Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel Is Just The Beginning

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!!Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 WELCOME BACK TO FREE SPEECH FRIDAY! Earlier this week, ABC and Nexstar yanked Jimmy Kimmel's show off the air after he made a joke about Charlie Kirk's death that the Trump admin didn't like. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called the comments “offensive and insensitive,” and warned ABC and Disney that there could be regulatory consequences if the network didn’t respond.All of this is a gross assault on free speech, and to discuss it (and more!) I brought on Ari Cohn, Lead Counsel for Tech Policy at the Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He's one of the leading first amendment lawyers in the country.  If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!!Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

This is not something that would have been up for debate two decades ago, and it is crazy that it feels like it is now. I don't know how we fixed that. Earlier this week, ABC yanked Jimmy Kimmel's show off the air, and Next Star Media Group dropped it from all of its stations across the country after the comedian joked about Charlie Kirk's killing. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called the comments, quote, offensive and insensitive, and warned ABC and its parent company Disney that there could be regulatory consequences if the network didn't respond. This is a big deal because Next Star, the company that owns all those local ABC affiliates, is trying to acquire Tegna, one of its main competitors. Brendan Carr and the FCC need to approve that merger, but these media companies don't think that will happen if they broadcast things

that Brendan Carr and Donald Trump don't like. All of this is a gross assault on free speech and free expression, and to talk about it, I have Ari Cohen, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or Fire. He's one of the leading for First Amendment lawyers in the entire country. Ari, welcome. Thanks for having me again. All right.

So first I want to explain to people kind of what's going on with this Jimmy Kimmel, Brendan Carr, situation. Obviously, we know he was sort of pulled off the air indefinitely. Can you explain a little bit what Brendan Carr did here and why it's so dangerous? Yeah. So on Monday, I believe it was Jimmy Kimmel's monologue involved some stuff about the Charlie Kirk assassination. And one of the things he said was that he insinuated that the shooter might

have been one of the MAGA crowd, which of course we know at this point at least to not be true and the internet did what it did and went indiscriminately crazy and people started calling for heads and you know we live in very weird times. So enter Brendan Carr, what he does is basically says, well, that's a big problem because broadcast stations have to act in the public interest and my version of the public interest is people not saying things that I don't like, which is basically what he's been saying for the past eight months. And, you know, this is kind of the trend of the punishment in search of an infraction that Brendan Carr is going after here.

And so he said, you know, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. He literally said that, which is something you would expect to hear out of the mob boss, not a government official. And, you know, insinuated that he would go after the ABC affiliates, broadcast licensing, and things like that. And within a matter of hours, ABC announced that it had indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, which is just a new record, perhaps, an ignominious record in caving to the Trump administration's pressure. Yeah. How unprecedented is it? Because I feel like we keep hearing these situations of, like,

CBS, you know, settling this bogus defamation lawsuit basically as like a payout to Trump. Like, it seems like Trump is increasingly, like, encroaching on the media's right to free expression. So where does this stand in the line of kind of like what's been happening? The concept of a broadcaster or a network pulling a personality off the air after a controversy is not new and it's not particularly novel or, you know, noteworthy. It happens. What's unprecedented about this is the direct causal link that you can clearly see in between the government threats and ABC's actions. I mean, it usually doesn't happen that starkly, but like we were treated to a front row seat here in jawboning. government attempts to control content via regulatory threats. I mean, it was explicit and it was fast and it worked.

And it was, that just all adds up to a really shocking set of circumstances. Yeah, it's so egregious and over the top. And like you said, even that line, like it's like parity level. You mentioned jawboning. And this is something that sort of keeps coming up. And I think people see this word around for people that aren't familiar with the concept in the Supreme Court case and everything. Like, can you explain what is jawboning?

And what role does it play? Job-owning is the use of informal pressure rather than direct legal threats or, you know, regulations or lawsuits to try to convince a speaker or social media platform or broadcast or what have you to not say certain things or to take down certain things or censor certain things. It is something that the right has had a lot of complaints about in recent years. They complained very loudly about how the Biden, administration put pressure on social media platforms to take down certain information in the COVID era. And I think generally speaking, complaining about government pressure against speech is a good

thing. The problem is here is you have a very large contingent of the same people who are complaining about it now explicitly cheering it on. Hell, you even had Brendan Carr who woke up on Valentine's Day of 2019 and tweeted about how the FCC should not be censoring content and ideas that it doesn't like. And now today is basically celebrating his threats having the exact effect what he wanted of taking somebody off the air. I mean, there's always a tweet, right? Yeah. Rendon Carson just had like an insane villain arc. And I've seen all these people pulling his tweets from 2019 back when he seemed to have like principles and comparing them to now. I mean, you mentioned like conservatives. This has sort of been something that conservatives

