Weekly Roundup: State Media, Jimmy Kimmel, and How Free Speech Dies

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Mundi Media. Here today with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Happy to be with you, Brad, as always. We always get to hang out, but it's always over really terrible stuff to talk about, so maybe I'm not happy to be with you.

Brad: Well, we are going to talk, as many of you, I'm sure, expect, about Jimmy Kimmel and the FCC and what seems to be a death knell to free speech and free media in the United States. We'll link that to the ongoing reactions to Charlie Kirk's death, especially as they are coming from high level actors in the Trump administration, namely JD Vance and Stephen Miller. We'll tie all of this into the attack on Antifa and transgender folks that is being waged in the name of getting vengeance and justice for Charlie Kirk. Lot to cover. This is the Straight White American Jesus weekly roundup. Let's go.

All right, Dan. Yeah, one of those weeks. Could do a five hour show. We're not going to do that, but I think we're going to start with Jimmy Kimmel and sorting out some of the facts, the details, the ongoings, the machinations, because there's a lot of anger and a lot of fear, and I think it's worth getting a lot of this straight. I'll throw it to you to start if you want to take us through some of the basic outlines, and then we'll get into some analysis.

Dan: Yeah, so just kind of walk folks through this. I know most folks will have some idea of this already, but ABC indefinitely preempted—that's the language. So they have not officially canceled Kimmel despite Trump's claims that they have, but you know, effectively, that's probably where it's going. So ABC indefinitely preempted Jimmy Kimmel Live following comments that he made about Charlie Kirk's killing. And it followed an announcement by the parent company, Nexstar. So they're the ones that own this, and this is what they said. This was Andrew Alford, the president of the broadcasting division of Nexstar. This is their official statement:

"Mr. Kimmel's comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views or values of the local communities in which we are located. Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue."

A Nexstar spokesperson also told CBS News that "the decision to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC"—that is the Federal Communications Commission—"or any government agency prior to making that decision." Which is maybe technically true, but is also highly misleading, as probably again, most people know.

The preemption announcement came within hours after Trump administration officials and the FCC chair made comments basically threatening to take away ABC's license if they didn't punish Kimmel. So the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, called Kimmel's comments "some of the sickest conduct possible." We'll get into those comments in a minute. "Sickest conduct possible"—I want folks to hold on to that. He said there was a path forward for license suspension over this. He said, "The FCC is going to have remedies we could look at for this." He said, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

So no, there was no official communication with the FCC, but there were these public comments by the Trump administration. Trump, of course, is also chiming in and so forth. And after the announcement, Carr congratulated Nexstar on the decision. He said this: "I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing. Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values."

Trump was also involved again. He also celebrated the decision. So big deal—and what did Kimmel say? "Sickest conduct possible" and so forth. Here were Kimmel's comments. He said, in reference to the murder of Charlie Kirk: "The MAGA gang is 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. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving."

That was the statement. That was the statement. There were some discussions behind the scenes. People will get a chance to talk about that. There was some other things going on. That's what he said. And so à la Viktor Orbán in Hungary—Orbán in Hungary, not Turkey, sorry—

Brad: We might as well correct it now, because someone's going to email me.

Dan: Yes, we're going to preempt the emails now. In Hungary, yeah, doing the same thing. And the same thing has been happening in Turkey with going after everything from the judiciary, which we've seen, to public media, to journalists and what have you. And this is what Carr continued to say after this. He said, "We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. There are broadcasters out there that don't like it, they can turn in their license to the FCC, but that's our job." Again, we're making some progress now, so very explicitly saying we're going to take the Erdoğan and Orbán playbooks and we are going to put them forward, and this is what we are going to do.

We could tie this in with universities firing faculty and public schools firing faculty and businesses firing people as well. But the Kimmel is obviously the most high profile and explicit of this. So I invite you for your consideration.

Brad: Can you read that last quote again? The "enforce the public interest" one? Can you just—

Dan: They said, "We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. There are broadcasters out there that don't like it, they can turn in their licenses to the FCC, but that's our job."

Brad: I just can't get away from those words: "enforce public interest." We are going to enforce the public interest. That is—I've said it 100 times on the show, Dan—we are so far away from any kind of small government, libertarian Reaganomics, laissez-faire, open society, let the ideas—this guy is literally saying we're going to force the public interest.

Dan: Does anybody remember the Republicans? They used to not want to have agencies like the FCC. There shouldn't be an FCC. There shouldn't be any regulation. Everything should be deregulated. And now we have the FCC threatening to take away licenses of somebody who made a comment about the Charlie Kirk incident.

Brad: So a couple things. Let's just stay on the Kimmel joke for a minute, and then we'll go to some more details about this timeline. The Kimmel joke, if you look at it, is he's basically saying MAGA tried to make the shooter anyone but a MAGA person. Now I think we know, best as I can tell, we are still in the place we were last Friday, which is the shooter is somebody who has what you and I described then as a mishmash ideology that is hard to decipher, seemingly chronically online, young male, video game set of references and touchstones.

Okay, Kimmel's remarks may not be accurate—the shooter may not be MAGA—but they're not like despicable in any kind of objective way. He's not celebrating the death. He's not saying he's glad about the death. He's not—

Dan: He's also not calling for violence. That's going to be important moving forward. He's not instigating violence. He's not calling for violence. He's not celebrating violence.

Brad: So I just want to say this, and Dan, jump in here. It doesn't matter, friends. You're going to spend time, you know, frustrated that when you look at the Kimmel joke, there's nothing there in terms of like a call for violence, a call to rejoice in Kirk's death—nothing. It doesn't matter. This is—go ahead.

