Sep
19
2025

I Sense a Broad Consensus

For the second day in a row, let's lead off with an Iowahawk tweet:

I strongly recommend reading Dave's whole tweet-thread. He's not alone. Just picking some links at random:

Quoting from that last one:

The FCC was established in 1934, an time when Americans were looking wistfully at both fascism and socialism and wondering, gee, maybe there's something to that stuff. We're smarter now—at least we'd like to think so—but the barbarous remnants of those failed ideologies continue to haunt us. (Aided, of course, by the power junkies in Congress and the Executive who can't bear the idea that they're not needed to "benevolently" run things.)

Hard to believe, I know, but Americans don't need the FCC for anything, not even protection from … what's his name, again?

Oh, yeah: Jimmy Kimmel! I used to watch him on The Man Show every now and then. Being a man.

But it turns out that he had a more recent gig where he babbled a bunch of lefty disinformation. And he got his hat handed to him by ABC, his employer, arguably caused by pressure from the Trump Administration's FCC.

Which brings us to Jeff Maurer, whose joke-to-outrage ratio is unusually low here: The Kimmel Cancelation Is a Million Times Worse Than Colbert.

When Colbert was cancelled, it was like a premature birth: The event didn’t surprise me, but the timing did. Everyone in late night knows that we’re selling buggy whips in the age of the automobile, and Colbert’s financial are indeed terrible, but the timing — coming right as CBS’ parent company was trying to get government approval for a sale — stunk to high heaven. My theory was that Paramount knew that Colbert’s days were numbered, so they figured they might as well drop the ax at a moment when it would earn maximum brownie points with Trump. It’s kind of like how if you’re going to break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you obviously want to do it before the Christmas/Valentine’s Day gift-buying season.

With Colbert, we don’t know how much politics influenced the decision. That’s not the case with Kimmel: It is crystal fucking clear that he has been yanked off the air for saying something that the government didn’t like. Here’s FCC chair Brendan Carr making it explicit that he threatened to revoke broadcast licenses if ABC stations didn’t pull Kimmel:

[Embedded 44-second video of Carr on "The Benny Show"]

That’s not even a veiled threat — Carr is using the clearest words I can imagine to communicate that the government threatened to punish ABC if they didn’t stop airing Kimmel. This came two days after Trump threatened to “go after” ABC and less than a month after he urged the FCC to revoke ABC’s broadcast license for running “bad stories” about him. There’s no mystery to solve here; if this was a Hardy Boys book, it would be The Case of Government Censorship That Solved Itself Immediately And Left Us Free To Play Madden All Afternoon. The bad news is that no one in the administration understands the First Amendment, but the good news is that they’re so dumb that they’ll go on a YouTube show and say “Yes, we pressured broadcasters to suppress speech that we didn’t like…pretty cool, huh!?!?!?”

No, sorry, it ain't cool. Should be grounds for impeachment.

But, finally, Andrew C. McCarthy at NR, with a headline I can't help but imagine being read with a heavy Jewish accent: So Now the Left Is Against Government Extortion to Suppress Speech?. (NR gifted link)

More than a dozen years ago, the Obama administration joined with Turkey’s despotic strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other sharia-supremacist regimes to craft United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. The provision bound the concurring governments to enact laws that would prohibit speech or expression that could incite mere hostility to religion. And as should go without saying when it came to the Obama administration, there was only one religion under consideration for this special dispensation — Islam.

Many of us pointed out that an American codification of Resolution 16/18 would be unconstitutional. This was so patently true that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, playing point on the speech-suppression effort and planning a 2016 presidential run, had to backpedal. Finally, she vowed, law or no law, that the Obama administration would “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Yup. If such annoyances as the First Amendment directly obstructed (by legislation and regulation) accomplishment of the left’s Islamist-friendly wish list directly, then they would achieve it indirectly, by extortion and intimidation. It would be government by extralegal pressure tactics and signals to the radical mob — as when Obama bent bank executives to his will with the blunt warning at a White House meeting: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” It was the administration that moved Alinskyite strongarm “direct action” tactics from the street into the administrative bureaucracy.

Yeah. So I was prompted to check out Nina Jankowicz's "American Sunlight Project" to see if she had anything interesting to say. Alas, the most recent "update" is from September 10, and its headline is:

Report: Nudifying Apps on Meta Platforms are Violating EU Transparency Rules

I'd like to think they intended that wordplay, but I'm pretty sure not.

Also of note:

  • Are you mything him yet? Via Power Line, a First Things article from Matthew Schmitz on The Epstein Myth.

    In March 2005, the Palm Beach police began to investigate whether a fourteen-year-old girl had been molested by a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein. When police interviewed the girl, she said that Epstein had paid her to give him a massage and masturbated in her presence. Before long, the police found twelve other girls with remarkably similar stories.

    The girls’ stories were consistent not only in what they described, but in what they did not. Not one of ­Epstein’s initial accusers described being trafficked to other men. ­Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor who led the charge against Epstein in Florida, later recalled: “None of . . . the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.”

    It is now widely accepted that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic blackmail ring that implicated some of the world’s most powerful men, most likely on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Commentators who agree on little else are united in this belief. If such a ring existed, it must have been up and running in 2005—well into his career, and immediately before his downfall began.

    But Epstein’s accusers in Palm Beach apparently had no knowledge of any blackmail ring. Nor has reliable evidence of one emerged in the years since. Ghislaine ­Maxwell, ­Epstein’s long-time associate, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, but she was charged with and convicted of trafficking minors to exactly one person: Jeffrey Epstein. Where did the idea that Epstein ran a blackmail ring come from? Answering this question requires separating Epstein the man from the Epstein myth, which has put a respectable face on once-fringe ideas.

    I admit that I am pretty far out of the loop on Epstein, other than amusement at Pam Bondi's on-again off-again statements on the "Epstein client list". But after reading the article, I'm pretty firmly in the Gertrude Stein Memorial "there's no there there" camp.

  • After you take the exit for the Road to Serfdom, hang your second right for … America's Turn Toward Ad Hoc State Capitalism. Veronique de Rugy writes:

    The question of whether President Donald Trump has turned the United States toward a new "state capitalism" — one in which the government is not just economic referee but active player — has been answered. His second term brings policies that go well beyond traditional Republican pro-market orthodoxies, such as tax cuts and deregulation, and into direct involvement with production and capital. Yet this doctrine is less a coherent grand strategy than a set of ad hoc deals, sometimes pro-market and sometimes interventionist.

    Some Trump policies — tax cuts, deregulating, talk of budget-deficit reductions — retain a traditional Republican tone. On the other hand, this administration's protectionism and tariffs would have been inconceivable a decade ago. Republicans would also traditionally label the government's acquisition of a 10% stake in Intel as socialism if proposed by anyone other than Trump. And other policies have the feel of mafia tactics made possible by the exercise of leverage, like letting Nvidia and AMD sell their chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut back to the U.S. government.

    Vero notes that Trump's record so far "isn't part of any coherent vision." It's just what his gut tells him to do on any given day. Good luck to corporations trying to make informed long-term decisions in that environment.


Last Modified 2025-09-20 7:02 AM EDT