Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel and free speech

Donald Trump has said some TV networks should have their licences “taken away” in the escalating row over free speech sparked by the suspension of TV host Jimmy Kimmel over comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder.

During a monologue recorded before Utah prosecutors released more information about the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, Kimmel said the president’s political movement was “doing everything they can to score political points” over the killing of the far-right activist. “The Maga gang [is] desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

It is not clear whether Kimmel was suggesting Robinson was a Maga supporter, but the comment “deeply angered Trump supporters and officials”, said The Guardian. The ABC network and Nexstar Media Group, which owns TV stations that are affiliated with ABC, announced they were pulling Kimmel’s programme.

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The saga sees Kimmel follow his fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert “out of the stage door”. The “fate of two TV icons” has “catapulted” the issue of free speech into the “front rooms” of America, said Sky News.

Maga’s ‘embrace of censorship’

The right “now embraces” cancel culture, said Matt K. Lewis in the Los Angeles Times. Although “celebrating murder is cruel” and “gross”, it’s “impossible to miss” the irony that conservatives, who “long treated cancel culture as an affront to the First Amendment spirit of open discourse”, are now “calling for people to lose their jobs and their livelihoods” because they said “something stupid” about the killing on the internet.

This “feels particularly hypocritical” from a political movement that’s “made cruel speech something of an art”, said Jill Filipovic in The New Statesman. Yes, the assassination of Kirk was “ghastly and unjustifiable”, but so is “shredding the constitution and its noble promise” that people in the US can “say what they believe without fear of government penalty”.

Kirk “arose as a countercultural figure” who deployed the First Amendment as a “crucial tool for spreading his ideas”, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. But now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, many seem “eager to suppress ideas they dislike”. Maga’s “embrace of censorship” isn’t a “bid to win a battle of ideas”; it’s an attempt to “force people to shut up”. Kirk himself “warned why this was dangerous”.

‘Consequence culture’

There’s been “predictable hyperbole about the administration’s behaviour after Kirk’s killing”, said Gerard Baker in The Times. “The inevitable Nazi analogies are flying, with his murder as the 1933 Reichstag fire.” This is “ahistorical silliness”. Kimmel’s removal has in fact “underscored how complex and pluralist American democracy is”.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, said on Tuesday that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech” and the administration “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”.

Her words “prompted a backlash from numerous conservatives, including prominent Trump supporters”, who pointed out that “hate speech” is protected by the constitution. What’s more, Kimmel’s removal “wasn’t the simple deferential cringe it seemed”. TV executives have simply become “increasingly tired of Kimmel’s brand of humour and the ratings haemorrhage it was producing”.

“Kimmel’s cancellation isn’t ‘cancel culture’”, it’s “consequence culture”, said Peter Laffin in the Washington Examiner. The “hysteria” hasn’t “grappled with the heart of the matter”: that Kimmel “lied” to his two million viewers. “During this moment of civil unrest, this is simply unacceptable.” The US “is a tinderbox right now” and Kimmel’s cancellation “feels like a necessary step toward de-escalation”. He “made his own bed”.