constantly accused Democrats of doing where they were like, as you said, like, oh, Biden pressured the social media companies to take down COVID information. Oh, they're censoring me for my anti-woke beliefs or whatever. Why is what Brendan Carr is doing with the FCC, like, kind of particularly insidious? Because I think for people that think of the FCC as just this general regulatory body, it seems like he's really taken this, like, activist's approach to kind of like what the FCC even does. Yeah, and this is an approach that past FCC's have explicitly rejected. I mean, when you saw complaints against Fox News, people complained say that Fox News,

fair and balanced slogan was a lie and that Fox affiliates should lose their licenses, the FCC consistently said, no, that's not what we do here. We don't adjudge the content of the broadcast, nor do we adjudge the veracity of a tagline of a network. I mean, preposterous, right? Except that's exactly what Brendan Carr's basically saying. I'm going to do all this. I'm going to use whatever I can. I'm going to say it's not the public interest to say things that I don't like. It's not public interest. He said, for a radio station to broadcast where ice raids are happening, even though that's public information and clearly constitutionally protected, his version of not in the public interest seems to align with his political views. And that's just

not how the FCC is supposed to work. And he's really taken this to its extreme. And, you know, he keeps making this excuse that, oh, I'm just playing by the rules the Democrats set. Well, I mean, first of all, no, you're doing a lot more. But second of all, if you are a person of principle, that thought should never cross your mind. I mean, that is, that is a child's answer. It was done to me, and therefore it's okay for me to do it back, is like the two wrongs don't make it right is the first thing we all learn as kids from our parents when we're three years old. And frankly, when you start going down that road when it comes to censorship, we end up in a really bad place because that doesn't have a logical stopping point. And unless you think you're going to be in power forever,

it's going to turn around and bite you on the way back. And, you know, if you're you do think you're going to be in power forever, I have very, very bad news for you about the course of political history. I want to talk about like this most recent attack in the context of broader attacks. I saw people like Chris Hayes and some of these other pundits who are like, this is the worst attack on speech that we've ever had, you know, in democracy or something. And I think for people that have been paying attention, this is sort of just the latest in this progression of the erosion of our civil liberties.

Can you talk about kind of, I guess, some of the other stuff that's going on amidst this that people might not be as aware of that's also threatening. free expression. I mean, just earlier this week, you had the Attorney General of the United States saying, there's a difference between free speech and hate speech, and we're going to prosecute hate speech. I mean, that literally just happened a couple days ago. It feels like a month ago, but it was just a couple days ago. And then she tried to clean it up by saying, because of course, that statement is completely bogus. She tried to clean it up by saying, oh, well, we're going to go after people who incite violence with hatred and whatnot, but then proceeded to give a very

inaccurate, bar-lowering definition of what constitutes incitement. You know, just the clear tenor of all this is they want to make people afraid to say the things that they don't want them to say. This is an exercise in speech-chilling, and it's all part of a pattern from the FCC to the Attorney General to, you know, Ed Martin back when he was doing whatever he was doing at the U.S. Attorney's Office, his Michigas, like, it's just, it's all part of a pattern to make people afraid to say the things that the administration doesn't want them to say. And it can work.

And that's the problem with all this, even if they don't do any of it. It's a huge problem, both because it chills speech and also because it fundamentally undermines First Amendment principles. It weakens them in people's minds. And when that happens, it's much easier for people to act, for government actors to act on these sensorial feelings and imputuses. Like, it's just a really, really bad thing to do, culturally speaking. It's going to take us to a bad place.

And you already see this. dramatic flip of people who spent a lot of time claiming to be, you know, free speech advocates who are now literally celebrating censorship. Like they are, it's not even like they're trying to, they're just, they're celebrating outright. And, you know, that's troubling to see. I mean, so many of these people, like the people that you're talking about celebrating censorship, a lot of them will say the Brendan Carr answer of like, well, it happened to us. But they point to things like Alex Jones getting de-platformed or Trump getting kicked off Twitter or like he's sort of like content moderation decisions, right, that like they feel were so egregious and so

unjust. And I am sympathetic, too, to some of the stuff. Like some stuff, I mean, I covered all of the sort of like disinformation concerns and like there was very legitimate, I think, concern there for some of them. So like, how much credence do you give those sort of original concerns that they had? And like, how much wrong did they suffer under the Democrats really? I mean, I think that every administration steps in it on free speech necessarily. And everyone feels like a victim of it and everyone also has a free speech butt. It's very easy to excuse censorship when the speech is something you don't like. All those things work together to kind of create this cavalier attitude towards what's going on, but we really need to not have that

attitude. We need to be on guard. We need to be worried about this because even if you like the direction it's going now, you're not going to like the direction it's going forever. And once that power exists, it never goes away. It metastasizes. It grows. It morphs. And, you I mean, that is just a fact that we can see that throughout history. So, you know, I think there have been legitimate free speech concerns from Democratic administrations. And I think sometimes, yeah, people are right to feel like maybe they were victims of censorship. And I feel for them. But the answer to that is not to commit censorship of your own.