Dan: Yeah, and we see this. We see the way that it doesn't matter. Number one, they want to go after him. But even look at the way Trump talks about it. He's still targeting other late night hosts, but he talks about their ratings being poor and they've always treated him unfairly, and whatever. The driving force of this at the very top—it's not Charlie Kirk. It's not worrying about instigations of violence. It's Trump and who doesn't like anybody who has ever been critical of Trump, and it's that at the end of the day. And so they are going to target those folks, and they're going to use this as a reason to do so.

Brad: If you don't believe me, here's a clip of Trump saying that exact thing yesterday about how their whole shebang is to hit Trump, and they shouldn't have a license if they do that. Here:

Reporter: Mr. President, are you going to ask Brendan Carr to weigh in on other late night hosts?

Donald Trump: My hosts on network television—there is a license. I'll give you an example. I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me. I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states. I won the popular vote. I won everything. And 97% against—they give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr. I think Brendan Carr is outstanding. He's a patriot. He loves our country, and he's a tough guy. So we'll have to see. When you think about this, 97% of the stories are negative, and yet I win easily the election. It's pretty amazing when you think of it. That shows they have no credibility.

Brad: I think there's some obvious things about state TV, censorship, all of that, and we're going to get there in a minute. Let me play you a clip, though, of Brendan Carr, just so you all can hear Brendan Carr, the FCC chief, saying all the things that Dan just recounted. So here's Brendan Carr talking about how Kimmel should donate to TPUSA, and it's reasonable for him to be taken off the air. Here he is:

Interviewer: According to The New York Times late Wednesday—I'm just quoting here—Sinclair, another owner of many local TV stations, said that it would also suspend Mr. Kimmel's program and call on Mr. Kimmel to apologize and make a meaningful personal donation to Mr. Kirk's family and the activist political group Turning Point USA. Do you think that's an appropriate remedy to the situation?

Brendan Carr: I think Sinclair has every right to call for that. Again, Sinclair affiliates with Disney. They take Disney's contract. They have a contractual relationship with Disney, and that's between the two of them to figure out what's going to make sense to make both of them comfortable with the relationship going forward. Again, over the years, it would be unthinkable for Sinclair, for Nexstar, for local TV stations to actually say, "You know what, we're not going to take this particular programming that's coming out of New York and Hollywood and send it to Pennsylvania and Utah." And so the idea that local broadcasters feel like they can push back, I think it's a much healthier dynamic for the country right now.

Brad: Now, in a vacuum, you might think, "Okay, well, yeah, I guess maybe it's reasonable if the public interest and the people in Pennsylvania and the people in Arkansas don't want to hear Jimmy Kimmel, okay." Usually that's something that is decided by those companies. The problem is, there are things behind the scenes that would point to the fact that this is not simply about ratings. And if people want to hear Jimmy Kimmel or not—are people listening? Are people watching? Is he popular enough for this to be a good business decision? This is not a free market, laissez-faire context, and here is the proof. Here's Brian Stelter on CNN:

Brian Stelter: Nexstar already owns lots of TV stations. It wants to merge with Tegna, which owns lots of other stations. In order to do that, it needs Brendan Carr, the FCC Chair's permission, and it actually needs the FCC to change the regulations entirely about how many stations an individual company can own. So Nexstar has all of this pending business before the government. Tegna also does, and there's another big station owner called Sinclair that also has business pending before the government.

So what do we know tonight? We know that both Nexstar and Sinclair called up ABC this afternoon, complained about Kimmel and said they were yanking the show off their stations. ABC subsequently yanked the show nationwide. So we know that two major TV station owners, both of which need to curry favor with the Trump administration, were the ones that most loudly and vocally condemned Kimmel and said they were going to not air the show tonight, in the coming nights. It's an Occam's razor situation. It's exactly what it looks like.

Brad: Just to make this point even more clear, Dan, I really appreciated a post by The Space Gal, who—if you don't know The Space Gal, and you think that's a silly name—is an MIT-trained scientist and a great public scholar. September 16, as you say, Dan: Kimmel makes the joke. On September 17, in the morning, Brendan Carr threatens FCC legal action. It's only later that day that Nexstar and Sinclair decide they're going to pull Jimmy Kimmel off of the air. Then ABC takes him down from the entire network.

As Brian Stelter said, this is not simply a matter of whether they decided this was best for their viewers and their business. There are two things at play: a pending merger, and Donald Trump saying they're too mean to me, so they shouldn't be allowed to be on TV.

Now I want to make a point, and I'll get your thoughts on this. As usual, Dan, just because I love all of you, and I do this because I love all of you, I spent a lot of time on right-wing Twitter this week. And Twitter is basically all right-wing at this point, because that's what Twitter is. But I really intentionally listened and tried to dig up the things on Twitter that people were saying about Kimmel getting fired.

Here is the basic sentiment from those folks: Kimmel deserved it, and they give two examples. Roseanne Barr was fired from a popular ABC show when she made racist remarks, and Gina Carano from The Mandalorian was fired because she likened Republicans to the Jews during the Third Reich. Now, Gina Carano's lawsuit was settled. She sued, and she settled that with Lucasfilm, and that whole thing. Roseanne Barr was fired during the first Trump presidency. Let's just get it clear. It was not during Biden. It was 2018, everyone.

So I'm getting ready—if you're going to take anything away from today, here's what you're going to say to Uncle Ron this week. Uncle Ron at your barbecue, at your work, wherever you find your Uncle Rons. This is it. You ready?

Y'all, when celebrities and public figures make remarks that are racist, out of bounds, not okay—if they do not align with public interest or values of the company and they are fired, that is not a free speech issue. That is a business decision on the part of ABC or Disney, because they're like, "If we let this person on our show anymore, our shows are going to be unpopular because so many people dislike racism or comparing folks to the Jews during the Holocaust. It's just—this is not good." I don't think that is a free speech issue.

