This week, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air after the Trump administration threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of local affiliates who platformed the show. President Trump commented on the cancellation while aboard Air Force One. He said:
When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do — if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years, or something — when you go back and take a look at it, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.
Trump is wrong. They are allowed to do that. Their right to do that is at the core of the First Amendment. If President Obama threatened to revoke the licenses of the radio stations that carried Rush Limbaugh or other conservative talk show hosts, conservatives would have been in an uproar. What would have been wrong then is still wrong now.
As evil and enraging as it is to see people celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, that is not a crime.
The initial justification for FCC Chairman Brendan Carr exerting pressure on ABC and the local affiliates to drop Kimmel was that Kimmel essentially lied about the identity of Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Kimmel implied to his audience that the killer had been a Trump supporter, when in fact, the killer was a radical Leftist who had “hey fascist, catch!” and “Bella Ciao” engraved on his bullets, and was motivated by a desire to “protect” his transgender romantic partner from Charlie Kirk’s political speech. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” the killer wrote.
Kimmel’s misrepresentation that the killer was a Trump supporter was a disgusting lie and it was part of a misinformation campaign that has been working on the public. A YouGov poll conducted in the days after the shooting revealed that a plurality of respondents with an opinion — 24 percent — believed the shooter was a Republican. This willful lie came at a time when Republicans are under threat in this country: Destiny, a far-Left but popular political commentator, said “You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they can look to their leadership to turn down the temperature. The issue is, right now, they don’t feel like there is any fear.”
He said this on a livestream in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. As someone who helped organize a vigil for Charlie Kirk in Washington Square Park, I can attest to the fact that security concerns are at the forefront of conservative activists’ minds when planning events. We had to have NYPD and private security present and had to stay very vigilant in monitoring the area for possible attacks.
Luckily, despite interruptions where people said they were glad Charlie Kirk died and chanted “Free Palestine,” there was no violence. At a separate vigil hosted at the same location a few days later, however, a far-Left protester sang to NYU College Republicans President Ryan Leonard, “I want you to fucking die,” and warned, “we’re not going to give you a second chance, even when you beg for it, on your knees, begging and pleading.” Another protester — these are people who protest against a vigil — sang Bella Ciao, the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist song that was engraved on one of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets.
Unfortunately, the hatred expressed in those statements is commonplace on the Left. According to a YouGov poll, only 38 percent of Democrats said it’s “always unacceptable” to feel happy about the death of a public figure they oppose, compared to 77 percent of Republicans who said it’s “always unacceptable.”
Similarly, another poll conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute showed that 55 percent of Americans who identified as left of center thought it would be “at least somewhat justified” to murder Donald Trump. That is unacceptable, and it is very hard to maintain a constitutional democracy when that many people approve of and welcome political violence. Over the last week, we’ve seen many Charlie Kirk memorials vandalized and destroyed, including at my law school. Conservatives are justly outraged by the celebration of Charlie Kirk’s death that they have seen from some on the Left.
However — however — we have to be smart about how we approach this. The people who make threats or incite violence, such as the commentator Destiny and the protester who threatened the College Republicans President with murder, should absolutely be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. As of this writing, the DOJ has not brought charges against Destiny, but they should. Thankfully, many of the people who have destroyed Charlie Kirk’s vigils and destroyed people’s property have been arrested and charged. However, conservatives must resist the urge to crackdown on free speech and weaponize the instruments of government against their political opponents in ways that we will all regret.
Administration officials, including Trump, have already gone too far in this regard. Stephen Miller, whose advocacy on a whole host of issues has been invaluable, was wrong when he accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of “inciting violence” when she said, “I do believe those of you who are interested in rewriting this hateful man’s history are full of shit.”
Ilhan Omar’s words were not an incitement to violence. They were offensive and wrong, but they were not an incitement to violence. Incitement to violence is illegal. Offensive speech — even when it is hateful — is not. This is a principle that Republicans have advocated strongly for up until five minutes ago. On a podcast, Attorney General Pam Bondi, said “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech … We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Pam Bondi is wrong. On the podcast, she invoked the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an added reason to “target” people who engage in hate speech. But Charlie Kirk himself outright rejected that argument. “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free,” he tweeted in May 2024.
The term “hate speech” has been used to silence conservative voices on college campuses across America for years. It has been wielded at people who support Trump, support the construction of a border wall, or oppose racial preferences in hiring practices. To see the right adopt that term — the leaders of our government nonetheless — is a betrayal of everything we fought for regarding free speech for years.
The government cannot and should not police thought crimes. As evil and enraging as it is to see people celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, that is not a crime. If we are going to combat the evil that has captivated much of the population, we have to do it through winning the battle of ideas. When Congress passed legislation codifying the FCC’s prior fairness doctrine into law, President Reagan vetoed it. He described “content-based regulation by the Federal Government” as “antagonistic to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment.” Conservatives and classical liberals have long been advocates of free speech. Government censorship is not okay just because Trump is engaging in it.
When Trump was running for President, he said “We are not the ones trying to undermine American democracy. We are the ones fighting to save our democracy.” I agreed with Trump then and would like to see him continue in that spirit now. That is why I campaigned for him in Bucks County, volunteered at his Madison Square Garden rally, and phone-banked for him during the last election. I want to live in a great country, not fight over who will reign over a corner of hell. By threatening to remove the licenses of his critics and investigate people who engage in “hate speech,” Trump is making America less free. Trump’s election was intended as a repudiation of Biden’s weaponization of the DOJ and other agencies to silence political critics — not a license to adopt those tactics ourselves.
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Joe Silverstein is a Juris Doctor candidate at Brooklyn Law School. He has been published in Newsweek, Fox News, Fox Business, New York Post, The American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, and various other publications.