I mean, that is the worst possible thing you could do because that just means that it's going to double back on you again. You are shooting yourself in the foot when you do that. One thing, and we've talked about this before, that I think that the Democrats and Republicans seem completely aligned on is censorship of the Internet. Like, I feel like censorship of mainstream media, maybe the Democrats are more against. But then you have Kathy Hochel introducing some other insane age verification types bill and Democrats in Congress talking about repealing Section 230. So can you talk a little bit about like on the tech side where you see things going? Because I feel like we see actually quite a lot of bipartisan support for Internet censorship. Yeah, when there's bipartisan support for anything, you should make you think twice about whether.

it's a good idea. But, you know, the thing that has struck me in the past week since Charlie Kirk was shot is the adoption of this, you know, this idea, this frame that social media is the cause of this because it radicalizes people. You had the New York Times for crying out loud, write a piece where they bemoaned that social media platforms hadn't found a way to keep people from being influenced by speech, which is the entire point of speech. It's just like, just bizarre. People are grasping for something to blame. But you know what? I look at the Republicans taking this mantle up now and I say, okay, well, that's not going to work out so well. You have these lawsuits saying that the Buffalo Top shooting and the Dillon Roof shooting in Carolina,

those people were radicalized by racist speech on social media platforms. And therefore, everything that might be racist or radicalizing towards, you know, racism must be taken off social media platforms. And that's going to involve a lot of, you know, things that they might think shouldn't be taken down. And you have Democrats now facing the reality after having called for this for a while where people are saying, literally a congressman said the other day, I'm not making this up. We need to prevent trans people from speaking to each other. We need to get them off the internet. Like he literally said that, Ronnie Jackson. First of all, that isn't just dark, dark thing to say about any group of people that we should keep them from speaking to each other.

other. But that shows where this goes. I mean, when you talk about the concept of radicalization, like, what does that mean, really? That just means people being convinced of an idea you don't like. Well, yeah. I'm just curious just to hop in, like, what do you make of this sort of bipartisan support for this? They're hauling all these people in front of Congress. They're bringing the CEO of Twitch, Reddit, Steam, and Discord, which is crazy because I don't think Twitch was even involved in the, you know, there's no Twitch angle to this shooting. It seems like this excuse to push a censorship crusade. Oh, yeah.

I mean, this is just, it's the basis for the dog and pony show that they're going to have. And that's what these, these hearings are not serious. They're not meant to actually get to any solutions or answers what they're meant for is for either A, members of Congress to berate the tech companies, or B, for them to ask people they already agree with to say the things that they already agree with. It's just, it's not good faith. And, you know, what are they going to do? What are they going to ask Twitch?

discord, like, why aren't you taking down speech that makes people hate Charlie Kirk? Like, that is none of Congress's business. They have no business caring about that, let alone browbeating tech companies just because they think the people saw things uncomplimentary of Charlie Kirk and then one person shot him. I mean, like, come on, let's be serious. It's absurd. I mean, no normal person would think that, but it seems so, like, that belief actually seems so pervasive in the traditional media. Like you mentioned that insane New York Times, Like I've seen other insane framing. A lot of people, also these mainstream journals going on,

talking about these dangerous algorithms, and we need to eliminate algorithms. There's not even any evidence algorithms had anything to do with any of this. The Newer Times Timespeace complained about algorithms, but then the only thing it said was that the shooter talked to people on the internet, which doesn't really implicate algorithm.

