First They Kill the Joke
Free speech is only free speech when they agree with it.
Last week, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade went on live TV and suggested solving homelessness by murdering the homeless. “Or involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill ’em,” he said. Kilmeade has since apologised, but there have been no consequences.
Free-speech absolutists have rallied to defend Kilmeade. The First Amendment protects even the rotten and offensive - even hate speech. The Supreme Court said so last year. You’d think these defenders of free expression would stand up for everyone’s right to speak their mind. But no. It’s easy to defend free speech when you agree with it. The real test is defending the speech you can’t stand. That’s how you know they don’t really believe in it.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way… take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel mocked Donald Trump’s bizarre response to the murder of his “friend” Charlie Kirk. Asked how he was coping, Trump rambled about building a White House ballroom. Kimmel observed “This is not how an adult grieves a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr went on air to attack Kimmel and gave the ABC a not at all veiled warning, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way… take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” In other words, get rid of him or else! A few hours later, Kimmel was suspended.
Trump’s White House is on a full-blown censorship spree. They’ve sued major newspapers, gutted NPR and PBS, torched diversity programs, and threatened critics with prosecution. Attorney General Pam Bondi even vowed to “target you” over hate speech, conveniently forgetting that pesky supreme court ruling. She’s since had to walk back her comments. Even so, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl pressed him Tuesday about the attorney general’s comments, Trump doubled down on an old idea of his — that journalists should be punished for reporting critically on his administration, which he branded as “hate.” “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly — it’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart,” he snapped at Karl.
The free-speech warriors who for years railed against any kind of censorship, now scream to silence anyone who says anything they don’t agree with.
“Dictators have always hated and feared comedy.”
This is how it always starts. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Putin, every authoritarian has gone after artists first. Hitler called art he disliked “degenerate,” seizing 20,000 works and branding the creators “sick minds.” Stalin outlawed the avant-garde and demanded flattering portraits of himself.
Under Putin, comedy hasn’t been officially outlawed, yet, but political humour has been completely silenced anyway. Comedians who mocked the government, the church, or the war in Ukraine have been fined, banned, deported, or forced into exile. Idrak Mirzalizade was expelled after a joke about racism; Alexander Dolgopolov, 25, has fled Russia after police presented a formal request for information about him to the HopHead Tap Room in St. Petersburg, where he made jokes about Vladimir Putin during a performance. and since 2022, new laws against “discrediting the armed forces” have been used to prosecute satirists and meme-makers alike.
Dictators have always hated and feared comedy. You see, laughter at their expense drains their power and chips away at the glue holding their empires together. One comic with a mic can rip the mask off a dictator. You can imagine the thin-skinned Trump going completely insane watching parodies of himself on TV - smashing anything to hand, his head dangerously close to exploding and screaming for vengeance.
And he will get his vengeance. That’s what the Kimmel situation is all about. These dictator types are nothing if not petty and vindictive. And they won’t miss an opportunity no matter how transparent it is.
Criticism of anyone calling out Charlie Kirk, for being that nasty, bitter, racist that he was, is a false flag operation. There are a lot of commentators comparing it to the Reichstag fire.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag burned. Hitler seized it as proof of a Communist plot, though there is a possibility the Nazis lit the fire themselves. Within hours, Communists, Social Democrats, and anyone branded a traitor or “enemy of the people” were rounded up. The very next day, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed, abolishing freedom of assembly, speech, and the press, and stripping away all constitutional safeguards. Overnight, every restraint on police power vanished. The rules had changed and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Initially, I think, Charlie Kirk’s murder was the modern Reichstag fire until the killer was seen to be one of their own. A white, gun-toting kid from a MAGA-Mormon family. That wouldn’t do at all. Now it’s criticism of Charlie Kirk that will get to targeted. And it won’t stop with Jimmy Kimmel. There will be other comedians suspended, sacked, imprisoned, deported.
We should be worried: first they kill the joke, they might start killing the jokers.