Among the main proud of the American conservative movement was always the image of himself against the “censor” spirit of the left. Things seem to have changed with Donald Trump in power for the second time, a time when their attacks on the press and the ideological persecution and the silencing of their adversaries have risen.
This is a campaign that has intensified after the murder nine days ago by the Juvenile leader Maga (Make America Great Again) Charlie Kirk, who are taking advantage of Trump, their vice president, JD Vance, and other members of the Government to launch a campaign against freedom of expression while promising that it is, however diffuse the concept will be, will pay for it.
Kirk was shot in the neck while exercising a right guaranteed by the first amendment, of which he himself was an absolutist. His murder was celebrated or apologized in certain sectors of the left and the extreme leftist American and that pushed the leaders of the Maga world, a movement agglutinated in good media around the criticism of the culture of cancellation, to adopt a version of that census passion and publicly point to those who celebrated Kirk’s death to encourage their employers to dismiss them.
The most famous victim of that script change on the right is the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose night program for the chain that has been broadcast for 20 years, ABC. It was following a Kimmel comment about the reaction of some Trump supporters after knowing the news that the alleged murderer, comes from a mormon, republican home and weapon lover.
Kimmel, who then joked about the president’s duel after losing one of his closest allies, made that comment before the authorities offered evidence of the connection of the acts of the alleged murderer, whose mother has told the researchers that he had embraced “leftist” positions, with a fed up, confessed by Robinson himself, with the “hatred” that Kirk scattered. The young activist was famous for his commitment to freedom of expression and with the right to carry weapons, yes, but also for an anti -immigrant and antilgtbi+discourse, contrary to the policies of positive discrimination and defender of the supremacy of man and western culture.
Kimmel’s comment was answered very hard in a Pódcast by an official of the Trump administration, Brendan Carr, president of the Communications Regulator (FCC). Carr suggested to ABC that he had to say goodbye to the presenter and that, if not, the government would take action on the matter. “We can do this for good or bad,” he said. A few hours later, the local stations chain affiliated with ABC Nexstar, which is in the middle of a phenomenal business for which they need the permission of the FCC, announced that they would no longer put the late night of Kimmel. A few minutes later, ABC consumed the suspension of the program.
Trump, back from his state visit to the United Kingdom, told the reporters who accompanied him on the presidential plane that he believes that the FCC should revoke the licenses of the chains whose presenters of night programs speak negatively of it. The night before, he celebrated the end of Kimmel on his social network, Truth, as “great news for the United States.”
It was not the first time: in July, when Stephen Colbert revealed that his employer, the CBS, would not renew the contract at the end of the new season, the president of the United States also celebrated him, and ventured that Kimmel would be the following. This Wednesday also said that two other presenters of the Night Strip, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Fallon should run the same fate.
The Democrats in Congress have asked for the resignation of Car, who justified in an interview in Fox News his decision arguing that the television comedians have ceased to be “courts of the court that mocked all those who are in the power to be clergy and impose a very close political ideology”.
Katie Fallow, an expert lawyer in freedom of expression, considered Thursday in a telephone conversation that “Kimmel’s suspension after Carr’s threat is the most serious and recent example of a sustained attack on the first amendment by Trump’s administration.” “It seems to me of extreme hypocrisy that those who complained about being expelled from social networks or public discourse for their ideas, want to cancel what are not and agree that they are in power. Freedom of expression should not be censored or suppressed, regardless of whether you are right or left.
In an X message, former president Barack Obama accused the government of being leading to “a new and dangerous level to threaten regulatory measures against media companies unless they gag or fire journalists and commentators who do not like.” Obama cited as an example of “government coercion to the first amendment” the dismissal of The Washington Post of the Karen Attiah for a post in Bluesky who echoed a comment from Kirk.
In a rare case of coincidence of opinions with Obama, Tucker Carlson, leader of Maga opinion, to trample the first amendment and encouraged the “civil disobedience” if the project thrives, advanced by the attorney general Pam Bondi, to create a legal type non -existent in the United States to pursue the “hate speeches.”
Bondi’s comments caused an intense debate among his own, and he had to disdain. According to Fallow, when Bondi talked about hate speech, he was referring only to the “speech that the right considers offensive,” when “legally defined itself as the use of insults based on race, nationality, religion or sex.” “And all that is fully protected in our system to preserve freedom of thought and expression, and to protect us from the government.”
Among Trump’s direct attacks on the press, which he considers “the enemy of the people” and whose discredit has contributed considerably, are his demands to an Iowa newspaper for publishing a survey that did not succeed with his blunt victory in that state, to The New York Times for publishing negative information about him already The Wall Street Journal For revealing the existence of a procaz drawing, which Trump says he is false, with which the then real estate magnate congratulated his 50 years for the millionaire Pederasta Jeffrey Estein. He has also prohibited the AP Agency to access the Oval Office for refusing to use the name of Gulf of America, and has encouraged the financial strangulation of public radio and television (NPR and PBS) and the closure of almost all external information services provided by Voice of America.
Although the most bleeding cases are surely those of ABC and CBS, which share anything more than have dispensed with their stars of the late night. Both chains have paid 15 and 16 million dollars, to stop two judgments for defamation of Trump. And both did so not to bother the FCC, whose permission required for two important commercial operations.
In the case of ABC, it was because a presenter of the news said on the antenna that the then Republican candidate had been condemned to pay the columnist E. Jean Carroll a compensation for “rape”, when the jury of the case condemned him for “sexual abuse.” In CBS, Trump accused his star program of the edition of an interview with the Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, who, in the opinion of the president of the United States, favored her.
Kimmel’s suspension arrives in the same week that Trump has sued The New York Times for defamation and libel for, according to the president, “lie” and harm him “for years” and be “practically a spokesman for the Radical Left Democratic Party.” Two correspondents of the White House and two research journalists who published a book that questions the story as a successful and made entrepreneur of Trump himself. The editorial that published the essay is also included in the demand.
The same day in which this legal action was learned, the president of the United States faced two journalists. The first is Jonathan Karl, from ABC News. Karl wanted to know what Trump thought about Bondi’s plans. The president said: “Maybe we should chase you, that you are always saying such bad things about me.”
The other intimidated reporter is the correspondent in the White House of Australian public television, which asked him about the apparent conflicts of interest of the Republican, in his double function as president and entrepreneur. This, before sending him shut up, warned him that with that question he was “hurting” his country, whose leaders, he added, “are looking forward to getting along” with him. That correspondent was left out of the press conference that Trump gave this Thursday with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The exclusion was due to “logistics reasons,” according to the British government. His administration has also threatened to withdraw the visa to a German journalist who criticized Stephen Miller, Trump’s narrow ally.
In that encounter with the media in checkers, Starmer’s country residence, the Republican said that the Kimmel case had nothing to do with freedom of expression, if not with the “bad audiences” of the presenter and with his “lack of talent.” The reporter’s question pointed out the apparent contradiction that the Maga have converted the alleged persecution of certain extremist speeches in Europe as a reason for an ideological war that Vance placed in the center when he talked about it in very hard terms in the Munich Security Conference, in February.
Vance seemed to have changed his mind. He spoke of the “incredibly destructive movement of the extreme left,” encouraged the signaling of those who celebrate the murder and advanced that certain organizations would be persecuted by the way to strip them of their exempt tax status. Vance talked about two: Open Society, by George Soros, and the Ford Foundation, which he accused of financing a “disgusting article” in the leftist magazine The Nation (It is titled “The legacy of Charlie Kirk does not deserve to be cried” and is signed by Elizabeth Spiers), which, he said, was used to justify Kirk’s death. In that article, Spiers defended that it was possible to regret the death of the activist, whose speech described in hard terms, without “celebrating her life.”
The link of these foundations with The Nation is not proven. Bhaskar Sunkara, president of La historic magazine, He declared in X that the publication had never received Open Society funds. As for the Ford, he gave money to the magazine for the last time in 2019.
In another message posted in Truth from the United Kingdom, in which Trump announced his plan, an amorphous constellation of anti -fascist and extreme left ideology groups, without a clear leader or structure, he said that he will recommend “strongly” that those who finance those groups “are thoroughly investigated according to the highest legal standards and practices”. He already tried to pursue that nebula during his first administration, after the murder at the hands of a White Minneapolis police of the African American unleashed a wave of anti -racist protests throughout the country in the middle of the pandemic.
The one who was then his chief of the FBI, Christopher Wray, declared this year that Antifa is an “idea” and not an organization. It did not remain with that clear message how the Trump administration thinks to pursue that idea.