Like, nobody has any idea what they're talking about. They're looking for something to blame because this is a senseless killing and nobody really can grasp it. And I get it. I get searching for something to blame, but like, let's be adults about this and really kind of slow our role here. Because, I mean, the things that have been coming out of people's mouths are crazy. Oh, John Stewart put out a whole video about, you know, these dangerous algorithms and social

media, like, putting people down. I think it's terrifying because it funnels this anger that people have towards, you know, a really dark political campaign that's aimed on censorship. I mean, just in terms of, like, what can happen, look at what happened with TikTok and the news that we got this week that we're going to have some, like, America version of TikTok, like run by Larry Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz and, you know, who has a terrible track record on speech as well. And I mean, look, TikTok was banned itself over speech, as Warner and Gallagher said at the Munich Security Conference last year that it was the pro-Palestinian speech on the app that allowed them to get that ban passed through Congress. So it seems like, I don't know, they were able to do it with TikTok. Could they do it for every one of these

social media apps? Well, they're certainly not going to stop trying. I'll say that. But it's actually, it's kind of absurd. You know, we just saw that news about TikTok. And it's now, what, almost a year later? And they came into the Supreme Court saying this is an urgent national security concern. And I mean, maybe my definition of urgent isn't completely aligned with theirs, but I don't think urgency is like nine months from now when it comes to national security. So, you know, I do hope the next time the government claims that the courts aren't so credulous. Yeah, it's shocking to me that the courts fell for this obviously bad faith argument. Well, they fall forward every single time.

Yeah. You just put the word national. Then they pretend that they didn't. Yeah, yeah, it's impuriting. Another thing that seems to be sort of something that they're cracking down on is content creators. And, you know, I've seen a lot of people be like, oh, well, Jimmy Kimmel can just launch a YouTube show or whatever. But it seems like it's harder and harder and they're really targeting content creators as well. I'm wondering if that's something that you've followed at all and how you think that that new form of independent media might be even more. I feel like there's even more vulnerability if you're an independent content creator to some of these sort of pressure campaigns.

There certainly can be more vulnerability because if you got a letter from Congress, it's a much scarier thing if you're an independent career. or you don't, like, they try to haul you in front of Congress, and maybe they will, maybe they won't. But like, that's a scary thing for some person just making, you know, videos in their house. These media companies have budgets. They have lawyers. They can stand up for themselves. When you start realizing that you're playing with fire because people, powerful people are going to get upset at you if you say the wrong thing and you're just a solo. I mean, most people are going to say, well, that's not worth it. You know, why am I, I, I don't need that heat. Why am I going to put myself through that. And that's exactly the problem we need to avoid, because that's the speech showing effect

of all of this. That is how we end up with a neutered public discourse out of fear. It seems like there's not a lot of people. I mean, you've brought this up several times as like try to think of how these laws will be used by the, by the worst people that you know, like if they were in charge, how would they use them? I mean, aside from fire, like what organizations are fighting back and what effective strategies have you seen in terms of countering this mass like censorship campaign? I mean, listen, I have held on to hope that we could kind of turn this around on a cultural level, but I don't, like, this is, like, we're in a dark place right now. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Like, we have people cheering on censorship, and we have people delighting in censorship. They are using it as a weapon of retribution, and they're happy about it. So I don't know what you do with that. I think we have to go through the courts. We have to try and mount any legal challenges and defenses that we can. But people really need to come back to earth on this. It's like, it is scary how far off the ground people have gotten about this.

I mean, it's just, it's worse than I have ever seen it before in my entire career. And, you know, there are, you know, there are tons of groups from, you know, all over the political spectrum and, you know, focusing, whether they're focusing on, you know, civics or democracy or technology. You know, there are tons of organizations that are perturbed by this and trying to do what they can. but it's going to take attitude changes from the general public because civil society can't just make people understand the shit. We need to come to Jesus moment for American society when it comes to what kind of country we want to live in, what freedoms we want to have.

This is not something that would have been up for debate two decades ago, and it is crazy that it feels like it is now. I don't know how we fix that. I know. I think it's bleak. I think people need to recognize that like all of these assaults on free speech are connected. Like I think so many in the media are horrified at Jimmy Kimmel being removed, but they're not horrified about the entire internet being censored, TikTok being banned and the overturning of Section 230 and COSA and all this other stuff. And I, that to me is really frustrating because I think the power of speech on the internet is actually almost bigger than the mainstream media.

And it's even, I wouldn't say, more important, but it's certainly just as important, if not more important to protect. Well, that might be a reason why they're not so worried about it. It's nice to be the gatekeeper, right? One thing that I hear a lot from liberals who I've tried to talk to about this subject that are, I don't know if they would describe themselves as pro-censorship, but they'll say a lot of things of like, well, we do need speech restrictions, and, you know, we do need to cut hate speech, and you shouldn't be allowed to say hate speech. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about just like the concept of hate speech,

because you see this now, like, being weaponized by conservatives as well, where like anybody that isn't sufficiently sort of mourning Charlie Kirk is accused of hate speech or something. It's like North Korea. It's insane. But can you kind of. describe, like, what are the rules around hate speech as they stand? And why is it important to protect maybe things that people would consider hate speech? Yeah, I mean, hate speech isn't a legal category of speech. Like, it is speech just like any other speech. And the reason why that is so

is look around you. The person sitting in the seat gets to decide what's hateful. Two days ago, we saw Donald Trump respond to a question about Pam Bondi's hate speech missive by telling an ABC reporter, maybe she'll go after you. You treat me unfairly. It's hateful. You have hate your hearts. Like, for him, unflattering coverage is hate speech. I mean, this is just the best object lesson in why we don't have hate speech laws that anyone could possibly dream up. I really hoped that we wouldn't have to do this to understand it, but, you know, here we are. And the malleability of what is hateful and what is hate speech will, in every single circumstance, always be used to silence dissent. That is, not something that can be debated. It is. It is.

