Conservatives ABANDON Trump after Kimmel cancellation

In the aftermath of Trump's insane crackdown of free speech with the forced cancellation via his FCC of Jimmy Kimmel show, it looks like even some conservatives are recognizing at best the egregious hypocrisy of the move and at worst the astonishingly dangerous and authoritarian precedent that it sets. Here are just a few right-wingers who've reacted poorly to the news. For example,

Tucker Carlson and Fox's Kennedy. You hope that Charlie Kirk's death won't be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build. You hope that. You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that ever.

And there never will be. Because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think. There is nothing they can't do to you because they don't consider you human. They don't believe you have a soul. A human being with a soul, a free man, has a right to say what he believes. Not to hurt other people, but to express his views. I do have an issue with some

of the statements made by Brendan Carr because if there were an FCC commissioner on the other side of the political spectrum from someone maybe on this network and they didn't like their speech, would they put pressure on, you know, some of the, yes, some of the advertisers. And, you know, if someone from Fox moved on to Fox broadcast to some of the own and operated stations there, that's the part of this that I do not like.

When you are too far right for Tucker Carlson and Fox News, you might have lost the plot. And of course, the irony is that these people supported Donald Trump largely because he framed himself as this free speech champion. Here he is at his own inauguration just eight months ago, promising the polar opposite of what he's delivering right now.

After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.

Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law. And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.

And yet now this guy is sicking his FCC on comedians. Comedians! Because he doesn't like the jokes they tell. Talk about thin skin. You want to know where that happens? Shall we go over a list of countries where comedians can't criticize their country's leaders? China, North Korea, Russia, Hungary? Congratulations to Republicans in your desperation to usher in free speech. You have all but eliminated it entirely and rebuilt this country in the mold of some of the most repressive regimes in the world, which makes these claims all the more embarrassing in retrospect. If we don't have free speech, then we just don't have a free country.

It's as simple as that.

It's like legalized comedy.

Yeah.

Freedom of speech. You know, having fun again.

It seems like we should have a good time, you know.

You don't have free speech unless people can say things you don't like and you can attempt to beat that speech. Debate is the fertilizer, it's the water, it's the sunlight for our democracy. The best measure of the health of our American democracy, our constitutional republic, is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public.

In Snyder vs. Phelps, the court made it clear that public speech can never be punished simply for being offensive.

And under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.

We must protect free speech. And free speech only matters, it's only relevant when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like because obviously the speech that you like is, you know, it's easy.

So either one of two things is happening. Either Trump fooled all of these people or it was his and their plan all along to bitch about censorship before censoring everybody else. But either way, the losers here are the Americans who were manipulated into believing that Donald Trump would be some free speech champion. He played his base for absolute fools, in very much the same way that he played his

base for fools on every other issue. On lowering costs, on protecting earned benefits, on protecting healthcare, on reshoring manufacturing jobs, on lowering the cost of drugs, on protecting the economy, on releasing the Epstein files, on ending foreign wars on day one, Trump played everyone who voted for him for fools. This guy is out here trying to make himself king, building himself a lavish $200 million ballroom, using our tax dollars to retrofit himself a personal 747 jet, he doesn't give

a shit about his supporters and he never has. He climbed over them for power, abandoned them for all the core issues they cared about, and is now solely focused on entrenching that power for good. The reality is that we are in a very, very dangerous moment right now. We are watching the fall of democracy in real time. And it doesn't just happen when troops march through the streets, although sadly that is happening

as well. It happens with the slow erosion of critical coverage and dissent. We have come to learn that the media entities that were supposed to be in place to protect free speech, to protect the First Amendment, to protect democracy, are in fact willing partners for Trump as he seeks to undermine all of those things. To that end, I will note that the onus then falls on those of us who are not bending the knee to Trump to speak out.

I can promise you right now that I will never capitulate to a tyrant, I will never allow my speech to be curbed by those in power, and I will never allow myself to be leveraged by this White House. If you'd like to help amplify my voice, please subscribe to this channel. And finally, for those who think that Kimmel's cancellation doesn't signal something especially dangerous on the horizon, who think that, eh, he's just a comedian, it doesn't really matter,

it's just one show here and there, it doesn't really matter, here's Jon Stewart explaining

why that is dead wrong. And there's a lot of talk right now about what's going to happen to comedy. You know, there was the slap. And what does the slap say about comedy? And is comedy going to survive in this new moment? I've got news for you. Comedy survives every moment. And having Basim here is a really great example

of the true threat to comedy. It's not the woke police that are going to be an existential threat to comedy. It's not the Fresh Prince. It's the Crown Prince. It's not the fragility of audiences. It's the fragility of leaders.

You don't owe us anything as an audience. If we say s*** you don't like, say that, do whatever you got to do. Don't get up and hit us. But that's just the game we're in. We talk for a living, you talk back,

and we've just got to be better than you. And we've got to find a way to entertain you. But the threat to comedy, comedy doesn't change the world, but it's a bellwether. We're the banana peel in the coal mine. When a society is under threat, comedians are

the ones who get sent away first. It's just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat. Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things. It's never been all that is a red herring. It ain't the pronoun police. It's the secret police.

It always has been and it always will be and this man's decapitated visage Is a reminder to all of us that what we have is fragile and precious and The way to guard against it isn't to change how audiences think. It's to change how leaders lead.

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