This assault isn't about Charlie Kirk

Telling the truth about a propagandist and liar has been deemed a radical act worthy of punishment. I use the case of novelist Stephen King to illustrate.

King had said Charlie Kirk, who was murdered this month, “advocated for stoning gays to death.” King was speaking the spirit of the truth, if not the precise letter of it, but was nevertheless hounded and harassed into apologizing by right-wingers who not only want to police speech but compel it. You shall honor the saintly demagogue or pay a price.

Unsurprisingly, the dragnet is widening. Last week, late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel was “suspended indefinitely.” (That probably means his show is canceled.) According to the AP, it’s because comments he “made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show and provoked some ominous comments from a top federal regulator.”

What comments?

Before I tell you what Jimmy Kimmel said, it’s important to tell you what other people are saying he said. Why? Because it’s like a sinister game of telephone, and the farther we get from the facts of what he said, the more chances there are for the totalitarians among us to replace reality with lies, making us all liars (not to mention insane).

First, a voice from the right, Piers Morgan: “Jimmy Kimmel lied about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being MAGA. This caused understandable outrage all over America, prompted TV station owners to say they wouldn’t air him, and he’s now been suspended by his employers. Why is he being heralded as some kind of free speech martyr?”

Second, a voice from the left, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: The ABC affiliates said they would refuse “to air Kimmel’s show, they say, because the comments the late night host made on Monday night relating to the motives of the man who shot and killed Charlie Kirk wrongly suggest[ed] the killer was part of the MAGA movement. He was not.”

Morgan is wrong. Kimmel didn’t lie. Hayes is wrong, too. Jimmy Kimmel did not suggest “the killer was part of the MAGA movement.”

Here’s what he said, per the AP:

“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.”

Also: “Many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

See anything wrong here? I don’t.

Indeed, neither did “multiple executives” at ABC, who, according toRolling Stone, “felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line.” What they did feel, however, was fear of an unfavorable interpretation of Kimmel’s words. Rolling Stonereported that two sources said “the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”

What retaliation? Hayes reported on it, as did the AP. Just before the Kimmel news broke, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, issued an open threat to ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company: get rid of Jimmy Kimmel or else.

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr told maga propagandist Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

And with that, it’s clear this is no longer about a dead demagogue. It’s about exploiting the memory of a dead demagogue to advance the totalitarian project: to not only police speech but compel it. I expect Kimmel to follow Stephen King’s lead and apologize in time for doing something he did not do, affirming the lie and undermining the truth.

I think the union representing Kimmel’s musicians is right.

“This is not complicated,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of the American Federation of Musicians. “Trump’s FCC identified speech it did not like and threatened ABC with extreme reprisals. This is state censorship. It’s now happening in the United States of America, not some far-off country. … This act by the Trump Administration represents a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression. These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.”

But I think it’s wrong too. This is complicated.

What’s happening is not just a consequence of government thugs attacking free speech and artistic expression. It’s also the consequences of three decades of corporate consolidation and the near-total lack of antitrust law enforcement. A handful of companies now own media outlets tens of millions use. In the case of the ABC affiliates, two firms — Nexstar and Sinclair — own nearly all of them.

This results in not only an artificially narrow range of information and views, but also a vulnerability on the part of media owners faced with a belligerent government such as the current one. They can stand on free press and free speech grounds and risk the wrath of a criminal FCC, or they can play along. ABC could have chosen to interpret Kimmel’s words in his favor — he didn’t say what critics said he said. Instead, it chose to interpret his words in maga’s favor. It sacrificed Kimmel in the misbegotten hope that doing so will appease them.

It won’t.

I don’t mean ABC won’t get something for failing to take its own side in a fight. (I have no idea what it might gain.) I mean surrendering in advance won’t end well, as we have seen in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where “autocratic carrots and sticks,” as Brian Stelter put it, have led to their respective governments having near-total control of the media. No one in Hungary mocks Viktor Orbán. No one in Turkey jokes about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. And that’s what Donald Trump wants.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t just a comedian. To the president and MAGA faithful, he represents “the left,” which is to say, anyone who has enough independence of mind to laugh. Indeed, that might be the biggest obstacle to their hostile takeover attempt. If you have the courage to laugh at the reality of the human condition, you don’t need a strongman like Donald Trump to save you from the truth about it.

But courage, like the enforcement of antitrust law, is lacking. It’s one thing for the state to bully private enterprise. It’s another for private enterprise to roll over, because it believes rolling over is its interest.

I’ll end by quoting Dan Le Batard.

“Once you’re a coward who is extorted, the bully’s gonna keep extorting” you, the sportswriter and podcaster said. “When [ABC] gave Trump $16 million on something that [ABC News anchor George] Stephanopoulos said, they opened the doors now to all of media feeling like it needs to capitulate to a threat — and now you get dangerously close to state-run media.”

He added: “I’ve never seen, in my lifetime, America in the position it’s presently in where the media is running this kind of scared from power, as if we’re not a place where one of the chief principles is free speech.”