Tag: 1st amendment

Trump’s Vision of Broadcast Regulation Is a Threat to Conservatives

“When 97 percent of the stories are bad,” President Donald Trump declared on Friday, “it’s no longer free speech.” When TV networks “take a great story” and “make it bad,” he added, “I think that’s really illegal.”

Trump was wrong on both points. And in groping toward a justification for the regulatory threats that preceded Jimmy Kimmel’s expulsion from his late-night slot on ABC, Trump embraced a principle that historically was bad for conservatives—one they are apt to regret reviving.

“You have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” the president complained. “They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

Trump made similar noises during his first administration, saying “network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.” But Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), rejected that suggestion in no uncertain terms.

“I believe in the First Amendment,” Pai said. “The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

The difference this time around is that the FCC’s current chairman, Brendan Carr, clearly has no such constitutional compunctions. When Carr said broadcasters could face “fines or license revocation” if they continued to air Kimmel’s talk show, he preposterously invoked the FCC’s policy regarding “broadcast news distortion.”

That policy applies to a “broadcast news report” that was “deliberately intended to mislead viewers or listeners” about “a significant event.” Whatever you think of Kimmel’s intent when he erroneously suggested that the man accused of murdering conservative activist Charlie Kirk was part of the MAGA movement, a comedian’s monologue is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “broadcast news report.”

Carr and Trump also alluded to broadcasters’ vague duty to operate in “the public interest.” Because broadcasters are “getting free airwaves from the United States government,” Trump thinks, they have a legal obligation to be fair and balanced.

That notion is reminiscent of the FCC’s defunct Fairness Doctrine, which required that broadcasters present contrasting views when they covered controversial issues. The FCC repudiated that policy during the Reagan administration, precisely because it impinged on First Amendment rights.

The Kennedy administration, for example, had deployed the Fairness Doctrine against the president’s political opponents. “Our massive strategy,” former Assistant Secretary of Commerce William Ruder acknowledged a decade later, “was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.”

Nixing the Fairness Doctrine allowed an efflorescence of political speech on talk radio, enabling the rise of influential conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh. Exhuming and extending that policy, as Carr and Trump seem to favor, would be short-sighted as well as constitutionally dubious.

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Google Admits Biden White House Pressured Content Removal, Promises to Restore Banned YouTube Accounts

After years of denying bias, Google now concedes that it gave in to pressure from the Biden White House to remove content that did not breach its own rules.

The admission comes alongside a promise to restore access to YouTube accounts permanently removed for political speech related to COVID-19 and elections, topics where government officials had applied behind-the-scenes pressure to control the narrative.

This move follows sustained scrutiny from the House Judiciary Committee, which Reclaim The Net covered extensively, led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who issued a subpoena and spearheaded an investigation that revealed the extent of government influence on content moderation decisions at Google.

In a letter from its legal representative, Google confirmed that it faced pressure from the federal government to suppress lawful speech.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Google revealed that it had been contacted multiple times by top federal officials regarding content on its platforms, even when that content did not break any rules.

The company stated that “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.”

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America’s Free Speech Culture Is Under Attack From Within

The First Amendment is alive and well, which is a reassuring note about the basic legal protections for free speech. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. The world is full of countries with written protections for liberty that are frequently honored in the breach because people and politicians don’t really believe in them (cough, Canada, cough). The true foundation for free speech in the U.S. has always been a culture that supports unfettered expression, of which the First Amendment is just an extension.

Assassin’s Veto, and the Cheers That Followed

But less than two weeks after Charlie Kirk was murdered because an assassin apparently didn’t like what he had to say, it’s obvious that free speech culture is besieged. That murder is celebrated in some quarters, the U.S. attorney general threatened to crack down on “hate speech,” and the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) leaned on ABC to fire a comic who got mouthy about Kirk. That’s after years of cancel culture meant to muzzle ideas and behind the scenes government efforts to suppress dissent. The First Amendment still stands, but too many Americans seem to regret its existence.

In justifying the murder of Kirk to his roommate/lover, alleged assassin Tyler Robinson wrote, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

We’ll be a while parsing the details of Robinson’s motives, but they seem founded in Kirk’s views about gay and transgender people. The irony is that Kirk, whatever his views, was willing to debate anything. Last week, liberal pundit Van Jones, who sparred online with Kirk, revealed that the conservative activist invited Jones on his show to discuss their differences. Kirk was killed before Jones could respond, though he added, “Please don’t give up on open debate and dialogue. Charlie didn’t. I won’t.”

