It's become clear that Charlie Kirk is worth more to Trumpworld dead than he ever was alive. His fatal shooting last week in Utah has been used as a cudgel in an attempted purge of wrong-thinking liberals and leftists, anyone who dare not treat a hateful YouTuber's death with a supposed civility that Kirk himself never displayed. It has come for students, teachers, police officers, retail workers, newspaper columnists and reporters. It has crystallized as a country of snitches, which is kind of the whole point: In their hope of seizing this moment as their version of a George Floyd–like catalyst to remake civil society to their liking, the right seeks a world in which they can say what they want, and you can only say what they want.
ABC announced Wednesday night that it would pull Jimmy Kimmel Live from air indefinitely, under pressure from Donald Trump's appointed FCC chairman Brendan Carr, in reaction to a comment Kimmel made earlier in the week about the person accused of Kirk's murder. If you wanted to point out that this is a blatant and galling abuse of state power and pretty clearly in violation of long-settled First Amendment law, well, great—I promise you they don't care.
The decision was made by Disney CEO Bob Iger and co-chairperson Dana Walden, according to the New York Times. Disney, which owns ABC, did not explain pulling Kimmel's show, but it came hours after Carr threatened action. In an appearance on plagiarist Benny Johnson's podcast released earlier in the day, the FCC head said that the commission, which oversees broadcast television and retains approval power over media mergers, has "remedies that we can look at” regarding Kimmel and Disney/ABC.
Carr told Johnson, "It's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney to say, 'Listen, we are going to preempt, we aren't going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out. Because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content with a pattern of news distortion.'"
"I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr continued. "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."
The threat was enough. But what of Kimmel's actual remarks, which it feels pretty low in this blog to finally be quoting, given that this is all ostensibly about how offensive they were? "We hit some new lows over the weekend," Kimmel said in his Monday monologue, "with the MAGA gang 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."
It's an almost shockingly innocuous comment, given the size of the backlash. But that's beside the point, just as Charlie Kirk's actual words and beliefs have become beside the point of his martyrization. The real mission is how fake offense on his behalf can be weaponized against media considered insufficiently servile to Trump, in this case meaning both Kimmel and ABC, which just last year settled a defamation suit filed by the president.
Lest you think this is a mere and straightforward violation of free speech, don't worry: There's also an extortion angle. Nexstar, which owns a large number of ABC affiliates, recently agreed to acquire a rival broadcaster and its 62 stations for $6.2 billion. That deal requires FCC approval. Soon after Carr's comments, Nexstar announced in a statement that its ABC affiliates would not air Kimmel, calling the host's comments on Kirk "offensive and insensitive."
It's all very bad and depressing. I've never seen the damn Disney corporation back down from a fight, but these are terrifying times, when Trump and his flying monkeys have demonstrated their willingness to use the full force of government to punish their personal enemies, and reshape the media landscape to be more purely sycophantic. They're using it to settle ancient grudges; one administration official claims to have been radicalized by getting banned from the Gawker comment section. Newly emboldened after Kirk's death, state actors looked at the witch hunt whose flames they've fanned, and have decided to get in on the action directly.
Historical references aren't hard to find, here, even if none are quite exact. It's part HUAC, part Salem 1692, but also partly its own new thing, of this moment: campy, Evangelical, openly and equally hateful and opportunistic, and above all else, shameless. It's a world Kirk helped create, but was only able to achieve its fullest expression by dying. His historical parallel is clear, anyway: He's their Horst Wessel.
