Jimmy Kimmel FCC Censorship – A Reason to Abolish the FCC

Former President Donald Trump celebrated ABC’s cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Source: Yahoo News report.

Jimmy Kimmel FCC censorship became headline news when ABC abruptly cancelled his show after he criticized political exploitation of the Charlie Kirk murder. Whether you like Kimmel or not, the speed of this sequence shows how a sitting President can stifle opposition in real time by pressuring the FCC and spooking media corporations.

For our broader position on speech and regulation, see our page on
free speech and government overreach.

Kimmel vs. Trump: A Tale of Two Narratives

Former President Donald Trump, speaking only hours after the murder of Charlie Kirk, set his own frame:

“We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

Trump’s immediate blame on “radical left lunatics,” delivered before the shooter’s motive was known, turned a developing tragedy into a partisan rallying cry.

By contrast, Jimmy Kimmel mocked the rush to exploit the event and called out the eagerness to assign blame.

Jimmy Kimmel on Sept. 15, 2025
“We hit some new lows over the weekend, with 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.
This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

This contrast matters because the president’s megaphone shapes more than headlines. When that same president’s appointee at the FCC signals license trouble for a network that airs dissenting voices, narrative and regulatory power reinforce each other. This is why the Jimmy Kimmel FCC censorship episode resonates far beyond late night.

What the Jimmy Kimmel FCC Censorship Shows About Power

The FCC is meant to be an independent agency overseen by Congress. In practice, the executive branch exerts decisive influence:

• Appointments & leadership: The President selects every FCC commissioner and the Chair, who sets the agenda and controls enforcement.
• Regulatory discretion: License renewals and merger approvals can be delayed or denied at will.
• Public signaling: A single remark from the FCC chair—especially when the president is displeased—can trigger panic in boardrooms.

Disney, which owns ABC, has billions of dollars in broadcast, streaming, theme-park, and sports ventures depending on FCC approvals. Risking those for one host, no matter how popular, is a business calculation executives won’t make.

When All Branches Bend to One Will

The U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers is supposed to prevent abuse. Yet when one party controls both houses of Congress, enjoys a sympathetic or hesitant Supreme Court, and commands the executive agencies, formal checks become paper thin.

• Shape the public story with immediate statements.
• Lean on regulatory agencies to enforce that story.
• Count on allied legislators and judges to look the other way.

This convergence is unprecedented in American history and serves as a stark warning that the wheels are coming off our democracy. What was designed as a system of competing powers is tilting toward a single point of failure.

Libertarians Have Been Right All Along

Many Americans were raised to believe that a little regulation keeps things fair. But this case shows how those same levers can go terribly wrong, punishing speech and rewarding political favoritism. It’s a vivid reminder that when government holds the keys to communication, everyone eventually suffers.

Full Post at Libertarian Party of California https://ca.lp.org/late-night-lesson-in-liberty-how-jimmy-kimmels-suspension-shows-the-dangers-of-fcc-power/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM7-UpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHny28EBVE9LeOVa2fvTBxrrHv4CT684ZdqHzKyzFMdmjbIkvwKbvvxN4Nci3_aem_HXvxyOjKfgvxUgcAFbKvgA

Yesterday’s tariff announcement was long expected, yet its details came as a surprise. In one regard it was less bad than it could have been: The baseline tariff of ten percent was less than the 20 percent widely touted. But the methodology of the “reciprocal tariffs” added to the baseline tariff was dismaying and not one many practicing economists had considered. The effects of this announcement are likely to be disadvantageous to Americans and may risk economic disaster. They will also have geopolitical effects that future American administrations will rue.

To begin with, the reciprocal tariffs are supposed to represent the sum of tariff and non-tariff barriers imposed by the foreign nation on American exports, plus factors like Value Added Taxes (which are not trade barriers). However, the administration says it calculated this based on the assumption that “the trade deficit that we have is the sum of all the unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.” This assumption essentially says that all American trade deficits are the result of unfair trade practices, whereas economic analysis says differently (they are caused by differences between the nation’s capital account and current account). So, the initial assumption is faulty.

This leads to absurd situations. Small, poor countries that cannot afford to buy many US goods are penalized harshly. Even uninhabited islands are subject to the ten percent minimum tariff. But so are countries like the UK that has its own trade deficit with the United States (one might ask if this is the result of US “cheating”). Moreover, this applies only to trade in goods. Trade in services, where the US routinely runs surpluses, are not mentioned.

As CEI analysts have argued until they are blue in the face, these trade barriers will be harmful to American consumers. They will also cause problems for American producers, and have already led to factory closures and the loss of manufacturing jobs. Global stock markets are reacting badly, and the dollar is falling. All of this was entirely predictable, and it is likely to continue. A recession is not out of the question.

