In his convention five years ago, President Donald Trump and his Republican party gathered their supporters fervently against an idea that they characterized as rot in society: cancel culture.
Too many people, argued one by one in speeches during stellar schedule, were being publicly ostracted, in some cases losing their work, for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression.
“For the voiceless, embarrassed, censored and canceled, my father will fight for you,” Eric Trump promised then.
But the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was among the speakers in that 2020 convention, seems to have quickly changed how Trump and other Republicans see the limits of freedom of expression and the rules of commitment for a culture of cancellation once adorned.
Previously a voice for canceled, now they are the ones who cancel.
The debate, feeding on the anger and pain of a White House where many, including vice president JD Vance, were close friends of Kirk, intensified Wednesday with the “Jimmy Kimmel Live shelf!” The ABC, owned by Disney, took out the night interview program hours after Brendan Carr, president of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened to “take action” against the company about Kimmel’s criticisms on how Republicans reacted to Kirk’s death.
“The Maga gang [is] Trying desperately to characterize this child who murdered Charlie Kirk as more than one of them and doing everything possible to score political points, “Kimmel said during his Monday monologue.
Tyler Robinson, accused of fatally shooting Kirk, came from a conservative family but, according to his mother, “he had begun to lean more on the left” politically during the last year, according to judicial documents. Robinson’s text messages published by the authorities said he went to Kirk because “he had enough hatred.”
Kimmel’s indefinite preference, which has raised concerns about the censorship sanctioned by the State, occurred for a week when Trump and other administration officials have promised to address left -wing organizations and people who believe in political violence. Attorney General Pam Bondi has raised the possibility of taking energetic measures against the “hate speech.” And Vance has encouraged people to call and press for the dismissals of those “celebrating” Kirk’s death.
He asked Trump, who celebrated the Kimmel News on social networks, about his ramifications for freedom of expression on Thursday during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and said something horrible about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk,” Trump replied. “Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad grades, and they should have fired it a long time ago. So you can call that freedom of expression or not. He was fired due to lack of talent.”
Trump, speaking with journalists later on Air Force One, suggested that the television stations he considers hostile could lose their FCC licenses.
Vance has been one of the lougiest champions of the freedom of expression of the administration and, more recently, one of his strongest voices that ask that Kirk be punished in death.
“The first amendment protects a very ugly speech, but if you celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk, you should not be protected from being fired for being an unpleasant person,” Vance said in an interview that was broadcast on Wednesday night in Fox News.
In February, Vance advocated a federal employee who had renounced publications on social networks that support racism and eugenics: “The stupid activity of social networks,” he argued then, he should not “ruin the life of a child.” Vance has also accused European allies of undermining the spirit of freedom of expression, specifically pointing to Germany to isolate the AFD, a political party with Nazis echoes.
“One thing is to say that a particular set of views is disgusting … or somehow outside the Overton window, outside the limits of reasonable discourse,” Vance said in an interview in May. “I think it is very, very dangerous to use the neutral state institutions, the military, the police forces … Intel services, to try to delegitimize another competitor political party.”
He added that, although he was a “quite a believer in freedom of expression … I think where I bring the line is to encourage violence against political opponents.”
Vance has not yet commented on Kimmel’s cancellation, apart from joking on social networks that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who already works as a Trump National Security Advisor, would be “the new host of ABC’s night show.”
During the administration of President Joe Biden, the conservatives complained that the officials used tactics, similar to those that the Trump administration is accused of adopting, to quell the conservative discourse, with the threat of adverse consequences if the requests were not honored, a practice known as “amazing.”
A key accusation often cited is the pressure that Biden officials put to social media companies to eliminate the content, especially because it relates to the anti -cachamic feeling.
That narrative suffered a setback last year when the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision written by the conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, said that several Republican states and individual users of social networks had not been able to adequately claim that the requests of government officials directly affected the content moderation decisions of the social networks of social networks.
Aware of how the animation of a cause has been the culture of the cause for Republicans in Trump’s era, some Democrats are intervening with alarm.
“There is no freedom of expression under the reign of Donald Trump”, the governor of California Gavin Newsom, seen as one of the main presidential prospects in 2028, published Wednesday night in X.
Newsom also caught attention to an old position by Stephen Miller, now head of the White House Deputy Cabinet, who, together with Vance and Bondi, has led the public position of the Trump administration since Kirk’s death.
“If the idea of freedom of expression enrages it, the cornerstone of democratic self -government, [then] I regret to inform you that you are a fascist, ”Miller wrote in 2022.
Former President Barack Obama, who comments on moderation about hot issues of the day, also accused the Republicans of inconsistency.
“After years of complaining about the cancellation culture, the current administration has led it to a new and dangerous level routinely threatening the regulatory action against media companies unless they are made to reporters and commentators and commentators,” Obama published Thursday in X.
The president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, Republican of La-La., Spuso questions on the subject of Kimmel when he spoke with journalists on Thursday.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Johnson said. “What I do know is that ABC is a private company, and they can make their own decisions about who they want to use their brand, so to speak. So this is a matter of ABC leadership. It has nothing to do with Congress or anything we are doing.”
Others inside and near the Trump administration have rejected hypocrisy suggestions by insisting that what they are being involved is not equivalent to Cancel culture.
“Welcome to the culture of consequence,” Taylor Budowich, another White House cabinet deputy director, published Wednesday night in X. “Normal and common sense Americans are no longer taking bulls, and companies like ABC are finally willing to do the right and reasonable.”
Budowich also responded to Newsom: “Freedom of expression is Alive & Well. Kimmel can go to Sunset Blvd and maybe even attract a larger audience than its program. Bad jokes and bad television are bad for Biz. ABC is no longer paralyzed with fear for the mafia that Woke.”
The argument of the “culture of consequence”, which is also being advanced by Donald Trump Jr. and the founder of Barstool Sports and the right -wing influencer Dave Portnoy, calls again the progressives of an idea raised in response to the previous cancellation debates of cancellation. The argument, essentially, is that bad decisions and errors result in consequences, whatever they are.
The change of the cover of freedom of expression has encountered a violent reaction from others to the right.
Conservative commentator Guy Benson, reacting Wednesday night to Kimmel News, published that “the open government entrusted in all this is still very worrying.”
And Tucker Carlson, a firm Trump and Vance Ally, criticized Bondi, who since then has retired from his position of hate speech and clarified that the Department of Justice will only go after a speech that leads to violence.
“You expect Charlie Kirk’s death not to be used by a group that we now call the bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one she worked to build,” said Carlson in his podcast on Tuesday. “You expect that within a year, the agitation we are seeing after your murder does not take advantage of bringing hate discourse to this country. And believe me, if so, if that happens, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, and there will never be.”
