Government

We’re In The Cancelling Talk Shows Phase Of Free Speech Crackdowns

We are inching closer to Fox and Friends being the only joke of a news source left on TV.

By Chris Williams on September 18, 2025 10:45 am

This is going to be one of those moments where future generations will ask how we didn’t see the writing on the wall so much earlier. For some reason, the country laughed off one of the first big rhetorical shoes in the door: “alternative facts.” The constitutional threat implied by the phrase “fake news” got treated as seriously as “covfefe.” One of the most lucid “What the hell are we doing here?” moments was when Obama asked an audience to imagine the fallout that would have happened if he pulled the equivalent of Trump blocking a CNN reporter’s White House press credentials during his time as president:

Funny or not, these became the grounds for deciding which narratives were state doxa and which would fall under the umbrella of the “woke mind virus” or whatever term talking heads felt like using to dismiss thoughts that fell out of line. The thought must have been that these were brief detours on a moral arc that bends toward justice or that free speech and the circulation of ideas would ultimately be the disinfectant best suited for a nation dirtied by misinformation, propaganda and fake news. Maybe we just thought things would never get this bad. But it is getting a lot harder to deny facts, alternative or not, when they’re right in front of you.

A couple of months after Stephen Colbert got a delayed axing for sharing thoughts critical of Trump, the Jimmy Kimmel show has been indefinitely suspended after making a Charlie Kirk joke:

You can see the offending joke below:

I know that it’s easy to point at this or that thing as partisan, but have we reached the point where you can get fired for pointing out that someone redirecting conversation to decor changes when asked about the death of a friend doesn’t exactly scream mourning a deep loss? Will Smith takes jokes about his wife better than Trump’s administration took this. What’s next? Getting fired for saying Trump was focused on the wrong hole in the ground because he went to a golf course instead of going to Charlie Kirk’s vigil? We’re Americans Goddammit it –the right to speak our minds without fear of government backlash is one of the most foundational aspects of our country’s mythos. And to think that all of this censorship is coming from the right: remember when they were the ones screaming that any state restriction meant that we were sliding down vaguely orientalist social credit scores and Communism? Because the internet does:

Think what you will about Jimmy Kimmel — he’ll always look a little lonely to me without Adam Corolla by his side — but what this late night comedy show’s “indefinite suspension” means for free speech is no laughing matter.

The details of that “suspension” only makes things worse. It looks like the show won’t be restored unless Kimmel does a great deal of ass kissing and pays tithe to Kirk’s family and Turning Point USA:

Right wingers have already taken to the this-isn’t-actually-a-free-speech-issue grift because ABC ultimately made the decision instead of the FCC or Donald Trump, but the funny thing about the internet is that there is an archive of all the shit you’ve previously said:

Back to Obama’s point of imagining if he did this, here is JD Vance railing against the Biden administration for “encouraging private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth”and promising that things would be different under Trump:

Quite the difference a couple of months makes:

This isn’t just blatant hypocrisy — this is jawboning. It is hard to think of a better textbook of example of quelling speech by removing someone’s speaking platform than what Donny Boy is trying to do here:

Despite the consequences of speaking out, we (thankfully) aren’t at the point that people are too afraid to speak out on the news. That said, no promise this doesn’t get CNN’s White House pass revoked again:

You know things are bad when Tucker Carlson is ringing the same bell:

Maybe the real bipartisan politics are the First Amendment violations we fight along the way?

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s .  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.