Do you all remember, like, if you're old like me and Dan, when Kramer from Seinfeld gave a standup show, and there was a Black man in the audience who was kind of semi-heckling him, and he talked about a noose and a lynching, and basically Kramer from Seinfeld was like not able to find jobs in Hollywood after that for a long time. Was that a censoring of free speech? I don't think it was. I think it was whoever was going to hire him saying, "I can't hire you because you're on video making lynching and N-word remarks to Black people."

So why is this different? Why is Jimmy Kimmel different? It's different for the two reasons we just mentioned five minutes ago: A) It seems to be about a set of networks needing the approval of the FCC for a merger that goes against the current rules of the FCC itself. They basically want to monopolize a certain corner of the market. And B) The President of the United States saying they say mean things about me, therefore they should be fired. They should not have a license.

That's not free speech. Why? Because of that quote you said: "We, the government, are going to force the public interest."

So I'm sorry, this is a matter of free speech, because it's not about business, it's not about dollars, it's not about ratings, it's not about revenue—it's about the government is threatening us, so we better comply. Do you see how they're two different things? One is about the government is threatening us to comply, or else—"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," a direct quote from Brendan Carr. Or it is, in the case of Roseanne, in the case of Kramer from Seinfeld, in the case of Gina Carano, it is "We need to fire this person because what they said is beyond our values as a company, and we kind of think people won't buy our products if we employ racists, so we're going to fire them." It's not that they lost their free speech in America. It's just that we're not going to employ them for things they said, even though the government gives them the right to say them.

In the Jimmy Kimmel case, the government is saying you don't have the right to say that—we're going to pull your license. Or else.

Is my distinction valid? Does that make sense? Does that hold up? Other thoughts on this whole case?

Dan: I think the distinction is valid. I think it gets murky. It does get messy. Like the Carano case shows this—you know, it gets messy, and there's a reason why there was a court settlement, and we don't know all the details of that and whether she was—

Brad: But like, two private parties. I don't think the government was involved there. It was just Lucasfilm and—

Danr: So yeah, so there can be—but yeah. So Kimmel was not preempted. He has not been fired. He hasn't been. And I think from the business side, that is an important distinction, because presumably he's still getting paid, and whatever. They're like, "We're not going to air your show," but, you know, they probably haven't done anything that he can kind of take action on right now. I don't know the details of that, but there wasn't a public outcry. This was not, "Oh my God, our ratings fell through the floor," or "We've gotten like a million social media posts," or "We, you know, whatever—we've got to figure out what to do about this." Or "We think that's going to happen."

It was preemptive statements by the government in public, threatening action against them if they didn't punish Kimmel for saying something that they don't like. And it was politically orchestrated, explicitly, with this ridiculous veneer of deniability that, "No, they never contacted us." No, they just went on like public platforms and said what they were going to do, so that you would be scared enough to do it, and then they could say that they never told you to do it, so you did it freely, or whatever.

Brad: We said it to everybody, so we didn't say it to you.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. There was a public statement in general. It wasn't about you, right? There it is.

I think there's also like other pieces of this. This is always—it's always in the Trump administration, at the end of the day, about Trump—and it's the equivalences. Let's say he said something nasty about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk is Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk is not an ethnic group. Charlie Kirk is not the Jewish people who live with the legacy of what happened in the Holocaust, right? There is just a qualitative difference in saying things about certain individuals or groups. And if people don't understand that, I kind of, you know, we can have a long conversation about why that is.

But so Trump, when he's like, "They've always been mean to me"—Trump is basically like, "That's as big a deal as making lynching jokes, given the racist history of America. That's as big a deal as comparing things to the people who underwent the Holocaust," right? Sort of antisemitic appeals to the Holocaust. Yeah, those are equivalent. Those are the same thing. And that's—to your point about what makes the Roseanne case different, or, you know, the Carano case different, and so forth—I mean, those are real things.

And then you get to the business decision piece of it, which, as you say, is not really at work here. We may get a chance to talk more about it. We've got a lot to talk about today, but we could expand out and say, like, even if this is—the business is the business case here—even if somebody will say, "Well, this is a business decision, not a free speech issue." Cool. Let's talk about the public schools where teachers are getting fired for private social media posts. Let's talk about college professors who are getting fired for making private social media posts. Let's talk about just people working regular jobs who are being doxxed by people who put together a list and then they call their employer and say, "Hey, your guy over here on his private Instagram made this statement about Charlie Kirk."

Those are not business decisions. Those are purely political and social and so forth. So I agree with your distinction, even if somebody wanted to say, "Well, you know, it can get really messy when you're a public figure." And okay, fine, but it was hours. It was hours later. This all happened within hours. There was no public outcry. We talked about the public interest. There was no expression of public interest. There was Trump administration interest. There was MAGA interest that was enforced on these companies, and they acquiesced and caved, because that is what big, powerful companies largely do to Trump.

Brad: So I would just say that, you know, when you mentioned those personal—the everyday American who likes a certain post, or is whatever, and they're getting fired or doxxed—

Dan: Getting fired for sharing Charlie Kirk quotes. Yeah, they put together quotes from the guy, and then they get fired for denigrating him.

Brad: Well, that happened to Karen Attiah, who was a Washington Post reporter who was fired for literally posting his words. Okay, so that's a really good example. So let's just use that example. Let's just stay on that. Okay, you're a Washington Post reporter who happens to be a Black woman, you post Charlie Kirk's own words, and then you're fired for doing that, because somehow that is what—in line with everything that's being said about hate speech and reveling in his death.

