Democrats are desperate to maintain their grip on the levers of cultural power, starting with the nation’s television networks. They went into absolute meltdown as their friend Jimmy Kimmel, who headlined the biggest fundraiser in Democratic Party history a year ago, endured a short suspension following a callous and intentionally inaccurate monologue about Charlie Kirk’s murder. Kimmel returned to the air on Tuesday after a pathetic non-apology from Disney (the ABC network’s corporate parent), though many ABC affiliates still refuse to carry the program.
When Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr raised the question last week whether that kind of programming is compatible with ABC’s public interest obligations, Democrats went into uproar at his supposed attack on free speech. Never mind that it was private companies — advertisers and affiliates — who put the meaningful pressure on Disney, and Disney itself that made the ultimate call to take Kimmel down.
Their distortion as to the real record of what happened (set forth quite clearly by Chairman Carr himself this week) won’t stand in the way of their talking points any more than their own record of using the FCC to target conservatives when they were in power.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, for instance, is the ranking Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over the FCC. She accused Carr of an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment,” saying that his “bullying tactics are offensive to the First Amendment.” She must have forgotten leading a letter from a dozen Senate Democrats in 2018 to Carr’s predecessor asking the commission to investigate Sinclair Broadcasting for “deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information.”
Of course, that’s what Kimmel did by presenting a monologue that was blatantly false in its characterization of a key fact about Kirk’s shooter, claiming he was a right-wing zealot when government officials had several days earlier confirmed he was motivated by a left-wing ideology.
Meanwhile, the top Democrats on the House Energy & Commerce Committee, that chamber’s committee of jurisdiction, have called for an inspector general investigation into Carr, charging that his comments on Kimmel were an “abuse of authority” and a “transparent act of illegal and unconstitutional censorship.” In 2018, House Energy & Commerce Democrats killed a Republican effort to hold an inquiry after two Democrats on the committee, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent a letter to cable companies pressuring them to drop Fox, Newsmax, and One America News for “misinformation.”
U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, another of the House Energy & Commerce Democrats, wrote on Twitter in 2021, “Enough is enough. We can no longer allow conservative media to lead Spanish-language misinformation campaigns on Florida’s Latino communities. It’s time for the FCC to intervene.” He was part of a campaign by Democrats to stop a conservative-leaning businessman from owning a Miami-area radio station; the transaction never went through.
I could go on — the Baltimore Democrat state’s attorney asking for an investigation into a local Sinclair station; the Fox Philadelphia station subject to an unprecedented license review because of its shared ownership with Fox News Channel — but the point is obvious: Democrats have exactly zero credibility when attacking Chairman Carr for supposedly politicizing the FCC.
That’s doubly so because so many of these same Democrats have been guests on Kimmel’s show or recipients of his political largesse. California Democrat Sen. Adam Schiff, for instance, wrote on Instagram, “The attack on Jimmy Kimmel is yet another page in the dictator’s playbook.” Schiff has received over $20,000 in campaign contributions from Kimmel and has twice been a guest on his show.
Kimmel’s given nearly $200,000 in personal donations to Democrats, sent emails and texts fundraising for their campaigns, headlined rallies and appeared in TV spots. No wonder they’re beside themselves that their buddy can no longer use the airwaves night after night to promote them and attack their opponents.
The real attacks on press freedom since Kirk’s death started with a bomb that thankfully failed to ignite after being placed under a Fox affiliate’s truck in Utah. They continued when a former senior official from the California teachers union fired three shots into an ABC affiliate in Sacramento. Sinclair Broadcasting has since disclosed that many of its ABC affiliates received threats of violent reprisals for its role in pressuring Disney to take Kimmel off the air, leading it to cancel a planned tribute to Kirk for fear of triggering attacks on its employees and properties.
The First Amendment is actually under assault when a speaker on a college campus is gunned down or when television stations are shot up based on their programming choices. Democrats should focus on addressing the reality of left-wing domestic terrorism within their own base rather than posing for holy pictures attacking Chairman Carr, especially when their comments reek of rank hypocrisy for anyone who checks the record of the last decade.