Special Episode - Jimmy Kimmel Pulled Off ABC Reaction: Trump Uses State Power To Silence Free Speech

the I just wanted to give it some context. I'll be honest, I I I I go back and forth about how much we should be focusing on the media problems in this country and the and the and the larger issue of that versus our political problems and our political divide. But the fact is that they're all intertwined now. But I wanted to put some context around why because I've I've even had questions of members of my own family sort of like, wait a minute, why is what

is you know? I'll just answer this basic question. You know, Disney can decide whether or not they want Jimmy Kimmel. What's you know? How? And I think this what makes why so many folks are up in arms. Right. It's not just folks on the left, but civil libertarians frankly across the spectrum are so alarmed by this. It's the sequence of events on how this is done. Because I'm going to make a confession, I didn't hear anything that Late Night did on Monday Night about Charlie Kirk because

I wasn't seeking it out. I wasn't interested. Don't I don't have the same I see clips of late nights, you know, this is part of the economics of late night. Right, I'm just like most too many other people for the economics of late night, I just wait for the clips the next morning. When we started this back in the old days of the hotline Wait, we became Washington source for Hey, tell me the best jokes that were on

late night TV. And so the idea of just clipping and and just having the political stuff from the late night comedians as an easy to digest morning you know newsletter is something that that is is quite common. So when I I was not following the day to day, was not following what Carr was doing, and then all of a sudden, there's this breaking news alert about Jimmy Kimmel's off the air. So I was like, Wow, how

bad was the joke that he told about Charlie Kirk? Right. So you go back and you think, well, he must did he use Charlie Kirk as a punchline? Did he what could he have said? And then you actually saw what he said and you're like, wait, what he got booted off the air for this? You know, because when the FCC gets involved, you assume did he say something indecent? Did he use a four letter word? Did he expose himself? Right?

Like you know, ultimately the FCC's role is about you know, public decency, right, And in this remark, other than look, I didn't love his remark, and I'll tell you why. I don't like what's happening right now. There's this contest

between the left and the right to prove that the other side's ideology incites more violence. That's not the problem we have here. It doesn't matter whether it's sixty thirty on one end or the other. The thirty can cause just as much violence as the sixty and vice versa. Right, and everybody is so worked up in the sort of part and the partisan corners of wanting to prove it's the other side that incites more violence, not my side.

That's not the issue. So I'm sorry he gave voice to that concept, but that's not the issue here, right, And you've heard me. I wish we would just be hey, we've got a political violence problem. We've let this get too far. Let's identify the actual problematic source, which of course we know is these algorithms and what we've done to political discourse in this country through social media. But it's the sequence of events here that make this a

violation of the Constitution. Okay, And you've got to remember what the first The first Amendment is about protecting the people from government influence. So the second that Brendan Carr went on a podcast and essentially threatened, you know, like

a mob boss, that's a mighty fine network you got there, Disney, That's a mighty fine merger you'd like to get completed there. Next star, that was coercion. That was government influence. That was an unconstitutional threat from Brendan Carr, the FCC chair. And I want to read all of his quotes here because it's fascinating how delusional this guy is about his role as SEC chair. And there's also a ton of hypocrisy in what he's saying in here. But I want

to get through the larger quote. Look, everybody has seen the quote, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. But I think his larger context matters here.

So he said to this sort of one of these conspiracy theorists on the right in some quarters, there's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about the nature of one of the most significant newsworthy public interest acts that we've seen in a long time, and what appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative that this was somehow a

mega or Republican motivated person, so that in itself, so basically what he is admitting here is that Jimmy kimmel sin is insulting MAGA. Jimmy Kimmel's sin had nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. This was and this is why this is alarming so many civil libertarians. He didn't like it that MAGA was criticized. You may not like the criticism right twenty nineteen, Brendan Carr, by the way, would also be upset. We've all seen his if you've been

paying attention to the story. Brendan Carr in twenty nineteen is having a huge debate with Brendan Carr twenty twenty five. We'll find out who wins that debate. And then he says this, I've been very clear from the moment that I became chairman of the FCC. I want to reinvigorate the public interest. Broadcasters are entirely different from people that use other forms of communication. They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with an

obligation to operate in the public interest. He is factually correct on that, and then he goes, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action

frankly on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. This is a very very serious issue right now for Disney. So he says that next Star affiliates announce what they announced, those ABC affiliates that they're not going to carry Jimmy Kimmel, and then of

course it puts pressure on Disney. Now this is a reminder of the children's book that I cite all the time when it comes to capitulation to this administration on so many things that are where the laws on the side of these entities, and yet they don't want to

use the law. And that is if you give a mouse a cookie. The second Disney paid the extortion price on the George Stephanopolis lawsuit, they opened themselves to more coercion. Right, you know, the second you sort of give into the bully, the second you agree to pay, you know, to pay a ransom. Right, Disney was being held hostage by Donald Trump, and so they paid a ransom on the on that with with Stephanopolis, and they came back and decided they had more that more that they wanted to get. Right.