Jones might not have won many friends had he responded in the affirmative. As Rhian Lubin reported for The Independent, “everyone from teachers, university staffers and media personalities, to firefighters, a U.S. Secret Service agent and a Marine is now finding themselves in hot water for reveling in the killing.”

“Hearing that Charlie Kirk got shot and died really brightened up my day,” commented John Colgan, who was both a public school teacher and a city councilmember in Cornelius, Oregon.

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“Hate Speech” Isn’t Real and Pam Bondi Is an Enemy of Freedom

Following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, many critics of Kirk posted content on social media in which they said rude things about Kirk—and even about his family members—while expressing delight about Kirk’s death.  Not surprisingly, many of Kirk’s supporters—and many other ordinary people—found these comments offensive and reprehensible. 

Perhaps as part of an effort to exploit the situation to improve her own political fortunes, US Attorney General Pam Bondi then declared that she, a government prosecutor, will “go after” those who engage in what she called “hate speech.” 

“Hate speech,” however, does not exist. At all. That’s a phrase the Left invented to define speech the Left doesn’t like as outside the legal protections of Bill of Rights. Put another way, the concept of “hate speech” was invented to justify state-enforced censorship of speech. That Bondi buys into this nonsense is made clear by Bondi’s pledge to “go after” people who are guilty of this hate-speech “crime” that Bondi apparently imagines in her head.  

These comments, coming from a sitting Attorney General, are extremely problematic, to say the least. The very fact that Bondi unironically uses the term “hate speech” illustrates how deeply immersed she is in the culture of coercion and despotism that permeates the Washington ruling class. Any politician who promotes the concept of “hate speech” should be considered an enemy of our most fundamental natural rights, and his or her political career deserves to be ended permanently. 

There Is No Such Thing as Hate Speech

Bondi’s dangerous comments on so-called hate speech came as part of her Monday appearance on the Katie Miller podcast. When asked by the host if colleges and universities are somehow complicit in Kirk’s murder, Bondi agreed and stated:

on a broader level, the anti-Semitism—what’s been happening at college campuses around this country— it’s disgusting, it’s despicable and we’ve been fighting that, we’ve been fighting these universities left and right and that’s not going to stop.  There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society …. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

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The FCC’s Involvement in Canceling Jimmy Kimmel Was ‘Unbelievably Dangerous,’ Ted Cruz Says

Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) is happy that ABC decided to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show. But like Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, Cruz is not happy about the role that Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), played in that decision. By threatening TV stations that carried Jimmy Kimmel Live! with fines and license revocation, Cruz warned in his podcast on Friday, Carr set a dangerous precedent that could invite similar treatment of conservative speech under a future administration.

“I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” Cruz declared, referring to the September 15 monologue in which the late-night comedian erroneously suggested that Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah five days earlier, was part of the MAGA movement. “I am thrilled that he was fired. But let me tell you: If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”

In an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday, Carr warned that there are “actions we can take on licensed broadcasters” that dared to air Kimmel’s show, including “fines or license revocations.” He added that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Either “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Hours later, Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! “for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show.” Sinclair, which owns 38 ABC affiliates, likewise said it would “indefinitely preempt” Jimmy Kimmel Live! beginning that night. ABC, which produces the programming aired by those affiliates and owns eight of the network’s stations, fell in line the same night, saying it would “indefinitely” suspend the show.

Cruz likened Carr to a mafioso. “He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,'” the senator noted. “And I got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar [and] going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.'”

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Should Elected Officials Censor Americans? Trump’s Administration Says Yes.

Last week, a gunman in Utah shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It was a brutal and tragic event, regardless of one’s politics. And yet the fallout of Kirk’s murder has revealed a disturbing hostility toward free speech on the political right.

Republicans have long cast themselves as defenders of free speech against cancel culture and the censorial impulses of the political left. And there was merit to the argument—Reason has covered many cases of overreach.

But over the last week, MAGA Republicans have scoured social media for government employees posting about Kirk’s murder, contacting employers in an attempt to get them fired. “Kirk’s online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don’t care about the assassination, that they didn’t like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote this week. Even for nongovernmental employees, social media detectives apparently compiled a database with tens of thousands of people who criticized Kirk, including their names and employers.

Of course, that’s just people online. It’s not like those with government power are advocating such a thing, right?

“I would think maybe their [broadcast] license should be taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week on Air Force One, about TV networks. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” Vice President J.D. Vance said while guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast this week. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Vance’s argument bears a striking resemblance to the comments made just a few years ago by his ideological enemies. When certain public and not-so-public figures received backlash for offensive statements, some commentators noted that this was not cancel culture, it was “consequence culture”—people merely experiencing the consequences of their actions.

