Washington: The White House warned us it was going to crack down on left-wing activists. The US attorney-general told us she was coming after “hate speech”, and that employers were obliged to sack people who said objectionable things.

We just didn’t know the next victim would be Jimmy Kimmel.

The American ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off air indefinitely after comments he made about Charlie Kirk two nights ago.Credit: Getty

The extraordinary decision of America’s ABC network to suspend Kimmel’s late-night comedy show – over genuinely milquetoast content on the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk – should be and is a wake-up call for all proponents of free expression in the United States and around the world.

It is a perfect distillation of the way Donald Trump deploys government power to vanquish his “critics” and steamroll organisations to bend to his will, even if the US president himself did not order the decision.

First, he installed a loyal MAGA ally and sycophant, Brendan Carr, as chairman of industry regulator the Federal Communications Commission.

Then, he publicly and vocally made clear his distaste for Kimmel and other late-night hosts – including Stephen Colbert, whose show has also been cancelled – and used social media to berate network owners over their programming. We don’t know what he may have said behind closed doors to Walt Disney chief executive Bob Iger, whose company owns ABC.

But we do know that Nexstar, one of the major........

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