So next Star is doing this huge merger with Tegna. Tegna used to be it's just a renamed version. It used to be the Gannett TV station. So this is going to create the largest owner of local TV affiliates, who, of course affiliate. When I see the affiliate network, some of you may be like, what the hell are you talking about? Right, if you're under the age of thirty five, you're like, what is this? But ABC, NBC, CBS, and

Fox the broadcast, not Fox News the cable channel. They have local TVs over the air TV stations that they have relationships with. And it used to be the networks themselves owned a lion's share of this, and then over time, due to some FCC rules, there were these used to be local people in the area would own the local TV station and then have personal and have affiliations with the big national broadcast networks, and then you had this consolidation, right,

and next Star is one of these consolidated organizations. Techne itself was a consolid and this merger is going to be even bigger. It needs FCC approval, right, and it's a big deal to next Start to get this FCC approval, So it is not lost shouldn't be lost on anybody that the minute this has heard, you know, Next Start literally coming up has had you know, knows its merger with Tegna is going to get a review by the FCC.

Disney is already agreed to buy out NFL's television all of it's the NFL's media properties, which is going to consolidate ESPN and the NFL network into one thing. And that's something else that the FCC has oversight over. And so you know, this is in a way that a mobster might say, that's a mighty that's a mighty nice television network. You might have there. This is a very serious issue right now for Disney. He didn't say it was an issue for ABC Entertainment, which is who Jimmy

Kimmel works for, not even work for ABC News. He said it was an issue for Disney. Well, that means

you're going after the corporation. And then of course they have shareholders and they have a phidio shared responsibility shareholders. So this is why there is so much alarm because they already if Brendan Carr never does this interview, never goes public with any of this, right, he ended up,

this is a self owned by Brendan Carr. Right, this is where where the where If he doesn't do this interview and he behind the scenes exerts this basically reminds Next Star in Disney that they need their approval and they didn't like what Jimmy Kimmel said. So you might want to do something about this if you want to curry favor with us. I guess we should be thankful he said it out loud. Right, he could have done

this behind the scenes, we wouldn't know about it. We would all be speculating that perhaps Next Star in Disney were either anticipating concern about this and decided to act Earli or whatever right in the wake of sort of a manufactured outrage. As we know, there is a you know, jd vance in his in his when he substituted for the first show after Charlie Kirk's assassination, he called on a fellow travelers to essentially docks people, right, He called

on them to do this, you know, promoted cancel culture. This is the same guy who lectured European nations a few months ago for them coming down too hard on speech. So, yes, this hypocrisy everywhere in this story, but really a lot of hypocrisy here on the right with cancel culture and things like that. So but when he put out that call for for doxing, you know, it was clear they were looking, right, They're looking they were looking for somebody

to make an example of it. And you know Donald Trump himself, right, I mean, this is where the laws on their side, right, Trump after after Colbert was fired by paramount during you know that whole thing, so they could get that merger done, so that Sherry Redstone could

get her money, Trump himself said, one down Kimmel's next lo and behold where do we go? Is it been four weeks, five weeks since the Colbert news and lo and behold Kimmel's next So look, Kimmel should know that the You know, if Kimmel's agent, I would assume told him, hey, buddy, you oversee something that Disney would love to get rid of, So be careful. You know, the smart thing to do

would have been to avoid that topic altogether. But then again, they were going to find something at some point, right this was there was no doubt he was going to be targeted. There's you know, the president's obsessed with trying

to silence any of his media critics, and that should be what's so alarming here is that they're using the power of the state. Right. You know what Jimmy Kimmel didn't do. He didn't call for the execution, for the lethal injection of homeless people. That would have been a really disturbing thing that happened on cable news. So in theory, the FCC doesn't have oversight over that, but it was

certainly in bad taste. He apologized for I guess saying for apologize for people noticing that he said something outlandish. That's what the apology felt like rather than realizing what he said was just awful and hateful, but the fact that it was instinctual on that, you know, Fox News has a choice if that's who they want representing them, go for it. Right, They're a private enterprise and they can go ahead and do that. But that was an

extraordinary bad taste. I didn't hear anybody on the right get upset about that, And of course Kimmel didn't do anything that was remotely like that. Again, Kimmel sin was criticizing Mega. He did not disparage Charlie Kirk. He did not disparage Charlie Kirk's family. He's in fact on the record offering condolences. What he did was go after Maga.

