First Amendment

Jacob Sullum | 9.18.2025 2:25 PM

Monday night on his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel said something dumb about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah last week. Two days later, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced that it was "indefinitely" suspending the comedian's show.

Maybe the Disney executives who made that decision—CEO Robert A. Iger and Dana Walden, who oversees the company's television division—were simply reacting to public outrage at Kimmel's remarks. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was announced several hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested that TV stations might be fined or lose their licenses for broadcasting the show. That constitutionally dubious threat shows how the FCC can abuse its regulatory powers to suppress speech that offends President Donald Trump and his allies.

"The First Amendment does not protect performers like Jimmy Kimmel from being cancelled by their private sector employers," Fox News political analyst Brit Hume noted. "But I would have liked the outcome a lot better if the chairman of the FCC had not involved himself in it."

That preference is not just a matter of personal taste. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers.

That principle applies even when those speakers, in pursuit of their own political agendas, say things that are not true, as Kimmel did on Monday night. "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," Kimmel said during his opening monologue. While the second part of that statement seems pretty accurate, the first part erroneously implied that Robinson is a MAGA supporter. While Robinson's family is conservative, his relatives say his views had recently taken a leftward turn, and text messages indicate that he killed Kirk because of his right-wing opinions.

"I had enough of his hatred," Robinson allegedly told his roommate. "Some hate can't be negotiated out."

Although prosecutors did not release Robinson's text messages until Tuesday, Kimmel's narrative had already been undermined by other evidence, including the anti-"fascist" messages that Robinson inscribed on his rifle cartridges, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's description of the alleged assassin's "leftist ideology," and conversations in which Robinson had said he "didn't like"........

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