My argument, Dan, would be that this is the ripple effect of a government that threatens free speech. If a government threatens free speech, you're going to see a direct hit, which is Jimmy Kimmel, but the direct hit in the water—we all know—ripples out. And it ripples out to the Washington Post reporter, but it also ripples out—I just got an email about somebody in Idaho who liked a post about Charlie Kirk, didn't post it, liked it. The right-wing, you know, Twitter brigade found it, doxxed, complained to her employer. Employer punished her.

Okay, we can talk about private stuff and all that, but I just think those things are a ripple effect of a government that is threatening free speech, that is saying, "Unless you comply, you'll be in trouble." And now folks are worried about state TV, because Trump allies will soon—if everything goes how it looks like it's going to go—be in control of Paramount, CNN, CBS. ABC is looking likely. Twitter, okay, and TikTok, which was just—and the details are still coming out, but Larry Ellison and others will have 80% of TikTok.

So you're starting to see a picture very quickly that looks like state-controlled media, and I want to talk about that next. Let's take a break.

Brad: Dan, here's the thing I have not heard discussed this week, and Monday already feels like two years ago, of course, but early this week, JD Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk show from his office complex in the White House. Let me play you a clip of JD talking from the White House, hosting the Charlie Kirk show.

JD Vance: Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. So I come here today, not just with an observation, but with an offer. Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that. In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town, 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.

Brad: So Dan, when this happened, I think there was a sort of shock of like, "I can't believe they're doing this." And then the Kimmel thing happened, and I think everybody's attention turned to Kimmel and ABC and Disney, and people are boycotting Disney, they're canceling their subscriptions, they're doing all that stuff.

Here's the thing that I have not seen talked about in terms of those two things together: The Vice President of the United States decided to host the podcast of the man that was just killed. Now you can say, "All right, that was his close friend, or they were colleagues or something." It's really, really, really hard to think about a situation where, like, when Joe Biden was vice president, he would have co-hosted, he would have stepped in to host a show by—by what, like The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was at his apex? Like, if Jon Stewart had been killed in 2014 and Joe Biden went and hosted that, I don't know—we'd still be hearing about that, right?

Do you all remember this? Here's a throwback. Dan, you want a deep cut? Barack Obama went on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. Y'all remember that show? And he did that in order to talk about Obamacare. And, "Hey, you should go sign up under the Affordable Care Act so you have healthcare." And y'all go look it up. The response to that was, "Obama is denigrating the presidency. He has, like, totally, you know, humiliated the office and the American people. What a tragedy, travesty that our president would go on a show like that."

Now we have JD Vance hosting the show from the White House. Dan, he then brought on Stephen Miller, okay, who is like the policy chief, and in my mind, one of the shadow presidents. And here's what Stephen Miller said:

Stephen Miller: There's incredible sadness, but there's incredible anger. And the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion, but focused anger, righteous anger directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history. Probably. Amen. And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

So let me explain a bit of what that means. The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger incitement to violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will—

Brad: They're doing two things here, Dan, and I'll shut up. This is state TV. They have now made the Charlie Kirk show into something that is an extension of the Trump administration. They're doing this from the White House. We have the Vice President hosting the show. We have the policy chief of the White House as a guest. Caroline Levitt also stopped by, like this was an extension of the Trump administration.

And why? As a scholar, Dan, as a religious studies scholar, somebody who's interested in ritual and symbol, this was them bringing the Charlie Kirk brand, podcast, TPUSA, and person, all within the "he is us." Charlie Kirk is an extension of the President, of MAGA, of the government, of the regime. This is now branded as us. So if you're against this, you're against us.

This, Dan—the beginning of the week in state TV—was not firing Kimmel. It was the Vice President doing a podcast from the White House for a slain right-wing Christian nationalist, and saying he is us. We are an extension of him. This show, this brand, this organization, is Trump, and Trump extended, okay?

And then Miller does this, and then I'll be quiet. Miller says, "I'm sad, but I'm angry, and I'm going to destroy all these organizations." Now, there's no—Dan, if you listen to the man, there's no mention of the shooter. There's no mention of the shooter and what he did. There's no mention of the shooter and his influences, his life, the people that the shooter quoted.

This is not a situation, as we said last week, where the shooter had a manifesto and said, "I was inspired by these people. I was inspired by this Marxist book, by this socialist, you know, document. I was inspired by this uprising of the people against capitalism that happened in Britain in the 1800s or the Luddites, or, I don't know." Stephen Miller just says, "I'm going to destroy these people," and they're the people he's wanted to destroy forever. And this is just the best excuse.

So Dan, we already had state TV, even before they fired Kimmel, when the Vice President decided to get on the White House and, instead of Fox and Friends, it was the White House and friends in the Charlie Kirk show.

Now let me say—sorry, I'm on a roll. I got to say one more thing. I got to say one more thing, and I'm sorry. I know you're like, "Brad, shut up." Dan, did you watch Succession? I don't think you did. Did you watch Succession? You didn't. I know. I already knew you didn't, but I was going to ask anyway.

So in one of the very last episodes of Succession, could be the last one—I haven't gone back to watch it—the Roy kids, who were like, you know, supposed to be like the Rupert Murdoch children, they've come to this place where, like, the oldest Roy, Kendall, is going to be the heir of his dad's throne, and he's going to—and they have this really touching scene where they're siblings, they have a food fight, and they joke and laugh, and it's really touching. And then the next scene is them going into the office the next day, and Kendall sits in his dad's chair, like the chair where ostensibly the Rupert Murdoch character sat, and that unravels everything.

His brother and his sister, once they see him in the chair, they're like, "Nope, we're not doing this." And they destroy it all. And I'm not going to spoil the ending for everybody, but it just does not go the way that they had planned. Why? Because they saw Kendall in the chair, and he went from Kendall, their brother, to Kendall, the extension of their dad, who was the chief.

