Oh, NOW They Care For Free Speech
None of these free speech warriors spoke up when they deplatformed Roseanne Barr, fired Gina Carano, or canned Matthew Marsden.
I never liked Jimmy Kimmel, and unlike some in this big tent, I never thought he was funny. He was the oafish, chubby friend of Adam Carolla, who I did like. Kimmel was the original DEI hire: the much-pitied friend who would be on the sofa playing Madden if Carolla didn’t bring him along. His talent was bulging his eyes out of his head when the girls on “The Man Show” jumped on the trampoline.
We’ve all seen it at this point, he went on his show and said the guy who killed Charlie Kirk was “MAGA.”
Sinclair, a right-leaning entity that owns a ton of TV stations, were appalled, so was Nextstar. Both dropped his show prompting ABC to follow suit. Sinclair doesn’t want his show just “dropped,” they want the FCC to go after him.
The left wound itself back to hysteria mode, accusing the Trump admin of pressuring ABC and the local networks to drop Kimmel, whose ratings were worse than Colbert’s. Dana said on her show today that she thinks that ABC/Disney just wants to offload a stinker of a late night program, and that makes sense. She directly asked Chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, if he contacted any of these networks to pressure Kimmel off the air, and he said no.
Neither ABC, Disney, Nexstar, nor Sinclair are government agencies. The FCC, long championed by the left who authored a lot of the language governing regulatory authority, have the authority to enforce licenses. Local stations can choose whether or not the content being aired meets the public interest guideline or guidelines for taste. They didn’t think so, without the admin being involved.
Democrats have to target the admin, because if not, they have to admit that the decision by these companies to nix Kimmel’s program was the choice of private companies with the free will to manage its employees. Democrats automatically place themselves in opposition of companies choosing how to run their affairs — much in the same way they placed themselves in opposition of tech companies when they pressured them to deplatform conservatives.
It’s funny how none of these free speech warriors spoke up when they deplatformed Roseanne Barr, fired Gina Carano, or canned Matthew Marsden (for refusing the jab and being conservative).
As Dana said, unless evidence emerges of Carr or others within the FCC or the admin pressuring the local networks or ABC, there is no argument. It’s a private business issue.
PJ Miller works in business and is a Chapter and Verse contributor.
Does the left have any other mode than "hysteria"? Is "reasonable" too hard? The absence of "reasonable" from their skillset is a consequence of indoctrination vice education. The diminution of education results in the slavery and death of its consumers. That's why "trans," as Gutfeld so aptly put, is "direct to consumer nihilism." But if you can't reason with someone who is unreasonable, what good is the argument? The argument of free speech with then becomes the embodiment of irony: the slave of indoctrination arguing against the free thinker on what free speech really means.