Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t suspended because of poor ratings. He wasn’t suspended because he crossed some ethical red line. He was suspended because the president of the United States decided to make an example of him.
The supposed justification came on Kimmel’s Monday night show. “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 in his monologue.
There was little evidence at the time to think the shooter was a MAGA supporter, as Kimmel’s comment seemed to imply, and nothing we’ve learned since suggests otherwise. If anything, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
But democracies are supposed to absorb careless speech. Bad jokes, bad takes, even vile remarks are the price of a free society. And the whole point of the First Amendment is to take the government out of the business of deciding what we can and can’t hear.
As my colleague Zack Beauchamp argued, Kimmel’s suspension represents a remarkably brazen attack on free speech. And if it succeeds in setting the precedent that presidents can use regulators to muzzle their enemies, we’re in a political emergency. Because free expression is more than a democratic value. It’s the foundation that makes every other value possible.
But none of what’s happening should surprise us. The same openness that allows dissent and satire is also what makes democratic societies vulnerable to demagogues who can exploit them — what my co-author Zac Gershberg and I called in our book on the subject the “paradox of democracy.”
So there will always be moments when a culture that prides itself on tolerating every kind of speech will eventually have to decide whether it also tolerates efforts to silence speech. This is one of those moments.
How democratic spaces can give way to antidemocratic forces
What we’re seeing in the Kimmel case has precedents that go all the way back to the dawn of democracy.
In Athens, the open legal forum that allowed Socrates to question authority also gave his enemies the power to put him on trial for “corrupting the youth.” The very openness that made debate possible also created the space for repressive forces to weaponize the system against him.
In Weimar Germany, the explosion of film, radio, and print paved the way for new art and progressive ideas, but those same media were quickly turned into tools of mass propaganda by Joseph Goebbels, drowning democratic culture in authoritarian messaging.
In the US today, the regulatory framework designed to safeguard open broadcasting is being wielded to punish a critic of the president. And more broadly, the same wide-open information environment that underpins free expression has made it possible for MAGA and its allies to increasingly dominate the public square — amplifying conspiracy theories, overwhelming fact-based journalism, and eroding the very conditions for shared reality.
Steve Bannon openly bragged about “flooding the zone with shit,” exploiting the sheer volume of the open information environment to break the press. President Donald Trump’s continual torrent of lies works the same way. And hostile actors abroad — from Russia’s troll farms wading into the 2016 US election to Chinese disinformation campaigns on TikTok sowing division today — have learned to infiltrate these same open channels to destabilize democracies.
A lot of us celebrated the collapse of media gatekeepers and the rise of a free-for-all, digital public square in the 21st century. In its early days, the internet was hailed as a democratizing force. But the same qualities that made it feel liberating — openness, access, immediacy — also made it ripe for exploitation.
There’s no easy way to resolve this tension. Free expression is both democracy’s strength and its weakness.
How much do Americans truly value free expression?
In the liberal imagination, free speech is a neutral principle that guarantees a fair contest of ideas, protecting all sides equally. The post-liberal right and MAGA Republicans treat it like a weapon. Speech is power, and judging by their rhetoric and actions this past week, they’re happy to police it when it serves their side.
From their perspective, this is all fair game. Liberals, they say, aren’t really committed to free speech either. They sat by as their allies on the left brought the hammer of repression on “incorrect” beliefs for the last decade or more. They feel justified in using state power the same way.
There’s truth in this critique. The left has its own illiberal reflexes. Cancel campaigns, deplatforming, disinvitations — from Middlebury students shouting down Charles Murray to New York Times staffers revolting over an op-ed to Hamline University dismissing an art-history professor for showing images of the Prophet Muhammad — the left has had its turn at enforcing orthodoxy.
But the difference is that the right now wields the machinery of government to enforce their reflexes in ways Democratic administrations have not done in any comparable way. We’re not talking about sophomores at Wesleyan storming the quad for Palestine.
That’s the crucial distinction, and how we’ve arrived at this juncture, where institutions powerful enough to shape the public square are giving way to political pressure.
That’s what happened here. Nexstar — which owns roughly 200 stations across the country — and ABC didn’t even attempt to defend their own autonomy. They apparently calculated that fighting the government was too costly, especially with billions in merger approvals on the line. So they surrendered. And when institutions with that much power fold, it sends a message to everyone else: Don’t push too far, don’t mock the wrong person, don’t risk your future.
Which is why you don’t have to care about Jimmy Kimmel to care about what just happened. The point isn’t whether you think his monologue was funny or offensive or worse. The point is whether you’re comfortable with the president of the United States using regulatory threats to remove a critic from national television. If the government can do it to Kimmel, it can — and eventually will — do it to anyone who stumbles over the wrong line.
Trump got to where he is because he saw a vulnerability in our system. In a media environment like this, shamelessness is a superpower. You can push the bounds of polite discourse and flood the zone with bullshit as long as you have no scruples. And now, having benefited from the openness of our public square, he’s slamming the gates shut behind him.
