The Easy Way

For half the country, and potentially more depending on what happens next, Charlie Kirk will now be remembered less as a martyr to free speech—which he was—than as someone whose death created a pretext for a fascist power grab aimed at restricting free speech. Jawboning Disney to put Kimmel on ice was the latest example of it, but certainly not the only one.

A White House that cared about honoring Kirk’s legacy of open debate and hoped to introduce him in death to less politically aware Americans would never have sullied his memory that way. “The Charlie Kirk memorial moment is over,” Zaid Jilani lamented, “and it’s mostly Donald Trump’s fault. Democrats were conciliatory and all mainstream liberal pundits bent over backwards to praise Kirk upon his death, an act of charity. But Trump is using it to consolidate power.”

There are no conciliatory Democrats, internet-poisoned populists will retort, but there are. In fact, in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, slightly more Democrats than independents said that political violence is never justified. There was an opportunity here for some degree of conciliation, but Trump’s political needs took precedence, and now his supporters feel obliged to defend his ruthlessness by pretending that the opportunity never existed.

Frankly, praising Kirk’s willingness to engage with opponents while exploiting his assassination to muffle those opponents borders on mockery of the dead. Maybe some Republicans should get fired for it.

The distinguishing fact about Carr’s thuggery toward Disney is that he did it in public.

He could have done it privately, as the Biden administration did when it leaned on social media companies to police misinformation about the COVID vaccines. Had Carr kept his mouth shut on Benny Johnson’s show, the Kimmel show’s suspension could and would have been spun by the right as a decision Disney had reached independently in a moment of moral disgust at the host’s lie about Kirk’s killer.

It wasn’t government coercion that got the show suspended, Republicans would have claimed; it’s the fact that Kimmel’s a mendacious mediocrity languishing in a dying television medium. His bosses were looking for an excuse to get rid of him, and he gave them one.

They can’t make that argument today because Carr wanted Americans to know that he and Trump were behind it. They’re not trying to conceal their coercion for fear of a public backlash, as any other administration would have done. They’re advertising it because they believe they’ve consolidated enough power now to operate with impunity, and they expect that making an example of Disney will intimidate the rest of their political critics into silence.

As Derek Thompson noted, Team Biden’s jawboning at least had a bit of moral logic inasmuch as it was geared toward containing a dangerous disease. The logic of Carr’s crackdown, as Thompson put it, is, “[Republicans] believe we were treated unfairly, and now we have power, so suck it, losers.” Arrogance is always an ominous sign in government, but it’s really ominous when bureaucrats are making a spectacle of it.

“Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest,” Carr intoned solemnly on Twitter after the late-night show’s suspension. “While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values.”

That’s a meaningless standard, as arbitrary as the vacuous term “hate speech.” Attorney General Pam Bondi infuriated numerous right-wingers a few days ago when she used the latter phrase because they recognized it as eye-of-the-beholder nonsense that will be abused by their opponents eventually to penalize right-wing rhetoric. “The public interest” as a benchmark for speech is no different. It can mean whatever you wish it to mean, like Stephen Miller babbling about “saving Western Civilization” as a counterweight to civil liberties.

Wielded by characters like Carr and Trump, the term is nothing more than a license to harass political enemies in the name of protecting some self-serving concept of the common good. The president did something similar in a different context last night when he announced that he was declaring Antifa a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” which had the feel of Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. “Major terrorist organization” is not a thing legally, especially not for a group that isn’t truly organized and lacks a discernible hierarchy. But you can understand why the president likes the idea: It grants him rhetorical license, potentially, to describe Americans who are anti-fascist as “terrorists.”

The closest Carr got yesterday to defining “the public interest” was noting that there’s a rule somewhere that authorizes the FCC to police for “news distortion,” which Kimmel’s lie supposedly ran afoul of. This is the same guy who, after splashing around in Benny Johnson’s sewer, spent his evening in primetime on a network that paid $787 million a few years ago for lying its collective ass off about the 2020 election. That’s what I mean when I say that Carr is arrogant: It’s not just his tone, it’s the fact that he makes not the barest pretense of caring about accuracy in media on the merits.

Although he certainly used to!

Twitter sleuths went digging through his archives last night after the Kimmel news broke to see what the FCC chairman had to say about free speech in the past. A lot, it turns out. “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not,” Carr declared in 2019. “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” Ahem.

Four years later, he sounded more like David French than a Trump henchman. “Free speech is the counterweight—it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream,” he tweeted in 2023. Reading that, I remembered that he’s not the only presidential deputy to have experienced a remarkable change of heart on the issue. In 2022, none other than Stephen Miller posted that “If the idea of free speech enrages you—the cornerstone of democratic self-government—[then] I regret to inform you that you are a fascist.”

