“Republicans are the party with a sense of humor,” comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said, chuckling, at last year’s now-infamous Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.
So much for that. In Trump’s America, you are now not only forbidden to criticize a certain foreign country (Israel), post impolitely about corporate executives, or have memes on your phone that mock the vice president. You’re now apparently also not allowed to make jokes about the president or his friends.
Last night, ABC announced it was abruptly pulling late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” mere hours after Trump and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened the network. Trump was already unhappy about ABC’s news coverage of his administration, and Carr specifically cited a part of the monologue that Kimmel, who has spent years getting under the president’s skin, delivered this past Monday.
Trump loyalists will say Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air because of the jokes he’s made. They say the real problem was he was whipping up violence, and that he was spreading misinformation — incidentally, the same excuses Democrats have used the past eight years when they pushed tech companies to censor their users. Here is Kimmel’s offending statement:
The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
Kimmel’s critics are correct that he was factually wrong here in implying Kirk’s killer is MAGA: there is no indication yet he was a Trump supporter and, in fact, no evidence so far that he had any strong political views at all beyond being pro-gun and pro-LGBTQ. But you’re allowed to be factually wrong and on TV: most of the people on TV are, including on pro-Trump news networks — which are, at least nominally, actual news reporting outfits and not…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
