Welcome to The Free Speech War

On Wednesday, ABC announced that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was pulled indefinitely for his comments about the Charlie Kirk shooting. Here are those comments:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.

Yes this was irresponsible, yes he should face consequences, but it’s not only the severity of the punishment that’s alarming: like the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, this is a troubling example of the Trump administration’s brazen efforts to silence anyone who undermines the regime.

In March, I wrote about how censorship had become a bipartisan cause,but now the split has happened. After decades of the right accusing the mainstream media of silencing them and years of the pro-Gaza left railing against censorship, the other shoe has dropped; now the liberals are getting targeted. For the first time since the ‘90s, free speech has become a liberal cause again.

There’s a good chance that it’s too little, too late though. Trump ally Larry Ellison is buying TikTok, thanks to the bipartisan bill that passed almost unanimously saying TikTok should either be banned or sold to an American company. Ah, but the Democrats took for granted it would be an American company that would butter their bread. Now here we are: the Ellison dynasty consolidating media, with son David Ellison buying Paramount in August through his own company, Skydance Media; David Ellison tapping Bari Weiss, no friend to Democrats or liberals, to run CBS News; an America-only version of TikTok under their control, cut off from the rest of the world like Chinese Internet or the Soviet-era newspaper Pravda.

Isn’t the Trump brand built on free speech, on running your mouth because America? The talking point this week: turnabout is fair play. No Democratic president used the FCC to foist out a talk show host, but there has been precedent from the liberals for the hordes of people who have gotten fired for tweeting irresponsibly about Charlie Kirk’s death. I do not agree that this is fair, but there was a dangerous precedent set in the 2010s.