They’re such hypocrites, you might say. Are they? I’m not sure that’s true.

Hypocrisy is when someone articulates a standard of proper behavior but fails to follow it in practice. It’s a form of lying, saying one thing and doing another. Having followed Trump’s postliberal movement for years, though, never once have I believed that figures like Miller and Carr were in earnest about supporting free speech. It seemed obvious to me that, insofar as they paid lip service to liberal values, they did so simply to reassure voters that they could be trusted with power. They would govern differently, and it was no secret.

The point of postliberalism is to abuse state power to advance your interests and to damage those of your opponents. It’s not inconsistent, and therefore not hypocritical, for a postliberal to believe in free speech when he’s out of power and to suppress it when he’s in charge. On the contrary.

This is the second time that Disney has felt obliged to pay the proverbial danegeld by bribing the president.

The first came last December, before Trump was inaugurated. He had filed a defamation suit against ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly reported that the president had been found civilly liable for rape. (In reality, it was sexual abuse.) Rather than fight the case, though, Disney threw in the towel early—suspiciously early, before even asking for summary judgment on First Amendment grounds. “This problem needed to go away,” one ABC News executive told CNN.

Disney, and many other corporate titans, had already grasped the significance of Trump’s reelection by then. The law would no longer be applied evenhandedly. The new president could and would abuse his power to favor his friends and punish his enemies; choosing to be his enemy rather than his friend could potentially cost them many millions of dollars. So they lined up to offer tokens of friendship, cutting seven-figure checks to his inauguration fund and paying him personal bribes in the form of dubious legal “settlements.”

In theory, those bribes would earn them his favor and keep him off their backs. In practice, we all know how protection rackets work: There’s always another payment. Just one day before the “payment” on Jimmy Kimmel was made, in fact, the president warned a reporter from ABC News that he believed Stephanopoulos’ comment about him last year amounted to “hate speech” and implied that the Justice Department should prosecute the network over it.

The mob never stops demanding bribes from its targets. Only a fool would think it might be permanently bought off.

Relatedly, the most trenchant point about the Kimmel saga was made by civil-rights lawyer Matthew Segal. “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” he wrote. “They are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.” 

That’s correct. Disney surely knew that it would have had a strong hand legally if it had kept Kimmel on the air and dared Carr and the FCC to do something about it. It caved because it believes, correctly, that the age of American exceptionalism is over. There’s no point in fighting Trump because that fight is unwinnable in a soon-to-be third-world country.

I had a spat with one of my editors this morning over this question: Is there any way for Democrats to deter the postliberal right from its speech crackdown apart from threatening to practice tit-for-tat crackdowns once they’re back in power? The threat of tit-for-tat worked pretty well a few days ago as a deterrent measure, after all, when it made them blanch at Bondi’s “hate speech” crusade.

That would be immoral, my editor said, and he was right. A country where both parties practice boorish caudillo-ism would be scummier than one where one party practices it. There must be a way to convince Republicans to back off for the sake of civil liberties that’s morally superior to, say, Gavin Newsom pledging to knock Fox News off the air when he’s president if they don’t.

What is that way? How do Democrats protect their rights without going full Trump themselves?

Go to court, one might say. Okay—but court is expensive, takes a long time, and risks winning the battle but losing the war. That’s Segal’s point: Even if Disney had prevailed in a legal battle with the FCC, our vindictive president would have looked for other levers of federal power to pull to damage the company. Keeping Jimmy Kimmel on the air and then turning around to find that the FCC has canceled your multibillion-dollar merger out of spite is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

The only moral authority that can effectively deter postliberals is the American electorate. And the lesson of the 2024 election is that the American electorate doesn’t care about anything except its wallet.

When Segal says the U.S. is headed toward a place where law doesn’t matter, that’s what he means. As long as the public remains unbothered by Trump’s power grabs and unwilling to punish his party for it at the polls—and it’s pretty darn unbothered right now—the president will keep pulling those levers to harm his enemies without needing to care much whether doing so is legal or not. Which, in the case of ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, it pretty clearly is not.

In a de facto autocracy, the sort of thing that was supposed to be impossible in a country as exceptional as ours, the least painful course for stakeholders is to cooperate with the leader regardless of whose side the law is on. That’s what Disney, and other companies, are doing. If you can think of a more moral way to make glib Republicans sober up about the civic horror of it that’s more effective than Democrats threatening an autocracy of their own the next time they have a chance, let me know.

But if you can’t because all of the morally superior alternative methods of resisting autocracy are likely to be futile, then we’re stuck with tit-for-tat, or we’re resigned to a Trumpist dictatorship. Which is pretty immoral, too.

The truth is that you can’t have a virtuous country without a virtuous people. America’s remorseless decline flows directly from that.