It’s no surprise that Trump has no principles on free speech—from the beginning of his first term, he called the press the “enemy of the American people.” But Vance’s position marks a notable pivot from just a few months ago.

“Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite,” Vance said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.”

Now, Vance seems less keen on defending someone’s right to offer views that he personally disagrees with. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.

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Trump proposes revoking licenses of critical American TV networks

US President Donald Trump has floated the idea of “maybe” revoking the broadcast licenses of American television networks that provide negative coverage of him.

The suggestion came a day after ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, following what it called “offensive and insensitive” comments made by the comedian about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Kimmel claimed on his program that Trump and his supporters were trying to “score political points” over Kirk’s killing and compared the president’s reaction to his death to “how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Trump, who was returning from the UK aboard Air Force One on Thursday, told journalists that TV networks “give me only bad publicity or press.”

“I mean, they are getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” he said.

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Kamala Harris’s Attack on Trump Adminstration’s Response to Jimmy Kimmel Blows Up in Her Face When X Users Discover a Tyrannical Old Post of Hers

Kamala Harris decided to inject herself into the political fight regarding Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and it backfired spectacularly.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, the left-wing Kimmel told his late-night audience on Monday that a MAGA REPUBLICAN murdered Kirk and accused the right of trying to score political points off of it.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend 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,” Kimmel claimed.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appeared on The Benny Show on Wednesday and told host Benny Johnson that he may take action against ABC and Kimmel.

“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.

“They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest,” he added. “There are calls for Kimmel to be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this.”

Following Carr’s comments, Nexstar announced that all 32 of its ABC broadcast affiliates would preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely, blasting Kimmel’s sick comments about Kirk’s murder as “offensive and insensitive.”

Harris slammed the Trump Administration on Thursday for its response to Kimmel’s firing and its supposed bullying of media organizations in general.

How rich, coming from someone who was part of a regime that regularly intimidated media organizations for expressing politically incorrect viewpoints.

“What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power,” Harris wrote. “This administration is attacking critics and using fear as a weapon to silence anyone who would speak out.”

“Media corporations — from television networks to newspapers — are capitulating to these threats,” she added. “We cannot dare to be silent or complacent in the face of this frontal assault on free speech.”

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Hillary Clinton on Kimmel, Kirk: ‘Very Clear Example of Using the Power of the State to Suppress Speech’

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday weighed in on the fallout surrounding Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, addressing both the late-night host’s removal and the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

When asked if Kimmel’s suspension amounted to state censorship, Clinton replied: “Well, I think this is a very clear example of using the power of the state to suppress speech. It is a direct government action to try to intimidate employers, organizations, corporations, much of which we’ve already seen, to remove an opponent, even though it’s a comic.”

Clinton continued:

Look, I had no idea when I was in public life and listening to the jokes that were made about me and the attacks that were, you know, coming from people like Jimmy Kimmel and others that I could have called up the head of the FCC and said, take them off the air. I don’t like what they’re saying. I mean, of course, this was a particularly sensitive time because of the terrible crime that was committed, the murder of Mr. Kirk.

But you know, you defend free speech in terrible times, and you defend free speech that is used against holding people in power accountable through satire, humor, barbed attacks, you defend it even when it is offensive, and they have unfortunately taken the view that we believe in free speech, as long as we’re making the speech and your speech agrees with us, otherwise, we’re against free speech.

Clinton later amplified the remarks on X, posting: “In America, we defend free speech in terrible times. We defend free speech even when it’s offensive. We defend free speech.” She restricted comments on that post as well as one she made one week after Kirk’s assassination congratulating American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten on her book Why Fascists Fear Teachers.

Weingarten’s excerpts, published in Rolling Stone days after Kirk’s assassination, accused conservatives of being “fascists” and “Nazis,” likened book bans to Nazi Germany in 1933, and warned that Trump and Elon Musk were acting as “shadow governing partners.” The release drew attention because Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect charged with Kirk’s murder, inscribed “Hey fascist! Catch!” on bullet casings, according to authorities.

Teachers across several states were investigated or fired after posting celebratory or hostile messages about Kirk’s assassination, with examples including posts such as “America became greater” and “1 Nazi down.” A new website, charliesmurderers.com, reported receiving thousands of submissions documenting celebrations of Kirk’s death. 

Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) said such rhetoric reflects a dangerous climate created by years of partisan demonization. “And now, Charlie Kirk has been murdered,” Hunt told Breitbart News. “This is not rhetoric. These are lived realities.” He asserted that Democrats and their allies “have vilified, censored, and targeted conservatives at every turn for over a decade,” adding that political violence against conservatives is now “normalized by silence, excuse-making, or even tacit encouragement from the left.”

Clinton herself previously described Republicans as her “enemies” during a 2015 Democrat debate. Asked which adversary she was most proud of making in her political career, Clinton responded, “Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians; probably the Republicans.”

The dispute surrounding Kimmel began after he mocked Trump’s mourning of Kirk’s assassination, joking it was “like how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,” and suggested Robinson may have been part of the “MAGA gang.” Authorities later identified Robinson as the suspect, describing him as left-leaning and in a relationship with a male who identifies as female and who “hates conservatives and Christians.” Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed those details, and investigators stated Robinson admitted responsibility in a message to the partner.

Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr cautioned ABC and Disney that broadcasters risk their licenses if they mislead the public, saying Nexstar Media Group did “the right thing” by suspending Kimmel. Sinclair Broadcasting also halted broadcasts of Jimmy Kimmel Live and announced a special tribute to Kirk would air in its place. ABC affiliates cited the need to uphold community values and maintain constructive dialogue. Carr noted that networks could “do this the easy way or the hard way,” signaling further review of their obligations under federal law.

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The “Charlie Kirk Act”, Free Speech, Propaganda, And A Censorship Nightmare

As of the date of this writing, September 17th, 2025, it is Constitution Day. Despite this, in 2025 America, the Constitution is being eroded more than ever before. Just read any of constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute, John W. Whitehead’s essays on the matter.

The infringements are endless, with masked agents running amok, disappearing people off the streets, extrajudicial executions at sea, military deployed domestically as law enforcement, unconstitutional wars waged, illegal mass surveillance on every American, warrantless search and seizure, debt-based Fiat currency, and so much more.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The only way for Americans to sit by and allow their freedoms to die at such a magnitude is to keep them perpetually distracted and apathetic. This is why 5th-generation warfare comes in so handy for the ruling class. Keep the entire population besieged from all sides at all times, economically, biologically, informationally, neurologically, so utterly saturated, so deep in the trenches, they don’t even realize they’re in a war.

When the average tax cattle are so exhausted from capitalist exploitation just to meet the bear standards for survival, so psychologically fatigued from the constant influx of doom porn, and the various other ways that the rat race is designed to keep us exhausted and unfulfilled while being simultaneously bombarded with socially engineered algorithms feeding into echo chambers it’s easy to keep the masses focused on manufactured outrage and fake culture wars, or shallow celebrity gossiping and rigged sports-ball entertainment. Blissfully unaware or uncaring of how their rights are being stripped away every day

The most fundamental of these freedoms is guaranteed to us in the 1st amendment — freedom of speech, freedom of expression, among others. That simple principle is the litmus test of a free society: Can you speak your mind freely without reprisal from the state? For believers in America’s founding ideals, the answer should be a resounding yes. And yet politicians and citizens alike oftentimes seem all too keen on allowing their principles to be pulled by puppet strings, ethically ambiguous and logically inconsistent.

Last week’s heinous murder of controversial conservative pundit Charlie Kirk has brought these issues to the forefront of our current discourse. Kirk based his entire brand on exercising the First Amendment, engaging in public debates with individuals whose ideological position opposed his own until he was ultimately gunned down last week.

Already, there are numerous discrepancies in the official story of the assassination, and much in line with the old adage of not letting a good crisis go to waste, the usual suspects have wasted no time in exploiting his death to ramp up the divide and conquer rhetoric. On the heels of attempting to make him a martyr, many on the right who previously grandstanded for free speech are now openly demanding the erasure of the rights that Charlie himself embodied.

But let’s not mince words here and call a spade a spade; none of this being said is to put him on a pedestal. Charlie Kirk was a professional liar, a propagandist of the highest degree who promulgated blatantly false, oftentimes bigoted, authoritarian rhetoric. He built a career off of perpetuating the fake left versus right dichotomy, exploiting the base he cultivated by inflaming the fears, anger, hatred, sadness, and anxieties of conservatives. While this was probably not Kirk’s intention, as he himself was likely just as much a victim of government propaganda that ultimately fomented his views, it was most definitely the result. Yet despite all of this, anyone who claims to actually support free speech should still support his right to express his ideas, no matter how much one may disagree with them.

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