We Are Not Going To Have A Debate About Free Speech

The national conversation we need to have right now is not about free speech.

The conversation we need to have is about the normalization of political violence on the left. We need to be talking about left-wing Antifa/trans terrorists gunning down Christians in broad daylight while Democrats and the corporate press justify it and the online left celebrates it.

That’s the only conversation that matters right now. The manufactured outrage over ABC canceling Jimmy Kimmel’s show is an attempt to change the conversation, to flip the script so that instead of talking about the first major political assassination in America in sixty years, instead of talking about the mainstream left’s embrace of political violence and the institutional ecosystem that foments and funds that violence, we can talk about whether President Trump is using Kirk’s murder as a pretext to crack down on free speech and silence his enemies.

What nonsense — and what a tell. It speaks volumes that Democrats, liberal media, and online leftists are so desperate to pivot away from talking about Kirk’s assassination that they have chosen to take up the transparently stupid cause of Kimmel’s free speech rights. Remember, these are people who don’t care at all about free speech. Some of those rending their garments this week over Kimmel’s cancellation were the same people who cheered on government censorship during Covid. They love censorship, so long as it’s their side doing the censoring.

And it hardly needs to be said that nothing about the Kimmel story implicates free speech in any way. Kimmel didn’t just mock MAGA or criticize Kirk, he patently lied about the ideology of Kirk’s alleged assassin, and by allowing his comments to air, ABC arguably violated the terms of its FCC license.

During his Monday show, Kimmel said this: “The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Anyone with an internet connection and half a brain cell knows that Kirk’s alleged killer was deeply into Antifa and transgender ideologies, and that he specifically targeted Kirk for speaking out against these things. He was a creature wholly of the left, and to declare otherwise, as Kimmel did, is a deliberate falsification of the facts surrounding the most high-profile political assassination of our time.

That means Kimmel blatantly violated FCC regulations. Public broadcasters like ABC are prohibited from spreading false information about a crime or catastrophe, and they can lose their licensure if they don’t adhere to the relevant federal regulations.

No surprise then that Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman, addressed Kimmel’s comments when he went on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday. “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. 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,” Carr said, adding that, “They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with an obligation to operate in the public interest.”

Not that the FCC had to take action, because the marketplace was already reacting. On the same day Carr made his remarks, ABC affiliates were pulling Kimmel off the air. Nexstar, the nation’s largest television station owner, announced it would no longer carry Kimmel’s show. Sinclair Broadcasting, a Nexstar rival, also announced it was pulling Kimmel from its stations until he apologizes to Kirk’s family and makes a sizeable personal donation to Turning Point USA. And then of course ABC announced it was canceling Kimmel.

Never mind that these affiliates were acting not so much in response to Carr but in response to the outrage Kimmel’s comments on Monday night had provoked among their viewers. But it didn’t matter, the news of Kimmel’s cancellation kicked off a news cycle focused on whether Carr’s remarks amounted to government suppression of free speech.

Liberal journalists who never uttered a peep about the Biden administration’s crackdown on conservative outlets and individuals immediately commenced with performative outrage online, lamenting this “unprecedented” attack of the Trump administration. The president, they said, was using Kirk’s murder as a pretext to clamp down on free speech.

None of the people peddling this line believe it. It’s a deliberate distraction by the institutional left and the Democrat party establishment to change the subject so they don’t have to deal with the horrifying reality that the left’s base — not the “far left,” not the fringe, but the base — has revealed itself to be totally comfortable with political violence against the right. Recent polls indicate as much, as does the widespread reaction of the left — online and in real life — to Kirk’s murder.

So no, we won’t be having a tortured debate about the nuances of the First Amendment and the finer details of FCC regulations. We won’t be furrowing our brows over the line between regulation in the public interest and censorship of free speech. We won’t be agonizing over what Democrats might do once they regain power and deciding it’s best just to let the late-night host spew whatever lies they want.

Free speech is not the issue at hand, and none of the people that want to make it the issue even care about it. Right now, they only care about changing the subject. They would rather talk about anything, manufacture any scandal, however idiotic or disingenuous, rather than deal with the truth.

And the truth is that the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the mainstream left’s celebration of it is the biggest story since 9/11. It heralds a new era in American history, in which the entire country has to figure how to deal with a political left that has embraced violence and terror.

Seen in that context, Kimmel got exactly what he deserved, and there’s not much more to say about it. America will not be grappling with the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! a generation from now. It will have no effect on anyone’s free speech rights under the Constitution. It is not a real controversy, it doesn’t matter, and we’re not going to debate it with the left.

What does matter is the left’s embrace of political violence and the left-wing terrorist ecosystem that enables that violence. Right now, it’s the only thing that matters. So that’s what we’re going to talk about, and act upon, until we get the situation under control.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.