That was Tuesday. The fact that by Wednesday Carr was advising broadcasters to preempt “garbage” content in order to avoid the “possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC” underscores just how thin the free speech credentials of the Trump administration really are.

The Kimmel affair came in the same week as another egregious action: the president announcing he is suing The New York Times for $15 billion because, he claimed, it has “been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long.” By threatening to sue the Times, Trump is evidently hoping to replay the script that had worked so successfully when, last October, he filed suit against CBS for $16 million because of the way in which an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes was edited—and Paramount Global decided to settle rather than risk the hassle of fighting a frivolous lawsuit (or, for that matter, jeopardize its multi-billion dollar merger with Skydance, which required FCC approval).

The Kimmel affair and the threats to the Times are entirely in keeping with the governing principle of the Trump administration: use the full force of the state to bully, harass, silence, and censor high-profile critics of Trump, the government, or the political right in general. Hence the attacks on major universities, threatening to withdraw federal funding unless they comply with onerous obligations designed to strengthen viewpoints favored by the administration. Hence the attacks on major law firms in retaliation for such sins as representing Trump’s opponents in court or filing lawsuits against the government.

A key feature of these salvos is that the administration would be very unlikely to win most of its suits if they made it to court. But, as the saying goes, “the process is the punishment.” If a bully comes to harass you every day for your lunch money, some days you’ll find yourself simply handing it over rather than expend the energy needed to stand your ground and fight back. Which is why universities like Columbia, or law firms like Paul Weiss, or news outlets like CBS and ABC choose to cave.

---

There’s a huge amount of hypocrisy here. The political right was outraged when, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, America was gripped by a wave of moral panic that led to countless firings and cancellations. Floyd’s murder became the ideological litmus test of the day. Say the wrong thing about anything in any way connected with the topic of race and you were liable to be fired by your employer, often at the behest of a social media mob. It was a strange time in America, when groupthink and institutional cowardice seemed to hit a new peak.

---

---

We’re witnessing something similar in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Except that what’s going on now is, in almost every way, worse. While political philosophers like J.S. Mill were deeply concerned about the censoriousness of public opinion (basically the 2020 paradigm), they were even more concerned about the power that governments have to silence their perceived enemies (sadly the 2025 paradigm). That’s why the First Amendment was drafted—to protect Americans from the government.

There should now be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Trump administration does not actually care a jot about free speech. And once censorship becomes a tool in the arsenal of governments, it becomes very hard to break the habit. That should worry everyone.

Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.

---

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: