On Sunday’s The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, CNN host Jake Tapper spent an hour mourning the six-day suspension of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel — a personal friend Tapper didn’t disclose — as dangerous for free speech, regardless of Kimmel’s vile comments about it on September 15.

Most disgusting was Tapper relegating the September 10 murder of Charlie Kirk to a supporting role, thus painting a narrative (via use of his time) that Kimmel’s suspension had more dangerous consequences than someone’s murder allegedly by someone who did so because of Kirk’s political views.

It started with this ludicrous opening from Anderson Cooper (click “expand” to read what Cooper said):

Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC sparked an immediate and heated debate over the First Amendment and censorship. To be clear, television networks are legally allowed to suspend or cancel any shows they want, and they have a long history of doing so when it comes to controversies involving their stars or cast members. But Kimmel’s suspension was different because it involved a mix of politics, the president, and the power of his administration when it comes to its critics.

In this next hour, CNN’s Jake Tapper walks us through how the decision to suspend Kimmel unfolded the role of the FCC, ABC’s affiliate stations, and its parent company, Disney, and he speaks to leading First Amendment scholars about the direction we’re heading when it comes to free speech.

It followed with this declaration from Tapper and Lukianoff:

Tapper then tried to insist Kimmel himself wastouched by the Kirk assassination, leaving unaddressed Kimmel both-sidesing it on September 11: “I’ve seen a lot of extraordinary vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum.”

Lukianoff followed with perhaps the most ludicrous statement of the entire special, whining the right has “leapt on” the “emotional opportunity” of their friend’s murder “to go after political enemies.”

Turning to Kimmel’s vile September 15 comments, Tapper falsely claimed Kimmel “wasn’t calling the shooter MAGA” and defended his friend by saying they were made “hours before...more details emerged about the alleged killer and his possible motive.”

With some help from senior legal analyst Elie Honig and New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg, Tapper spun a conspiracy theory web of direct government censorship and collusion with local TV conglomerates Nexstar and Sinclair.

Tapper then arrived at the heroes of this story, excluding himself: Democrat FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez and then Lukianoff (click “expand”):

TAPPER: If you notice there, the President just segued from comedy he doesn’t like to network news he doesn’t like. [TO GOMEZ] Do you think that Brendan Carr, as Chair of the FCC, has weaponized the FCC?

GOMEZ: I think this administration is weaponizing every agency it has under its power right now, and it has asserted that even though the FCC is an independent agency, that it has to do its will. And so, we are using our leverage over private companies to do this administration’s will.

TAPPER: How serious an offense against the First Amendment, do you think, it is what happened to Jimmy Kimmel? I can’t think of anything where government was more directly and openly threatening.

LUKIANOFF: Yeah. One of the things that I found so remarkable about the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing was how upfront the head of the FCC was, how upfront Trump himself was, saying that it’s the stated goal of my administration to get rid of a late-night comedian. That I’m not familiar with in American history. There have been presidents, to be clear, who are not good on freedom of speech. They tended not to brag about it, though.

TAPPER: Or if there were fingerprints, you didn’t see them.

LUKIANOFF: Yeah. That’s one of the fascinating things about the Trump administration, is when they violate the First Amendment and potentially could get away with it because people don’t know the leverage they pulled, Trump himself seems to want to take credit for the cancelation, the person getting in trouble, the person getting fired.

Tapper turned up the lunacy after a break, further cementing his emotions about which event has more significant consequences: “Less than 24 hours after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended, the tight-knit fraternity of late-night hosts rallied around their comedic brother.”

He also wondered “how worried should...comedians or journalists” be of the government’s thumb. Nevermind Kirk being assassinated by someone with a trans lover.

Longtime TV reporter Bill Carter backed Tapper up, saying “late-night...is...not competitive anymore” and “the hosts are best friends, really, and Trump hates all of them.”

In celebrating Kimmel’s return on September 23, Tapper turned to Zoom masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, who said “Carr backing down was a meaningful lesson in what happens when you push back against bullies. Bullies back down, and that’s what Carr did.”

Tapper gushed Kimmel was still “the same...laughter mixed with emotion,” leading Lukianoff to add he saw a “glimmer...of hope” for America because Kimmel “point[ed] to so many conservatives who” defended him and the aggrieved host is “stronger than ever.”

“And while more people are right now watching Kimmel than ever, especially since Sinclair and Nexstar began allowing Kimmel to air on their agency affiliates again, it’s clear this fight is not over,” Tapper added ahead of a narrative from Kimmel, Toobin, and The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman that free speech remains under attack.

Note: All of the above can still speak. Charlie Kirk cannot.

The third segment identified a reality long known by conservatives that late-night comedy has become both extremely political and left-wing, but Tapper, Carter, and Rutenberg never expressed a problem with this pivot Jon Stewart helped lead.

Tapper saw no issue with Colbert and the rest turning their shows into partisan ventings: “Colbert’s progressive viewpoint and harsh attacks on Trump galvanized his liberal viewers who agreed with his point of view, catapulting him and The Late Show to its biggest ratings victory in two decades.”

“President Trump, in many ways, gave new life to all the late-night hosts, The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon...and of course, Jimmy Kimmel...John Oliver, another Daily Show veteran, devoted a huge chunk of HBO Last Week Tonight to Trump fact-checking,” he gushed.

Despite all that, the narrative put forth by Tapper was this pivot should have been something Trump and the public should take lying down.

Tapper even compared these far-left, late-night hosts to Founding Father Benjamin Franklin Bache, who had a newspaper that attack George Washington and ended up being jailed by President John Adams.

The fourth block included Trump comparisons to Richard Nixon, Tapper heralding his 2009 defense of Fox News to the Obama White House, and an admission alongside Lukianoff that the press should have done more in covering the Biden administration’s censorship of viewpoints about Covid-19 (click “expand”):

TAPPER: President Obama made no secret of his disdain for Fox News, trying to ice them out from interviews and publicly dismissing the network as “destructive to the country.” [TO LUKIANOFF] Back in 2009, during the Obama administration, I took issue with the White House labeling Fox News not a legitimate news organization.

LUKIANOFF: Yeah.

TAPPER: Do you see that in any way as an infringement on the First Amendment?

LUKIANOFF: I think it is bad practice. I think it’s definitely the idea that if we’re supposed to be a republic that cares about our press, we don’t do things like that. I didn’t like what Obama did, and I haven’t liked what the administration has done to CNN, for example.

(....)

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN [date N/A]: The outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.

TAPPER: President Biden faced his own accusations of censorship, most notably when his administration tried to control what social media companies allowed to be posted during the pandemic.

LUKIANOFF: Completely inappropriate, and I wish it got better coverage at the time that essentially the government is leaning on you as a private entity to censor speech that the government itself is forbidden from censoring under the First Amendment.

TAPPER: The Biden administration would say, hey, we were just trying to keep dangerous medical advice out of the public realm.

LUKIANOFF: Yeah, and I think that if in COVID we treated the American public like adults who can have discussions and can actually figure out what the truth is for themselves, like you should treat your public in a free and democratic society, we’d be facing a lot less skepticism of expertise right now, for example, like the lab leak theory that we treated at the time as if it were absolute blasphemy, heresy, and obviously already proven wrong.

TAPPER: The lab leak theory is really like, why is that dangerous to discuss?

LUKIANOFF: The thing that people didn’t quite get about the sort of rapid and vehement rejection of the lab leak theory was it wasn’t that any of us knew whether or not it was true. It’s that we knew that they definitely didn’t know for sure. I understand that the Biden administration believed it was doing it with the best of intentions, but censors always think they’re acting with the best of intentions.

Tapper eventually concluded by whining a March 14, 2025 Trump speech as “one of the most political speeches ever given by a sitting President at the Justice Department.”

“What the President was doing...was signaling that he wanted to take a firmer hand in deciding whom to prosecute,” Toobin huffed, backed up by Haberman saying Trump will “use the power of the government in ways we just have not seen before so openly.”

After an hour of painting Kimmel’s suspension as a dangerous attack on freedom, Tapper cowardly returned to Kirk’s murder as though it’s an afterthought: “While Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air, Charlie Kirk’s voice was silenced forever when he was tragically killed, and in this time of escalating partisanship, both sides can at least hopefully agree on this, the First Amendment is a right that is fundamentally American.”

However, Tapper immediately turned to Trump being the real threat to speech, wondering if we’re “an era where free speech is under an attack in a way we haven’t seen in a long time,” adding in one last question to Lukianoff: “What do you want people to know, just like that the price for a free society is that sometimes people are going to offend you?”

“[W]e take freedom of speech for granted and we will really regret when it’s gone,” Lukianoff replied, calling it an inevitable conclusion of “liv[ing] in communities that are more politically homogeneous.”

To see the relevant CNN transcript from September 29, click here.