That is what happened with Charlie Kirk's show and JD Vance. When JD sat in Charlie's seat, he became Charlie. And Charlie became part of the White House, the Trump regime, the government, the power, the power, the power to force the public interest. I'm done. I'm sorry. I got on a roll. It's all yours.

Dan: So a few thoughts here. One is that this was basically a MAGA acquisition of TPUSA. Do you want a business model for it? That's what it was. They just basically bought the intellectual property, TPUSA, and we'll see if, like, the organization still works after this. We've talked about, Vance is not the figure or the speaker or the provocateur that Kirk was, whatever. But the point is that it illustrates everything you're talking about. This is now part of the MAGA brand. Officially, they acquired it, like moved it into the White House.

I think it also—I think the other key that you're talking about here is that all of this is a pretext to do what they've always wanted to do, which is limit free speech, which is go after, quote-unquote, left-wing groups, which means anybody who's not MAGA. Anybody who's not MAGA becomes defined as a left-wing group. Even the loose linkages, you know, to try to find some connection, as some do, between this figure who committed the act and other groups—even you talked about how it was not only not a manifesto saying that he was inspired by this or that, let alone actually part of some organization, or acting on the behest of some organization, or part of some conspiracy to commit the assassination of Charlie Kirk—all of that sort of stuff.

It ties in with this broader notion that this is all a pretext to do what MAGA has always wanted to do. And if it's okay, I want to turn to Pam Bondi for a minute. We want to talk about free speech and where we're going. And in case people are like, "No, you're just blowing this all out of proportion. Kimmel, yeah, whatever." Well, Pam Bondi, in the same week, on Monday, said that the Department of Justice would, quote, "absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech." Basically said, "We are going to come after you and prosecute so-called hate speech."

And it was interesting, and we could talk about this, and I think I understand parts of it, but frankly, there are parts of it that are still confusing to me. She gets assailed from every side—left and center, everybody on the political spectrum comes after her for this. The pressure increased enough for her to walk back her comments, and she has since said that she was talking about, quote-unquote, "criminal groups, people that incite violence," not those who said, quote-unquote, "hateful things" about Kirk's killing and so forth.

She said this. This was the walk-back. She said, "Under President Trump, the Department of Justice will be unabashed in our efforts to root out credible violent threats. We will investigate organizations that pursue illegal activities, engage in political violence, violate our civil rights and commit tax or nonprofit fraud." That's a weird thing to add on to it, but like, whatever.

So she walks it back and is trying to say, "Nope, we're after violent groups." But she said the quiet part out loud. The target is free speech. Now that drove a lot of MAGA people nuts, because there is the wing of MAGA that celebrated Charlie Kirk as a free speech advocate. There is the wing of MAGA that, you know, celebrated the baker who didn't have to bake the cake for a gay wedding as an exercise in religious liberty and free speech and whatever. Elon Musk didn't like this. Yeah, yeah. He was upset about this.

So you've had this weird thing at the same time that they're calling on businesses to fire people, and they're celebrating higher education firing people and so forth. And that's its own thing. But the point for me is we're not making up the stuff about free speech. Pam Bondi said it. And I believe that Trump told her to say it. Do I know that? Nope. But she's the Attorney General. She acts at the behest of the President. We know that everybody in Trump's cabinet does what Trump wants them to do, or they won't be in his cabinet anymore. And so here it is.

And what else happens this week? So if we tie Stephen Miller talking about these violent groups, we talk Pam Bondi originally saying this about free speech, saying, "No, no, no, it's groups that promote violence," and so forth. What happens this week? Trump also comes on and says that he has blamed the radical left for Kirk's killing, and that he has named Antifa as a major terrorist organization, right, which is something he's wanted to do. And I've got lots of thoughts and takeaways about this, but let's, you know, you connect these pieces, you pick up these scattered pieces.

It's a coordinated effort to limit free speech, number one—critical speech of the President and MAGA and Trump. They're not interested in—they're not going after Fox and Friends for, like, not being fair and balanced or something like that. You know that, like—

Brad: Like, Brian Kilmeade said that we should involuntarily kill mentally unwell people or people who are unhoused, yeah?

Dan: So, yeah, that we should just execute them. And he issues an apology. It's all fine. There's no threat to remove Fox's broadcasting license over this. You want to talk about the sickest statements, or reprehensible statements, I'll put that much higher on the list. He did explicitly advocate and call for violence against vulnerable populations. That's explicitly what he did. You won't hear Pam Bondi or anybody else saying anything about that.

It's about going after free speech aimed at or critical of the Trump administration, and it's about going after organizations and groups that they don't like and never have, and it's a pretext. Final point I'll make on this about why is it a pretext? First of all, Bondi's statement is pointless. "We will investigate organizations that pursue illegal activities, engage in political violence, violate civil rights, commit tax or nonprofit fraud." Yeah, no shit. You're the Department of Justice. That's what you already do. So thanks, Pam Bondi for that—supposedly do.

Well, yes, like, talk about, like, the mission statement of the Department of Justice. "We're going to go after organizations that pursue illegal activities." Yeah, it's pretty high on the list. So thanks, Pam Bondi for, you know, doubling down on that.

But Trump, you know this, this labeling of Antifa as a terrorist—first of all, Antifa is not an organization. It's kind of an umbrella term for a series of, you know, different groups and so forth. But there's not, there's nobody who's got a membership card that says "Antifa" on it, and here's the world headquarters of it, or something like that. There also, legally is no category of domestic terrorist organization. There's no way to legally enforce this. You can label them a domestic terrorist organization, but there's no category in federal law that actually applies to that.

This is symbolic. This is about saying, "We are going to target you if we don't like you. We are going to silence you if we don't like you. We are going to use all the mechanisms of government to do it. We will use the Department of Justice, but we'll also use the FCC."