Full Post with more analysis by Iain Murray @ Competitive Enterprise Institute https://cei.org/blog/an-economic-constitutional-and-geopolitical-disaster/

WASHINGTON DC – National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) President Jake Colvin today issued a statement following the announcement by the President of new reciprocal tariffs:

“We share the President’s desire to grow U.S. production of manufactured goods, agriculture products, services, and knowledge, but dramatically increasing America’s tariffs will undercut that objective.

“Without oversight from Congress, the President intends to raise tariffs to the highest levels since the Great Depression, which jeopardizes the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and the pocketbooks of all Americans.

“While the price of imported goods will undoubtedly rise, the President’s tariffs will also tack on added costs to American manufacturing, assembly and farming. There is simply no way to mitigate all of the added costs of inputs to finished goods from the Administration’s complex and growing web of tariffs. Consumers should expect to see higher prices for everything from groceries to home renovations to auto insurance as construction and repair costs rise. 

“The America First Trade Policy rightly recognizes the harmful impact that discriminatory measures can have in preventing U.S. companies from accessing foreign markets, but tariffs should be a scalpel to remedy specific unfair practices, not a sledgehammer that disregards our trade commitments, invites retaliation and undermines the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and the finances of the American people. 

“The Administration, Congress and America’s key trading partners and allies quickly need to identify paths forward to de-escalate and seek a durable new normal that lowers barriers, rebuilds trust and minimizes uncertainty.

“We look forward to partnering with the Administration and Congress to think creatively about pathways to foster trust with our trading partners and achieve our shared goals of lowering trade barriers and enhancing the competitiveness of American businesses and workers.”

Source:The National Foreign Trade Council @ https://www.nftc.org/tariffs-jeopardize-the-competitiveness-of-u-s-businesses-and-the-pocketbooks-of-all-americans/

by Eric Boehm (from Reason.com)

“Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt!” Haley said during Wednesday’s first Republican primary debate.

When it comes to runaway federal spending, unsustainable levels of borrowing, and the inflation that those first two things have helped unleash, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Wednesday that Republicans better look in the mirror.

“The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us, our Republicans did this to us too,” Haley said during the early moments of Wednesday’s Republican primary debate. She pointed specifically to Republican support in Congress for COVID stimulus bills and other recent spending packages. “They need to stop the spending, they need to stop the borrowing, they need to eliminate the earmarks that Republicans brought back in,” she said.

Then she delivered the hammer blow: “And Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt, and our kids are never going to forgive us for this,” Haley said.

She nailed it.

Trump promised to pay off the national debt within eight years when he was running for office in 2016. When he got to the White House, the national debt was a little less than $20 trillion. He, uh, didn’t pay it off. Instead, federal spending climbed each of the first three years that Trump was in office—from $3.98 trillion in fiscal year 2017 to $4.45 trillion in 2019—then exploded in 2020 due to emergency COVID-19 spending. (For the first two years of Trump’s term, Republicans also had full control of Congress, so there is a lot of blame to go around.)

When he left, the national debt was nearing $28 trillion. Today, it stands at $32.7 trillion.

Republicans have predictably swung back to a message of fiscal restraint during President Joe Biden’s time in office, seemingly forgetting that the fiscal years of 2017 and 2018 ever existed.

Haley shining a spotlight on the bipartisan role of borrowing and spending in recent years was a welcome moment—and a powerful one for Haley, who stood out during Wednesday’s sometimes chaotic debate. And it’s critical for whoever wins next year’s presidential election to be clear-eyed about the seriousness of the debt problem facing the federal government.

Commentary by Eric Boehm reposted from Reason.com https://reason.com/2023/08/23/nikki-haley-burned-trump-and-her-fellow-republicans-for-blowing-up-the-debt-shes-right/?itm_source=parsely-api

“The FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate, according to a newly unsealed court document.”

“The FBI says it has already fixed the problems, which it blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”

“But the failures to use the Section 702 database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year. “

Full article@ Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/19/fbi-digital-surveillance-misuse-jan6-blm/

 GOP politicians often pay lip service to the principles of limited government, they usually increase spending even faster than Democrats.

Indeed, Republicans are even worse than Democrats when measuring the growth of domestic spending!

This is bad news because it means the burden of government expands when Republicans are in charge.

And, as Gary Abernathy points out in a column for the Washington Post, Republicans then don’t have the moral authority to complain when Democrats engage in spending binges.

President Biden is proposing another $3 trillion in spending… There are objections, but none that can be taken seriously. …Republicans had lost their standing as the party of fiscal responsibility when most of them succumbed to the political virus of covid fever and rubber-stamped around $4 trillion in “covid relief,”… With Trump out and Biden in, Republicans suddenly pretended that their 2020 spending spree happened in some alternate universe. But the GOP’s united opposition to Biden’s $1.9 trillion package won’t wash off the stench of the hypocrisy. …I noted a year ago that we had crossed the Rubicon, that our longtime flirtation with socialism had become a permanent relationship. Congratulations, Bernie Sanders. The GOP won’t become irrelevant because of its association with Trump, as some predict. It will diminish because it is bizarrely opposing now that which it helped make palatable just last year. Fiscal responsibility is dead, and Republicans helped bury it. Put the shovels away, there’s no digging it up now.