And again, like, I think this is bad politics for everybody to try to blame the other side for political violence, because we're going to not only not do anything about our political violence problem, but it's likely to incite more violence. And there's a part of me that wonders if that's a feature not a bug, if this is exactly what Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr hoping, like they want to poke and get more reaction so they can come down even harder on more institutions. And that is that is

chilling on all this front. And we've seen now all these corporate don't look here's my I'm begging these corporations that are publicly traded that own news organizations. Just sell them, Please,

just sell them. Do not do not stop this. You are you are destroying the information ecosystem. You are participating in this. You are you are undermining your own employees. This is not fair. Look what happened to John Carl earlier this week when when when the President threatened him and ABC News nobody backed him up. I didn't see Disney trying to push back on that, and there was nothing illegitimate about that question. In fact, in many cases, you know, if it is, it's not worth his time.

But John Carl could be suing the President for defamation. Right if if, if, if you accept the premise of Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times, then we all then there's a bunch of us who have been defamed by Donald Trump over the years via his Truth for Truth social organization, which he's an owner of. Right, it makes him responsible. It's not he's not a public figure. He's a public figure. In addition to be an owner of a platform that he uses to disparage with malice, right,

with malicious intent, which is always part of those things. Now, are they extraordinarily hard to prove? And as a journalist, as somebody like John Carr gooing, hey man, I can take the arrows, of course he is. But if you're if you own a news organization and you're a publicly traded company and you're not going to stand up for your journalists, don't get can get out of the journalism business.

Just put ABC News up for sale. Put put up all these news divisions up for sale, because you're undermining the credibility you think they've been. Their credibility has been undermined already by this concerted effort on the right to undermine the credibility of these news organizations fairly or unfairly. Well,

what you're doing is actually undermining them for everybody. Right, So nobody is going to trust CBS News because of

what they've done. Look, the guy they hired to be an umbudsman would be a good hire if you were just hiring a conservative umbudsman and a liberal umbudsman, if you were hiring somebody from the Hudson Institute and somebody for the Center for American Progress, then I might have some faith that CBS was trying to be something different here, but that is not what they did, right, They just catered to one side of the ouse. So what it is going to do? It already doesn't really have credibility

with the right. Now they've made sure they're not going to have any credibility with the people that live in the in reality and the people that live in the left. So here we all are. So I would just beg, you know, if you're not going to stand up for your news organizations, the laws on your side in this

the First Amendment, the laws on your side. If the FCC had nixed the merger of Tegna and and and next hour over this, or nixed the merger of ESPN and the NFL media properties, right, and this was sort of a car was going to weaponize his role at the FCC. The amount of evidence that Disney and the NFL would have to essentially sue and say that this was a violation of their kind of the of their constitutional rights government, you know, the government's insertion in speech.

They'd have a case. But what's really scary is that they refused to use the law to protect their business interests and instead they're capitulating. You know. This is why

again a lot of US civil libertarians are extraordinarily alarmed at how easy it is to control these these entities. I personally believe this goes back to the difference between

you know and Trump one point zero. When he would veer into these unconstitutional territories, there were fellow Republicans and people in Trump's cabinet who were the guardrails, and when they would speak up, corporate America then would actually stiffen its spine, you know, sort of the non partisan part of the of the nation's sort of cultural and business elite would say, whoa, this is too far, and because they felt like they had cover because it was coming

from both sides of the aisle. But Donald Trump has purged the party of those Republicans that were comfortable up. He's made it clear that if you speak up, I'll destroy and end your career, potentially even harm you financially. So those that might be speaking out against these this government overreach have chosen to not run for reelection if they're uncomfortable being members of Trump's political machine, right, and

so you know, you know who those people are. I don't have to I don't have to recite them by

name right now, but that's what's happened. And then so when you've had no Republican pushback, right, then you've had all these I think corporate America has been scared away from this there's and they know that the government, you know, this administration's comfortable weaponizing government against any political anybody that they think is standing in their way politically, and so they won't stand up because they don't want to look if the only people opposing Trump are are you know,

people like me in the media over these things, or folks on the left, if they're the only ones critiquing what he's doing, they don't want to look like they're just you know, he lumps everybody in as a partisan actor. And it gets me to the core of one of my biggest sort of and I and I you know, to my conservative friends out there who constantly think everything that isn't conservative is biased, I would say to you, Brendan Carr is a co partisan conservative. He does not

have the intellectual ability to know what's neutral. He thinks anything that isn't conservative is liberal. Right. There's some liberals that believe this, that anything that isn't liberal. If you're not siding with them, you're part of the right wing machine. This is how we've lost our ability to have conversations.