I think—this is my view on the universities that have fired different professors and things—I think those universities are going to get sued. I think that they're going to lose. I think they're going to have to settle out of court and whatever. I think they've also made the calculation that even if they have to pay out millions of dollars to faculty and staff who've been wrongfully terminated, they are better off than losing billions of dollars in funding. When the Trump administration says, "Hey, you can't have foreign students anymore," or "Hey, we're going to take away your funding," or "Hey, you're no longer eligible for Pell Grants," or whatever it's going to be. They've made that calculation.

So you have the Trump administration using all the levers of government and all the agencies of government to target speech they don't like, people they don't like, organizations they don't like, and everything is a pretext. It has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk.

Brad: So a couple things. What you just said about universities is just ripple, ripple, ripple. Yes, absolutely. If you have the direct hit on Jimmy Kimmel, then other people—it ripples out, and other companies, whether they be school districts or whether they be media companies, are going to take notice and just fire people, suspend people preemptively, so they don't draw the ire of the president. But it's the same with universities. Dan, they go after Harvard, they go after Columbia. Columbia capitulates, continues to capitulate. And so what happens? Other universities are like, "Well, we should just pay the $2 million for the unjust firing of someone rather than lose $200 million in grants."

One example of this, and I've been highlighting this on TikTok and Instagram this week—if you're an Instagram or TikTok person, go check it out—is the president of Texas A&M just resigned. Dan, yes. And he resigned because of the fallout of an undergraduate woman recording a literature professor teaching about a transgender human being and basically telling that professor, "What you're teaching is illegal," according to the president, who says, "There's only two sexes."

What happened is the president of Texas A&M fired that professor who was an adjunct, took the Dean off their post, took the head of department off their post, and now the president of Texas A&M himself is a sacrificial lamb, because I'm sure the board and others are like, "We'd rather just fire you than have Texas A&M become something that Trump and anyone else—no, like, we do not want the Trump administration aiming their sights on us, so we're just going to—you're fired or you need to resign."

Dan: Just the last point I want to make about this. And I know this gets maybe a little bit wonky, but, right? You know, you and I have spent a lot of time in higher ed. People who work in big corporations and businesses, I think will resonate with this as well. It is hard to fire people in these kinds of positions. There's a whole process you have to go through. You got to, like, talk to HR and figure out what you do and what the process is, and did you document it? You—if you're going to do it smart, you need to go talk to your legal counsel and make sure.

None of that happened, and they know that none of that happened, and the reason that they didn't, that they did it anyway, is, again, this calculation. If somebody says to me, "Well, what makes you like—do you know that they're actually making this calculation that they didn't?" I don't know that these aren't sincerely held beliefs or community standards or whatever. And my answer is yes, because nobody follows policies like university administrators. You want a breed of people who love policy and live by policy and follow policy and stay awake at night writing policy? It is university administrators, and they violated all the policies, and it is going to come back and bite them.

They calculated this, they counted the cost, and they're like, "It will be better to just weather the storm later when we lose in court or when we settle out of court for tons of money, so it never comes into court and whatever, than getting the ire of Trump and becoming a Harvard, because we don't have a billion dollar endowment to fight that."

Brad: All right. Y'all ready for a story? So I'm not going to say names or institutions, but Dan, I told a Dean one time, I said, "Hey, Dean So-and-So, I said, hey, I know for a fact there's a professor over here in my department who, at the beginning of class on the very first day of the semester, asked students to identify their sexualities so that a straight student in the class would feel comfortable because it was a course about sexuality and all kinds of other stuff, whatever." I'm not going to give away details. So basically, you're in the class, you have to go around the circle, there are like 10 students, and be like, "Hi, I'm Brad, and here's my sexual identity. I am bi, I am gay, I am lesbian, I am straight, I am something. I don't know what word you want to use, whatever."

So I go to the Dean, I'm like, "Yo, that's happening." And one of the things that they told me in that conversation was, like, "It's a tenured professor. We're not going to get rid of them. So I don't know what you want me to do. I mean, we can do stuff, but I just need you to know at the beginning of this conversation that person's not going anywhere." So y'all can take that with you about higher ed, but Dan, it goes to your exact point of like they—this Dean didn't even, they did not even flinch. They did not look at me, like, "Ooh, that's serious. We might need to think about firing that person or something."

Dan: Have you documented this? Yeah, oh, dude. Like, names and like all of it. It's just—it's actually—

Brad: The beautiful thing is, I actually did. I did. I had recordings of it all. No, I did. I did. I had recordings. But anyway, we can talk about that another time. Let's take a break. We're going to get in trouble. I'm going to get fired from a job that I don't even have anymore if I keep going, Dan, or maybe sued. Who knows? Let's take a break before that happens. Be right back.

Brad:All right, Dan, let's play a clip of Pam Bondi, just to stay on this for one more minute, who said, in response to somebody who did not want to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk memorial, said this. Here it is:

Pam Bondi: That's horrific. It's free speech, but you shouldn't be employed anywhere if you're going to say that. An employer—you have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things and they shouldn't be working with you. Businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie's pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that. I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our Civil Rights unit looking at that immediately, that Office Depot had done that. We're looking at that. But Sean, you know—

Brad: So Charlie Kirk memorial, "I don't want to print those flyers," and Pam Bondi's response is, "We can prosecute you." This, of course, brought on all of the comparisons to people making cakes for gay couples or making websites for gay weddings and so on and so forth. So just to say there that everything you talked about is right there in Pam Bondi's own words.

I want to just stay on this idea of a major terrorist organization and destroying, you know, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, JD Vance. Here's what they're talking about: "We want to destroy these networks. We want to destroy the people that fund them. We want to make sure that they don't have any ability to organize. We want to take away their status. Could be a nonprofit, could be a corporation. We want to basically get rid of these networks in our country that are major terrorist organizations."

