MAGA Has a New Defense for Trump Trampling the First Amendment. Don’t Fall For It.

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It isn’t especially surprising how farcical the Trump administration’s commitment to free speech absolutism turned out to be. The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!—prodded on by Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission after Kimmel made a joke about the MAGA movement’s reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk—is the most flagrant addition to the president’s growing blacklist. But Trump possesses a storied history of legislating his miscellaneous culture-war fixations. (Perhaps you recall the State Department revoking visas of students who dared to criticize Israel.) That the Trump administration has made a continual mockery of the First Amendment is not something the right can effectively dispute; the muzzling is happening in broad daylight, and the targets are invariably opposed to the regime. Instead, in order to sanitize the creeping sense of illiberalism, conservatives wield their favorite cudgel: the year of 2020, in which a great deal of upheaval tilted the leverage of social justice toward the left, and—ever so briefly—rewrote the rules. The ousting of Kimmel, in this retelling, is nothing more than retaliation.

I’m not here to defend everything that happened in 2020, an epoch that included some flailing overreaches enacted by our corporate overlords attempting to concoct racial equity through some regrettable means. (Nancy Pelosi in the kente cloth, Roger Goodell offering a way-too-late apology to Colin Kaepernick, Mad Men—a show largely about the cancerous dominion of powerful white men—adding bizarre disclaimers to episodes that articulate its founding thesis; I could go on.) Some of this stuff was cogent, a lot of it was tiresome, but ultimately—and this is key—all of it was the result of pressure from the public. Black Lives Matter might have been the largest protest in history! Something like 20 million people participated! You do not need to be a dogged partisan to see how that differs from the genuflections demanded by Trump. I am sure that the Washington Redskins changing their name aggrieved the nation’s racists, but the team only conceded after a consortium of sponsors, under the gun of that civic action, implored the team to do so.

We can argue about the tyranny of deplatforming, or the contrivances of political correctness, all day long. The left has demonstrated a capacity to scold and silence its enemies, which has undoubtedly bred our current environment of reaction and resentment. But no matter how annoying those liberals might be, it remains undoubtedly true that “cancel culture”—whatever that means—bubbled from the ground up, and was sharpened by the coalition’s allies in the media and elsewhere. Maybe you think that there was more skullduggery afoot, and actors in the government were spurring on the agitation with the levers of the executive branch. This premise is easily disputed, of course, by the fact that Donald Trump was president in 2020, a fact that has been shockingly memory-holed with the passage of time.

Which brings us to what’s so much more sinister, and so much more dangerous about 2025: These aren’t reforms engineered by social pressure. They’re top-down exercises of state power to punish disfavored speech. MAGA ideologues have achieved their revenge for 2020 by playing an entirely different game: A president is brandishing the weight of the state to purge a talk-show host he doesn’t like from the airwaves.

He’s not being quiet about the operation, either. The Trump doctrine is to deploy FCC Chairman Brendan Carr onto a podcast hosted by fascist influencer Benny Johnson, where he brags about the “remedies” he has in store for the Kimmel problem. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Carr, ominously. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

That’s just not how things are supposed to work. Earlier today, the National Review mounted a meek argument that Biden has also indulged in his own anti-Republican censor campaign, when his administration pushed tech companies to scrub COVID-19 misinformation from the internet. A tactical error, in retrospect, given that we didn’t yet understand that the pandemic had made everyone significantly more paranoid and insane than they were previously. But as a counterpoint, it fails to carry any weight whatsoever. Put it this way: If Biden did to Sean Hannity what Trump has done to Kimmel, I am confident that we would have balkanized around, like, 2022.

Nobody forced the conservative movement to brand itself as the eternal stalwart of free speech. This is a title they have foisted upon themselves. The brutal murder of Kirk is certainly horrific conditions in which to test those virtues, but the instantaneous collapse has been hilariously apt. Everything we have always known about Trump is true, which makes what he came to represent even more baffling. You thought this guy was going to safeguard the marketplace of ideas? Seriously? Think of the legion of grumpy stand-up comedians who took the red pill because of the slurs that were no longer acceptable on stage, or the chaotic-neutral podcasters who were seduced into the fold by the wondrous promises of forbidden knowledge—mostly about mRNA vaccines—that liberals were supposedly keeping under lock and key. Think of Bari Weiss, who became so self-righteous about millennial groupthink that she started a publication literally titled the Free Press. Or the Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams, who just published a book about the illiberalism of Black Lives Matter. Its subtitle reads “The Demise of Discourse.” Well, the Trump regime grows steadily more entrenched, and its administration is promising further crackdowns on anti-conservative thought. If nothing else in these dark times, I hope some people feel pretty stupid.

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