For what it’s worth, I hope genuine fiscal responsibility isn’t dead.

Full Post by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/big-government-republicans-enable-big-government-democrats/?utm_source=feedotorg&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fee_partners

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) has decided to close out the year by introducing the most unobjectionable piece of legislation ever conceived.

Called the Kittens In Traumatic Testing Ends Now Act, or KITTEN Act, Merkley’s bill—introduced last week—aims to stop the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current practice of killing off cats they breed for research, requiring instead that these kitties be put up for adoption.

“The KITTEN Act will protect these innocent animals from being needlessly euthanized in government testing, and make sure that they can be adopted by loving families instead,” Merkley said in a statement.

The bill is a response to revelations from the White Coat Waste Project, an anti-animal testing group, about the USDA’s practice of essentially using kittens as parasite incubators at its Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland.

Carlin Becker described the grizzly practice for Reason in September:

“Documents obtained by the [White Coat Waste Project] show the department has been breeding around 100 kittens a year for almost 50 years just to infect them with a parasite that can cause toxoplasmosis, a disease that can lead to miscarriages and birth defects in humans and is a leading cause of death from foodborne illness. The department collects the kittens’ feces for two to three weeks and then simply euthanizes them with a shot of ketamine to the heart.”

This is a pretty shocking practice, considering the undeniable cuteness of the average kitten. It’s made worse by the fact that euthanizing the cats is almost certainly unnecessary.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the toxoplasma found in the research kitties’ poop only poses a risk to humans for up to three weeks after the animal is first infected. The parasite is easily treated in both humans and cats, and most people who become infected with toxoplasma do not even require treatment.

Nevertheless, the USDA has continued to defend the practice, arguing that it’s just following orders best practices in animal research, and that the risks to adoptive families are just too great to let these cats live.

“Our goal is to reduce the spread of toxoplasmosis. Adopting laboratory cats could, unfortunately, undermine that goal, potentially causing severe infections, especially with unborn children or those with immunodeficiencies,” a USDA spokesperson said to CNN back in May.

All things considered, this is a remarkable testament to a bureaucracy’s habit of just continuing to do the same thing it’s always done regardless of how cruel or unnecessary it might be. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone that could be opposed to ending needless, government euthanasia of potential fur babies.

No action has been taken on Merkley’s bill, as the text of his legilsation has not been released. A companion House bill—which would prohibit any “painful or stressful” USDA experimentation on cats—was introduced back in May, but has languished in committee for months.

Even in these divided times, one would hope that Americans could at least rally around the cause of saving a few cute kittens from needless, taxpayer-funded annihilation.

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2018/12/28/bill-to-end-unnecessary-federally-funded

On the heels of an unpaid-for $1.3 trillion spending binge, House Republicans have announced they plan to—I’m not making this up—push for a balanced budget amendment (BBA) when they return from recess. This only proves there is no low to which the GOP will not stoop as it continues to insult the intelligence of its voter base.

The real strategy to pass a BBA, as happened with Obamacare, will most likely be to hold empty, meaningless roll call votes on measures that have no hope of passing and which the GOP has no plan to carry out. Then a Republican lawmaker can tell voters in the fall: “Look, we tried to do something about federal spending, but the Democrats voted against the balanced budget amendment.”

Here’s why the GOP’s move to prioritize BBAs should be perceived as the duplicitous pandering and vacuous virtue signaling that it is: first, there’s the timing. This gesture comes just after lawmakers from both parties passed a broad, two-year budget framework that blows up the budget caps imposed in 2011, and will lead to trillions in spending each and every year henceforth, with interest payments on the massive federal debt set to outpace the cost of the military and the cost of Medicaid in just eight years. Voting for gargantuan spending of this size and then claiming to support a balanced budget amendment is like gorging on a sumptuous feast while insisting that you want a svelte physique.

The other reason voters should not take the Republican call for a BBA seriously is that even in the best of times it is almost impossible to pass an amendment to the Constitution. A balanced-budget amendment would require the support of two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate, in addition to the backing of three quarters of the states. That’s an almost impossible lift, which is why only 27 amendments to the Constitution have ever been ratified.

Nevertheless, calls for BBAs have been popular since the 1980s, and gained particular steam from conservatives in 2010 with the Tea Party movement. The idea sounds deceptively simple: a balanced budget amendment would require that the government spend no more than it takes in during any given year.

But even if by some miracle one was ratified, a balanced budget amendment is a blunt instrument that wouldn’t necessarily be effective. That’s because during recessions and economic downturns, the government has to spend more on things like nutritional assistance and unemployment benefits. With a BBA in place, Congress would be unable to do so, resulting in something like sequestration on steroids.

Full column by Barbara Boland @ The American Conservative http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-gops-laughable-call-for-a-balanced-budget-amendment/