Now what they talked about was Antifa. Okay? Now they've also talked about trans people, and I'll just tell you that today—actually, I think it was yesterday—the Heritage Foundation came out with a new document that calls for transgender people and allies to be designated as terrorists. This is from The Advocate: The Heritage Foundation urged the FBI to add a new designation to its list of domestic violent extremist groups for "transgender ideology-inspired violent extremism," falsely claiming violence from trans people and its allies is increasing.

"So trans ideology-inspired violent extremism is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. It has led to an increasing trend of this kind of violence from domestic terrorist events across the country," reads the release from the Heritage Foundation.

Now we've got the Heritage Foundation talking about trans folks. And we've got Stephen Miller, who always talks about trans folks in this way, also talking about Antifa. And this week I—there's somebody who just contributes great research to our Discord and who I correspond with often, who just documented all of this in dogged detail. So what they reminded me of is this.

And we covered this. We were some of the only ones that covered this, Dan. Project Esther was an addendum to Project 2025. So let me refresh everybody's memory. You all know Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation. There was a related document, an addendum called Project Esther. Project Esther's goal was to, quote-unquote, "destroy antisemitism in the United States." Okay, it was completely directed at eradicating antisemitism.

Now, what we talked about, Dan, months ago was that Project Esther seemed like a front for going after anybody, any group, any organization, any nonprofit, who was pro-Palestine. There were so many Jewish groups that were like, "Nobody asked us about Project Esther. Do you want actual Jews to jump in and like, help you with the antisemitism in the country?" Heritage Foundation was like, "We're good. We don't need you. We know antisemitism better than you, and we'll get rid of it, don't worry." And it all seemed like a pretext for persecuting, prosecuting, going after anybody who was pro-Palestine.

What has happened with the Antifa comments and the trans document from the Heritage Foundation is they've basically done a find and replace, and they've switched the words to Antifa or trans people instead of antisemitism and those who are antisemitic. So here are some examples of that.

Okay? JD Vance, who was, as I just mentioned, hosting state TV Charlie Kirk show the other day: "Any political movement, violent or not violent, is a collection of forces. It's like a pyramid that stacks one support on top of the other. That pyramid's got a foundation of donors, activists, journalism, social media, influencers, politicians."

What does Project Esther say? It talks about a network of activists and financial supporters that allow there to be a Hamas support network—but just find and replace Antifa—"to succeed in its operations and the goal of eliminating capitalism and democracy."

Here's JD Vance: "We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years."

Okay? Project Esther: "After 9/11, the global war on terrorism, there is this sense of Islamic extremism and a Hamas supporter network."

Okay, Trump: "There are groups. We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder. I've been speaking to Pam Bondi about bringing RICO against some of them."

Project Esther: "We have several laws at our disposal that may help to exploit the Hamas support network"—again, just find and replace Antifa or others—"vulnerabilities, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations"—what does that stand for? RICO—"and counterterrorism."

What did the Heritage Foundation just say they wanted? Those who support trans folks labeled domestic terrorists. Okay, Pam Bondi got in on this too. She talked about antisemitism in light of what happened to Charlie Kirk, even though there was no kind of dynamic of antisemitism. Maybe Pam just didn't do find and replace. She forgot, and she just forgot what she was talking about, okay? But she talked about that too.

I can give you way more examples, Dan. The point is there's a pretext here for going after people that, as you've just said, are opponents of, critics of, in disagreement with, dissenters of the Trump regime, and they already have the playbook from Project 2025 creators, Heritage Foundation, in the form of Project Esther. They're just now going to switch the names out, and instead of antisemites, it's going to be—and Hamas supporters, quote-unquote—it's going to be Antifa and terrorists and trans folks and trans supporters and trans allies.

I got one more thing to say on this, and it comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates. You want to wrap up anything else up here though?

Dan: I think just a couple things about this. Number one, in terms of, for lack of a better term, you know, an objective rationale, Project Esther is not really about antisemitism. Okay, to be clear about that, but Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US. So the connection to violence is there. Now people can argue about that and the background of Hamas and everything it does, and Palestine and so forth. It is a fact that it has been designated by the US as a terrorist organization. Fine.

Now you get these appeals to violence where there isn't any, right? Like there is no call to violence, and so forth. And, of course, that's a pretext. Like, you know, you feel like, okay, what's the violence that, I don't know, what violence is GLAAD calling for in the world, or, you know, whatever? They're always like fighting against violence against, you know, queer folk and so forth, right?

What's interesting to me is, do you remember a time, Brad, when the right would accuse the left of calling everything violence? When they would make fun of the left, they were like, "You guys want safe spaces all the time, and you talk about this, you don't feel safe here and there, and you're a bunch of snowflakes," and like, this is now what the right is doing. Violence, quote-unquote, is just, if you disagree with them, we're going to have to label that as violence, because there is no actual violence being advocated or promulgated by any of these groups that they're busy targeting, right?

There is no trans organization out there that is calling for acts of violence against, I don't know, cis people or something. It's just, it's not a thing. So we're just going to call cisgender discomfort with trans people—we're going to call that violence. Like that's what's going to happen now. That doesn't stand up legally, and it'll play out, but symbolically, it tells us everything about everything that is going on here, and the level of animosity and fear and resentment and everything else that exists in the American right.

Brad: Okay, so just to make this point, Donald Trump says that he thinks charges should be brought against a group of women who, when he went to dinner in DC the other day as a publicity stunt, were jeering at him and saying "Free Palestine" and so on and so forth. He says they were a threat, and that's just consistent with all this language from Project Esther, from Miller, from Vance. If we label you a threat and we can call you a terrorist—I said this last week—we can do whatever we want to you, because a terrorist means you have no rights. You have no access to any kind of due process. You're just a terrorist. We will put you in a place we want to: Guantanamo Bay.