We've lost our ability to sort of moderate, not in saying you have to be moderate, but moderating temperament where you realize that the whole point of these you know, and ideological left and ideological right and practice politics means

it's a little bit, you take a little bit of both, and whoever's winning, maybe you get seventy percent of the pie. They get thirty percent of the pie. When we stop viewing politics that way, when we stop governing that way, where winning forty nine percent of the vote means I get one hundred percent of my way right, which is essentially what Donald Trump has done. He did not win a majority in this country. Yes, he won the popular plurality of the popular vote, but he did not get

fifty percent. Doesn't even have half the support of the country, and he does not govern as if there is a robust minority out there that didn't that didn't want that point of view. If you want to be a successful president, you actually try to govern a little bit for everybody. But that isn't what he's looking for. He's looking in

some cases for revenge or accumulating power. But this is look, this is you know, sometimes you have an imperfect moment, an imperfect person that ends up being a galvanizing issue in the moment. I don't know whether this has long term relevance to the mid term elections, for instance, but what I will say, you know, and I do worry that sometimes these criticisms of that come from US folks that are worried about our civil liberties, you know, are seen as sort of like a you know, a luxury issue.

You know about the First Amendment, and it's all about the press and all of this stuff. But you'll care

when it comes for you, right, And how I do think this stuff hurts politically long term on the right and that they're inviting actually a political loss over this over time is that we know people in the middle didn't like the cancel culture that was taking place on the left, right, this idea, right, you'd hear this all

the time. You're afraid of you know, you'd have people that weren't partisan but would find themselves side with those and the right that were complaining that, you know, political thought was being weaponized against them, it would cost them jobs or cost them opportunities. A lot of people in this country don't like that. And now the Republicans are doing exactly They're behaving the exact way they said they didn't like when they thought the left or other institutions

were doing this to them. I mean, I will go to my grave believing the single biggest mistake we've made in the last five years was deplatforming Donald Trump from

Twitter and Facebook and the pressure campaign on Jack Dorsey and on Zuckerberg when they cave done that. You know, you know, it's a it was. It just is a monumental mistake, right it That was sort of the moment that we stopped even having shared conversation, shared debate. An entirely new right wing media ecosystem was created in under the guys, an umbrella of grievance, created the situation we're in.

So you know, I couldn't. I was one of the few who said, this is a mistake to not to somehow ban anybody that didn't certify the election from TV. The fact that so many of my colleagues cave to that mindset, did do damage to our trust and did do damage the electorate. But if it was wrong, then it is wrong now. And that's what's getting lost here. Okay, deplatforming half the country, or the perception of de platforming

half the country was wrong. It is just as wrong when those when that aggrieved person decides to go with

revenge rather than have a principle. Are there any principles in this MAGA movement, That's what we're finding out. Are there any principles? And when it comes to the First Amendment, it's possible that those in power are just drunk with it. Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr are drunk with the power that they have in the moment, and they have completely lost the plot. They do not understand what neutrality even means.

They do not understand what the role of government. They do not understand the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution, because if they did, they'd be pursuing different policies, they'd

be behaving differently. So this is not a left right issue. Is is it constitutional or is it unconstitutional? And this is an extraordinarily unconstitutional act. This is a weaponizing of the government against using using government power to stifle speech. It is the first amendment in our constitution or a reason. And so when we lose that, this entire experiment begins to crumble. So I hope people view it this way. Get out of the debate over who's more violent? Okay,

get out of that debate. That's not a debate anybody wins. All right. That's the personal critique I have of what Jimmy Kimmel, you know, going on that narrative, that is, it's just even it doesn't matter if it's true, it it's it's it's only in a moment. We there is plenty of evidence that we've got ideological inspired violent actors that are on the left and the right. And we can have an historical argument over who's got more violent violent acts over time, But do you know what neither

side can say. Neither side can say it's zero. All right, get out of that debate and start focusing on constitutional protections, because what they did on this is a violation of your rights and these single most important rights that our founders thought mattered the most because they put it in Amendment one. All right, So with that, I'll now see you in about seventy two hours. Thanks