Who’s the comedian? Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairperson, pressured the Disney company to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night talkshow host on ABC, for a remark he made about the right wing’s attempts to shape perceptions about the murderer of the far-right political operative Charlie Kirk. (Kimmel is now back on the air.) It was the opening riff of Carr’s stand-up routine.Carr’s choice of venue to issue his threat – a hard-right podcast – indicated the kind of media of which he approves. His pressure against Kimmel is no isolated gesture, but the execution of a calculated plan he himself helped hatch to eradicate critical political speech. But Carr’s exploitation of the death of Charlie Kirk to serve as the trigger for Trump’s repression only succeeded in turning Jimmy Kimmel into a free speech symbol before his return to television on Tuesday.“Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control,” Carr wrote as an FCC commissioner in 2023. “That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Then, on 17 September, he told the podcast: “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.”Now, Carr was fulfilling “the authoritarian’s dream”. He seems indifferent to his duplicity, boldly tossing aside pretense. Dealing with Kimmel, he posed as a stereotypical gangster speaking in clichés from a 1930s movie: “the easy way or the hard way.” Carr seems excited by his own rough language. His display of brass knuckles, however, demolishes his legitimacy to wear a badge. As the violator of free speech, he betrays his office as a protector. He also destroys conservative posturing as the special victim of speech suppression.Carr is using government power to eliminate criticism. He is implementing a policy of censorship he himself authored in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Even when he imitates a mobster, he does not issue his threats in a raised voice. His tone does not rise to the histrionics of Stephen Miller. Carr is a zealot of a certain type, the rightwing Leninist with the grim resolve of a commissar, the bureaucrat rigorously checking off boxes – in this case, purging late-night comedians – to fulfill the larger ideological agenda.The operation of Trump’s purge involves not the slightest bit of persuasion, debate or discussion. Carr is executing the will of the leader who is not to be questioned and above all never to be ridiculed. “We’re not done yet” with the changes in “the media ecosystem”, Carr told CNBC on 18 September. He called the erasure of Kimmel a “market correction”. Carr is incapable of comprehending when he is unintentionally funny in a way that is self-undermining. He’s not only Trump’s executioner. He’s Trump’s straight man.Before the identity, let alone the motive, of the Kirk assassin was known, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, raged against “an ideology at war with family and nature”. Weeks before, on Fox News, he had already declared the Democratic party “a domestic extremist organization”. Now, after Kirk’s assassination, taking Miller’s cue, the rightwing site the Federalist stated: “After a long history of condoning, advocating, and participating in political violence, it is time to designate the Democrat party a domestic terrorist organization.”The influential anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo tweeted: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”JD Vance threatened: “We are working very hard to ensure that the funding networks for leftwing violence, that the radicalization networks for leftwing violence – that if you encourage or fund your fellow Americans or anybody else to commit acts of violence because you disagree with political speech, you are going to be treated like a terrorist organization and we are going to go after you.”Trump went on Fox & Friends to point his finger: “The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy.”All of this occurred before Jimmy Kimmel’s ouster.Meanwhile, gaggles of feverish far-right influencers, whose stock-in-trade is conspiracy theories, tried to debunk one fantasy spinning around the internet that threatened to boomerang on them. Within the Maga hothouse, Kirk had faced backlash in 2019 from the Groypers, led by Nick Fuentes, who once dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and accused Kirk of being too moderate. Kirk later shifted his position to the hard right on immigration. “I’ve noticed people like Charlie Kirk … are now calling for an immigration moratorium,” Fuentes said in June. “That means they want to shut down all immigration. And suffice to say, the Groypers have won. It’s just not even a question at this point.”The theory spread like wildfire that the killer’s cryptic inscriptions on shell casings could be Groyper messages. If they were, he would be an errant rightwing extremist, not a leftwing one. Those etched messages, however, apparently referred to a range of things, including gaming memes. No evidence has emerged that Tyler Robinson, the suspect, had political connections to any group or the involvement of anyone else in his act.But with the far-right’s history of heated factional warfare flaring in the background, Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue on 15 September : “The Maga gang [is] 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.”Kimmel’s comment condensed, into a line that was not a joke, a complicated and fraught situation, down the rabbit hole of the far right, involving the frenzied Maga effort to pin the blame on the “radical left” and by extension the whole Democratic party, and to deflect scrutiny of their own infighting. Kimmel’s remark assumed a lot of arcane knowledge on the part of his audience.At the same time, the FCC, which Carr chairs, was considering a $6.2bn merger between Nexstar Media, a large owner of TV stations, and the Tegna media company.Within days of Kimmel’s rather innocuous comment, Carr stated that the comedian was “appearing to directly mislead the American public”. Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Disney followed by suspending him from ABC. Carr praised Nexstar “for doing the right thing”.Ironically, during the Red Scare, in 1950, when Gypsy Rose Lee, soon to be the host of an ABC radio gameshow called What Makes You Tick?, was accused of being a Communist by the American Legion and Red Channels, a conservative publication seeking to root out subversives in the media, ABC executives stood by her. CBS, on the other hand, demanded all of its employees sign a loyalty oath. Gypsy Rose Lee said about the efforts at censorship: “This may be all right for Russia, but I hope not for us.”Sinclair, a rightwing-controlled media outlet that broadcasts ABC shows, announced that suspension of Kimmel was insufficient and that it would pre-empt his program until further notice. But even that was not enough. Sinclair demanded that Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA”. Instead of airing the show, Sinclair said, it would offer to its affiliates a “remembrance” of Kirk, “who boldly and tirelessly defended biblical values and truth as he challenged a new generation to stand firm for Christ”. The piece was sanitized of his racist, nativist, antisemitic and misogynist views, and his assertion that Joe Biden “should honestly be put in prison and/or be given the death penalty for his crimes against America”. Kirk, extolled as an exemplar of free speech and debate, had in fact created a “Professor Watchlist” to blacklist liberal academics across the board. Sinclair made Kirk, touted as an advocate of free speech, into a symbol of its suppression. But, after further stoking the firestorm, Sinclair put its “remembrance” on YouTube and instead ran an episode of Celebrity Family Feud. Once Disney restored Kimmel’s show, Sinclair and Nexstar stated their affiliates would not air it.Carr launched his attack on Kimmel on a podcast called The Benny Show, hosted by Benny Johnson, the former chief creative officer at Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Carr had plunged down a deep rabbit hole of the right with a dubious character.Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after being accused of plagiarism. He was later associated with a political consulting firm called Arsenal Media – “a chaotic working environment, rife with internal bullying, toxic HR practices, and an intense culture of secrecy”, where some contractors said they were not paid, according to an investigative report in the Verge. (Johnson’s own website described him as a co-founder and chief creative officer of the site until April 2022, according to the report, but a spokesperson for Johnson told the Verge in April 2022 that he “is not currently, nor has ever been an owner, executive, or even employee of Arsenal Media”.) Johnson was also exposed last year to be among a group of six rightwing influencers who were funneled $10m from two Russian agents indicted by the justice department. Johnson and the others claimed to have been duped.When Pam Bondi, the attorney general, created an uproar, including on the right, by stating: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Jonathan Karl, the former ABC White House correspondent, asked Trump his reaction.“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” Trump replied to Karl. “You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC. ABC paid me $16m recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16m for a form of hate speech, so maybe they will have to go after you.” Trump was referring to his suit against ABC for This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos’s comment coming out of the E Jean Carroll trial describing Trump’s sexual violence. It was generally believed that ABC would have won the case, but the prospective threat to the Disney company from the Trump administration prompted its first capitulation.Trump, on his state visit to Britain, slammed Kimmel at a press conference with Keir Starmer, saying the host had been “fired because he had bad ratings” and was “not a talented person”. The old reality-TV host’s jealousy for an actual show-business star shone through. In fact, Kimmel’s show was rated No 1 with the highly valued young adult demographic.On Air Force One, Trump suggested that the FCC look into revoking the licenses of other networks, saying: “They give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”If there are further attempts at impertinent humor, they will be met with even more severe punishments. Will Carr issue a full report to meet the crisis, perhaps to a newly created House committee on the weaponization of humor, the Trump era version of the Red Scare’s House un-American activities committee? Will witnesses be subpoenaed from the writers’ room? Will comics be permitted to sign confessions regretting their past gags? What about the audience members, fellow travelers all, who laughed? An inquisition of comedy would take everyone’s minds off the Epstein files. Are you now or have you ever been a comedian? No joking! That’s an order – an executive order.
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist More
