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charlie kirk
'Red Alert Moment' for Free Speech as ABC Cowers to Trump FCC and Cancels Kimmel
"These companies are turning the public airwaves into another propaganda arm of the Trump regime," said one critic.
Sep 18, 2025
First Amendment advocates on Wednesday evening demanded that media companies "stop capitulating—and start fighting back" against President Donald Trump and his administration after FCC chair Brendan Carr successfully pressured ABC to pull comedian Jimmy Kimmel's talk show from the air indefinitely over comments he made about the aftermath of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's murder.
ABC announced the decision just hours after Carr said on a podcast that the network; its owner, the Walt Disney Company; and its affiliates must "find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel."
Carr took issue with remarks Kimmel made in his Monday night broadcast—remarks that had more to do with Trump's far-right MAGA movement than Kirk or the suspect in his killing, Tyler Robinson, but which right-wing activists claimed portrayed Robinson as a conservative.
“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 said.
This is what got Jimmy Kimmel fired.
The Dear Leader was not pleased.
pic.twitter.com/SzilavNgYA
— Maine (@TheMaineWonk) September 18, 2025
Carr said Wednesday, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” suggesting the FCC would take action to pull "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" from the air unless ABC made the decision itself.
According to The New York Times, Disney CEO Robert Iger and co-chair Dana Walden made the decision to take the show off the air, and Rolling Stone reported that in meetings on Wednesday, many executives believed Kimmel had done nothing wrong—"but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed."
Nexstar, which owns ABC affiliate stations across the country and is currently seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with rival company Tegna, fell in line soon after Carr's remarks, saying it would preempt Kimmel's show on its affiliates. Sinclair, another affiliate owner, also said it would preempt the program and called on Kimmel to make a "meaningful personal donation" to the Kirk family and Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, for describing the far-right's decision to immediately blame the left for Kirk's assassination.
Craig Aaron, CEO of the First Amendment advocacy group Free Press, noted that ABC attempted to "buy off Trump with a ridiculous legal settlement last year" when it gave $15 million to his presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit—but the move made no difference when Carr disapproved of Kimmel's remarks.
“ABC keeps caving regardless of how meritless the administration’s claims are—and how much lasting damage they’re doing to free speech in America," said Aaron. "These companies are turning the public airwaves into another propaganda arm of the Trump regime."
"Donald Trump and Brendan Carr have turned the FCC into the Federal Censorship Commission, ignoring the First Amendment and replacing the rule of law with the whims of right-wing bloggers," added Aaron. "They’re abusing their power to shake down media companies with their dangerous demands for dishonest coverage and Orwellian compliance with the administration’s demands. This is nothing more than censorship and extortion."
The administration's latest attack on the media, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has been characterized by "last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval."
"Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy," she said. "It sure looks like giant media companies are enabling his authoritarianism."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in a video posted on social media that the US public is witnessing "the systematic destruction of free speech in this country," noting that "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" was also recently cancelled, effective next May. CBS announced the decision as its parent company, Paramount, was seeking approval of an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance. The merger was approved days later.
"This is a moment for the country to mobilize," said Murphy. "This is a moment for all of us to be out on the streets protesting because if you don't raise your voices right now about the assault on free speech, about Donald Trump's decision to disgustingly exploit the murder of Charlie Kirk, so as to try to permanently render powerless and impotent those who politically oppose him—there may be no democracy to save a year from now."
"This is a red alert moment," he added.
The abrupt cancellation of Kimmel's show in response to his comments comes after numerous attacks on free speech by the Trump administration. In March, former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk were among the foreign students who were detained by masked immigration agents and threatened with deportation for speaking out against US support for Israel's assault on Gaza. Both have since been released; on Wednesday Khalil and his legal team said they would fight an immigration judge's ruling that could pave the way for his deportation to Algeria or Syria.
Trump also announced a lawsuit against The New York Times and book publisher Penguin Random House over reporting and news analysis that was unfavorable to him.
“Jimmy Kimmel is the latest target of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional plan to silence its critics and control what the American people watch and read," said Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division at the ACLU. "Cowering to threats, ABC and the biggest owner of its affiliate stations gave the Trump FCC chairman exactly what he wanted by suspending Kimmel indefinitely and dropping the show."
“This is beyond McCarthyism. Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke," said Anders. "The Trump administration's actions, paired with ABC's capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”
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Responding to Charlie Kirk's Killing With the Wisdom of Our Inner 3 Year Old
Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Sep 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s killing last week—and the aftermath of grief and political outrage—are too overwhelming to ignore, even though I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.
The best I can do is wander into the spiritual unknown and perhaps ask an impossible question or two. The first one is this: Are words adequate for the exploration of life and death? I ask this question as a writer. To me, words are virtually magical entities. They give us the means to shape, if not the world itself, at least our comprehension of it... and thus we assume we know what’s going on around us.
For instance, here I am, sitting at my desk, looking out my window on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon. The leaves on the tree in front of me flutter in the breeze. A woman in a red coat walks through the parking lot, which is mostly empty. Everything is calm. The time is 2:43 pm on a Tuesday. This all seems simple enough, right?
But of course this is nothing more than the surface of this moment—a real-life postcard, you might say. Putting it into words, at least in one sense, limits what I see. I see what is “known,” categorize it all as normal—and move on. If I were 3 years old, I’d still be staring at the tree, perhaps one leaf at a time. I could well be lost in its beauty and complexity.
Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
As I return to the news, I’m suggesting that we bring with us our inner 3 year old. The news of the Kirk assassination is given to us with simple us-vs.-them clarity. He was speaking at an event in Utah. Someone fired a rifle from several hundred feet away. He was hit in the neck. He died.
And then it turns political. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Charlie Kirk was a husband, the father of two young children. No matter where you stand in regard to his right-wing, MAGA politics, the horror of his death—the horror inflicted on his family—is explosive. "No!” screams our inner 3 year old. The nation is stunned.
But almost immediately, things turn political. US President Donald Trump and others instantaneously blame the “radical left” and let their hatred spew. Kirk is now their martyr, and they feel they have permission to make the most of his death politically that they can. Eliminate the left. I can feel the joy oozing from their hatred, which gushes like blood from a bullet wound.
All progressives can do is express shock and grief. Kirk’s murder isn’t “political.” He was a human being! And here’s where words can too easily fail us. This isn’t Side A vs. Side B. This is “We are all one” vs. “We’re great and you’re evil, and we’re comin’ for ya.”
But the divide is infinitely deeper even than that. Charlie Kirk’s murder is international news, but it’s also only one murder out of unknown thousands and thousands every day. Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
Killing requires dehumanization. That’s the nature of war—every war. And the larger the number we kill, the easier the dehumanization becomes. Oh, they’re just “the enemy” or, ho hum, collateral damage. Any questions?
And here’s where language deeply, deeply, deeply fails us. “Left” and “right”—life and death—are simply equal opposites, at least in much of the media coverage of this. Nothing could be further from the truth: Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Here are the words of Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, speaking at a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice award ceremony the day of Kirk’s killing:
Before I begin, I do want to take a moment to address the horrific political assassination that just occurred today in Utah. Charlie Kirk is dead, yet another victim of gun violence in a nation where what should be a rarity has turned into a plague. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all...
We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, and the refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done, when it comes to Palestinian lives...
We know, because the United Nations tells us, that by the end of the month, millions will be facing starvation, if they are not starving already. This is not accidental. This is not due to a freak blight. This is not because the world now lacks the means to feed the hungry. It is because those decisions made by the Israeli government and by our government here continue to ensure that that is a reality. And if that does not stagger the conscience, what will?
Let me repeat these words: “the shared notion of humanity that’s behind us all.”
Our inner 3 year old knows this. How do we start embracing it politically? Humanity is a collective entity. We can’t kill our enemy without eventually killing ourselves.
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Trump Backs Pride Flag Ban as Allies Spread False Claims Tying Transgender People to Violence
One rights advocate noted that the creator of the flag the president said he'd consider banning recently left the US due to fears of persecution under the Trump administration.
Sep 17, 2025
After false claims spread last week that a transgender person was behind the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, US President Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to push the erroneous narrative that the transgender community is a danger to the American public.
Trump on Monday said that he'd consider banning LGBTQ pride flags as his political allies ratcheted up dehumanizing rhetoric.
During an exchange in the Oval Office, Real America's Voice correspondent Brian Glenn showed Trump a photo of a trans flag currently on display in Washington, DC, and claimed that "a lot of people are very threatened" by it.
"Would you be opposed to taking this flag down, up and down the streets of DC?" Glenn asked.
"Well, I wouldn't be," Trump replied. "Then they'll sue and they'll get freedom of speech stuff, you know, so that'll happen. But I would have no problem with it."
Trump then pivoted to saying that he wanted anyone who burned an American flag to "go to jail immediately."
The day after the president signaled his support for banning transgender pride flags, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) likened the transgender rights movement to a “cancer” and suggested detaining all transgender people in the United States.
In an interview with Newsmax, Jackson baselessly said that transgender women "have an underlying level of aggressiveness" and suggested they be forcibly committed to mental institutions.
"We have to treat these people," he said. "We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other. I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country."
In response to Trump's attack on the transgender flag, ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter pointed out that the transgender activist who created the symbol, Monica Helms, recently left the US "for fear of her safety as a trans person under Trump."
After the assassination of Kirk—who also falsely connected transgender people to mass shootings with no evidence—right-wing commentators quickly reacted by claiming the attacker was transgender and federal agents reported early on in their investigation that symbols of "transgender ideology" were found at the crime scene—a claim that was amplified by the Wall Street Journal.
In reality, mass shootings carried out by transgender individuals represent a minuscule fraction of the total number of mass shootings carried out in the US, and there is no evidence that transgender people are disproportionately likely to engage in acts of violence.
Laura Loomer, once a fringe far-right internet commentator and conspiracy theorist who is now an influential informal adviser to the president, has also been ramping up attacks against the transgender movement, and she even went so far this week as to demand that gender-affirming care be completely banned by executive order.
"It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement," she wrote in a social media post. "Trans people are a threat to society. We can’t allow them to continue killing people. They need to be socially ostracized and the president should make medical transitioning ILLEGAL in our country."
Conservative attacks on the transgender movement have persisted in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, despite the fact that the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was not himself transgender.
Evidence released by prosecutors on Tuesday showed that Robinson's transgender partner refused Robinson's request to delete incriminating text messages the two had exchanged. The partner subsequently shared these messages with law enforcement.
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