something that has been proven time after time after time in every situation. There's just no way to give the people in power the ability to restrict hateful speech without them using it for their own purposes. That's just, it's human, human, all too human. So, you know, just look around you. Yeah, no. I mean, I think actually a lot of like pro-Palestine sort of voices and activists learn this lesson the hard way.

I think that they have seen that sort of censorship and maybe hopefully have opened their eyes a little bit more to this issue. I'm wondering, like, also just where things stand on some of these more congressional state laws. I don't know if you've been following the age verification. I've been talking about the, like, the rollout of the Online Safety Act in the UK. You know, you're such an expert of these tech laws. Like, what's the landscape like currently for some of these censorship laws domestically? I mean, we're kind of seeing how things can go haywire in Europe right now.

Like, it's like we are now witnessing. We have a front row seat to what our future is if we go down this road. And it's baffling that our politicians will sit there and criticize your. for their tech laws and for their anti-free speech positions when they are sitting here proposing the same damn things domestically. It is just, I don't know if it's a lack of self-awareness or just dishonesty. I'm just, I can't tell what it is anymore. You know, now that Free Speech Coalition versus Paxton was decided and apparently we can require age verification for pornography based on species legal arguments, people are emboldened. States are now trying to argue that that means

that we can do it for social media too. You can be forced to hand over your drivers likes to have a social media account as well. You know, we are fighting against that, but it's like they are emboldened. They're trying to swing for the fences and, you know, get whatever they can out of this. And, you know, it's particularly chilling when you consider how dissent is being, you know, pursued by this administration to imagine that, you know, we might lose the ability to speak anonymously on social media. It's just a really bad, bad place that we're headed towards if we don't turn things around. You have COSA and the blockbuster AI lawsuits, which threaten to put wind under those particular wings, even if they aren't particularly related, but people see, oh, my God, it's something on the internet and a kid gets hurt. So let's just do something about kid safety generally.

And that's how you end up with terrible laws like COSA probably, you know, that have more possibility of passage than they might have otherwise. We are in a state of panic. We are looking for things to panic about. human beings love to panic. That is, we are very good at it. And we like to blame things. And we like to shove all of our, you know, rational, long-term thinking to the side so we can feel better about having done something.

And if we do that right now, we're going to end up to some real bad stuff. I think that, like, censorship is obviously, it's so rarely sold to the public as, like, overt censorship. Like, Trump is being as overt as possible. But it's scary to see these people, especially these liberals online that are like, oh, So against censorship, we against censorship, but they still buy into this moral panic about social media, and they still buy into this idea that, like, you listen to the wrong person on the internet. All of a sudden, you're racist. Yeah, right.

I don't know how to, like, break that or, like, kind of make people understand that, like, that is delusional and you have fallen for this crazy moral panic that is ultimately, like, the guise for all of this censorship. Yeah, I don't know if people are amenable to being convinced that it's not the case, but what maybe they can be pointed out to them is that the people who are in power right now literally think that people become trans because they read things about trans people. That is where this goes. Like they will say, oh, it's either radicalization or it is leading kids to harmful behaviors and therefore we must stop this speech or cut kids off from this speech or maybe even cut adults

off from the speech. If you are willing to accept that the government, should be able to do this for one category of speech. There is literally no reason why it cannot be done for categories of speech that you don't want it to happen for. That's the point. The power exists and it will be used and it will morph. Yes, I think that's so important

because I think a lot of people would like that to be used of like, oh, anti-radicalization, whatever. But I mean, yeah, the conspiracy about trans people is something that Jonathan Haid himself promoted on PBS last year or the year before, which is depressing. He's sort of one of the main architects of a lot of this moral panic, I would argue. All right, all right.

Well, thank you so much for joining. me today. Thanks so much for having. All right, that's it for this week's show. If you want to support me and my show and the work I do, please support me on Patreon via the link below. You can also buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag.co. That's Usermag.com, where I write about all of these issues and more. If you're listening to this show on a podcast platform, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.