The Ultimate Reason Not to Censor

If the Trump Administration follows through on its F.C.C. threats, we'll all be robbed of the joy of legacy media failure

Jimmy Kimmel, exiting stage left. From the New York Times:

Now [Trump] is taking his campaign against free speech to a new level by using the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a justification to promise the repression of groups that he describes as liberal… The intimidation campaign is already having an effect. Federal officials have urged companies to fire workers who have criticized Mr. Kirk, and some have done so. In a direct exercise of government influence, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., threatened Disney for remarks that Jimmy Kimmel made on his late-night ABC show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr said. He also urged television stations to stop broadcasting the show. Two major station owners quickly did so, and ABC has suspended the show indefinitely.

Don’t do it, President Trump.

If you and F.C.C. Chair Brendan Carr follow through on threats to turn the federal government into broadcast media police, millions of Americans will not be able to enjoy the spectacle of people like Jimmy Kimmel suffering. It would be the greatest Schadenfreude robbery in history. As you like to say, “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it before.”

If the F.C.C. were mothballed for winter, most of the “Fake News Media” would be dead by Spring anyway. Half the network anchors are already sending out applications to work chair lifts at winter ski resorts. If however Trump drops the F.C.C. on the broadcast sector, it will be like every George Romero movie ever rolled into one, with already-dispatched figures like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert reanimated and turned into martyrs. Let the dead sleep, instead of waking them and forcing citizens like me to defend them.

The move by Carr to inject himself in the middle of Kimmel’s firing by telling Disney and ABC, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” was and is a very serious one. This was no offhand unforced error by someone like Pam Bondi, who ran into a buzz-saw (mostly from the right) when she said the Constitution doesn’t protect hate speech. It’s not a trolling misdemeanor like the yanking of AP’s White House privileges. Now it’s clear why there was correspondence in the Twitter Files suggesting the U.S. could catch up to European censors by using F.C.C. authority. Why is the vision Carr has for the F.C.C. dangerous? Because it’s possible: