Maga is being conned by Trump and JD Vance – Jimmy Kimmel is the latest casualty

“Free speech isn’t just saying what you want to say, it’s also hearing what you don’t want to hear.”

“Ah,” you’re thinking, “it’s that oft-quoted George Orwell line carved beneath his statue outside the BBC.” Nearly, but not quite. That line actually came from the mouth of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing American activist who was shot last week on a campus in Utah, where he was about to debate opponents.

In the hours after his death, the man who used his words to provoke fear, hate and division was acclaimed by fans as a “free speech martyr”. So, how ironic that his killing has turbo-charged the Trump administration’s assault on free speech, which it has been quietly waging since gaining power at the start of the year.

There can no longer be any pretence that Trump’s team isn’t intent on silencing opposition after the ABC network pulled its late-night chat show host Jimmy Kimmel off air following demands for action from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, who is a Donald Trump appointee.

Kimmel – one of the most famous men in the US – had made crass and inaccurate comments following the death of Kirk, saying: “The [Make America Great Again] gang [is] desperately trying to characterise 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 went on to attack flags being flown at half-mast for Kirk and, after playing a clip of the President being asked how he was “holding up” two days after Kirk’s shooting (in which Trump said that he was “very good”, before talking about the construction of the White House’s new ballroom), he said of Trump: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Kimmel’s monologue was most probably factually incorrect (there is no evidence that the shooting suspect Tyler Robinson was a Make America Great Again fan). It wasn’t clever. And it certainly wasn’t funny. But (and this is the but) they were the incorrect, moronic, unassuming words he chose to use. A liberty which Kirk, who uttered far worse, would surely have applauded.

Yet far from applauding, Kirk’s libertarian fellow travellers were enraged. 

Carr, under whose leadership the FCC is responsible for approving TV station licences, appeared on a right-wing podcast and called for Disney – which owns the ABC network – to take action. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said.

ABC took its decision to axe Kimmel after Nexstar – one of the biggest owners of American TV stations – said that it would not screen the show.

Nexstar is currently awaiting a sign-off from Carr’s FCC for a $8bn merger. Carr, meanwhile, contributed to the extreme right-wing Project 2025 manifesto which has shaped much of Trump’s policy since his election – and was one of his first appointees to the FCC role. Media moguls are not such “big men” when they see their profits under threat due to actions from an aggressive administration.

Trump, who this week spoke of free speech outside Windsor Castle, responded hours later to news that Jimmy Kimmel Live had been “pre-empted indefinitely” by posting online: “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.”

The President’s hypocrisy would be hilarious, if it weren’t so terrifying.

Because this, of course, is at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on free speech – not by sending jackboots through the front door, but by sparking shockwaves about the bottom line.

Just two months ago, another evening show host – Stephen Colbert – was dumped from CBS’s The Late Show, just as the channel backed down in a $16m lawsuit by Trump over editing an interview with Kamala Harris ahead of the election (and just as permission was sought for a mega-merger between CBS’s owner Paramount and the movie studio Skydance).

Disney also backed down to the tune of $15m when Trump brought a defamation case against ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos, who wrongly said that Trump had been found liable for rape (he was actually found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, but not rape).

There is also a lawsuit ongoing between Trump and the Des Moines Register newspaper after it published a pre-election poll which showed him trailing Harris. And Trump has filed a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for reporting the existence of a message, signature and drawing of a naked woman (all of which Trump denies penning) in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book.

Such use of lawfare has the twin result of tying media organisations up in hugely time-consuming and expensive lawsuits, while discouraging others from even considering what might become problematic reporting.

The FCC has also launched inquiries into the operations of several media companies which could cost them millions – thereby creating a climate of fear across the industry and a trend of obeying in advance.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press news agency remains banned from White House briefings because it refused to accept Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Then, there are the almost daily online attacks on journalists by the President and his acolytes on social media.

Many of these attacks – and the hypocrisy over when it is permissible to criticise Trump – have happened outside the attention of most ordinary Americans. The Kimmel case has brought the debate over free speech centre stage.

This week, Vice President JD Vance – another advocate of free speech – called for US citizens to report to bosses any colleagues who delighted in the death of Kirk.

How can those who have made the right to “free speech” central to their belief system be so quick to abandon it when they don’t like what they hear? And will the Make America Great Again devotees of free speech stick by their faith in the first amendment – or by their support for Trump?

Without doubt, it will (for most) be the latter. Their devotion to Trump overrides all thought about the philosophy that sits behind him. And while they may have agreed with the first part of Kirk’s philosophy – that free speech is saying what you want to say – they never truly believed the second part: “It’s also hearing what you don’t want to hear.”