Dan: Yeah, to be clear, this is the playbook of the George W. Bush administration. I mean, this has been an evolving GOP strategy for a long time.

Brad: Yeah, all right, I'll give you my reason for hope, and it might be kind of extended. So Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this this week. Ta-Nehisi Coates, somebody who is not afraid of the moment, said: "Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Bearing the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?"

If you go back and listen to this show, I don't know, like two weeks ago, I said that Trumpism is the Lost Cause, the new Lost Cause, and it is MAGA nation, not seceding from the Union, but taking over the Union. It's what I said two weeks ago. I made this whole case, like 20 minutes. Dan was like, "Be quiet already." Okay? And I said that, instead of seceding, MAGA nation is taking over. They're taking over by way of military occupation. They're taking over by way of destroying public health. They're taking over by destroying education.

Trumpism is a new Lost Cause fueled by the Big Lie and the grievance and the resentment that they feel is the reason to take these actions and destroy so many aspects of our public life, our political life, our cultural life. And what I said in that segment, what I said in The New York Times four years ago, what I've said over and over again is that Trump's civil religion, that MAGA nation's myth of its victory and its resurrection and its conquering requires martyrs. It requires rituals. Ashley Babbitt is one of them, right? Ashley Babbitt's been turned into a martyr, a state-sanctioned martyr. Her family has been given millions of dollars. She's celebrated as a hero. She is a J6 martyr.

Charlie Kirk is now the most prominent and forceful MAGA martyr that one could imagine. Once again, I'm going to say it just so nobody's confused. I'm not celebrating his death. I do not want this to have happened. I am not happy. I am not joyous. I do not like any bit of this. I do not want him to be dead. I do not want that assassination to have happened. I do not want that murder to have taken place. I don't want his kids to go through what they're going through. I don't want any of this.

But what has happened in the wake of his death is that he's become the most influential martyr. And what is going on, Dan, is that you're no longer allowed to criticize him, because if you do, it's like you're criticizing somebody who's been canonized. They did his podcast from the White House. You cannot criticize him. It's just not allowed. And you can show up to the barbecue. You can show up to the cookout. You can show up to your family dinner and say, "Here's his quotes. These aren't okay." And someone's like, "I can't believe you would just attack this man and his family after what happened to him. That's just not okay. What, you're happy he's dead?" It's like, "I'm not happy he's dead. I'm just showing you what he said. I don't think we should celebrate him as, like a martyr, as like a great something. I just—I don't think this is okay." "I can't believe you would do that."

And what Ta-Nehisi Coates is pointing out in his piece this week at Vanity Fair is exactly what happened in the South with the Lost Cause. When you look away from this kind of element in somebody's words and their influence, you get Jim Crow, which was American apartheid. You get Black serfdom, which is relegating Black people to the bottom of the economic and cultural and political systems in our country. You get redlining. You get Japanese incarceration. You get the fact that you couldn't marry somebody from another race in this country, in all 50 states, until 1967. That is what he's saying. If you look away, like Ezra Klein has been doing over and over, trying to say that Charlie Kirk this and that, what else are you willing to look away from?

And to me, there's good news that he—Ta-Nehisi Coates—is saying this. And I'll just point out one more thing. If you are feeling down and you are feeling hopeless this week, something that really helped me was someone on Bluesky saying, "You can't take the Jimmy Kimmel firing as the reason to give up. They killed Bayard Rustin." Like if you're a Black person in this country, you know through your family's history or so many other histories about apartheid, about authoritarian regimes that don't treat you as a human—not going back to the 1850s, going back to the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s—they killed Bayard Rustin. They killed Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement still moved forward. People didn't give up.

So the idea that we're just done now because Jimmy Kimmel got fired—that reeks of privilege, and it reeks of us not knowing our own American history, which is a resistance history that Black people and people of color and queer people have been leading for a long, long time. So before you say "I'm done" or "we're cooked," try to keep some of that in mind.

Dan: My reason for hope—a different direction, but I think still significant. I think it's related to some of the things we're talking about—is that an increasing number of countries are prepared to recognize a Palestinian state, due, in large measure, to the US inaction related to Israel-Gaza. So I think Trump policies and inaction—he evaded this big UN meeting coming up. So there's a lot of talk about this, and, you know, public statements and so forth.

I recognize a lot of it is symbolic. I recognize that some countries are sort of afraid to sign on to something because they don't want to run afoul of the US. I recognize that you can't just call a state a state and have it be a state. And I recognize the way that the US can block things in the UN. I recognize all of those things, but I find it significant that in the past few months, you've had more and more nations backing this idea, you know, the two-state solution, recognizing Palestine as a state, and in large measure, not just in support of the Palestinians, in opposition to what Israel is doing in Palestine, but in opposition to the US.

And I take hope in that for a number of reasons, because I think that we need allies of the US, ostensibly, to stand up to the Trump administration and the things that it does. So I take hope in that.

Brad: All right, y'all, join me Monday. I'm going to be doing a special episode reacting to Charlie Kirk's funeral and everything that happens there. So if you're interested, I'm going to invite subscribers to join me for that live. If you're a subscriber, look for that link and those details. It will be at 2:30 Pacific, 5:30 Eastern. And if you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to think about doing that. It's 40 bucks for the whole year, and you get to support us and the work we do as an indie network and indie show that we've created from nothing, and try to do the best we can.

We're here three times a week. We'll be back next week, on Monday, as I said, Wednesday with It's In The Code, Friday with the weekly roundup, and we'll be announcing the details for our bonus episode, which will also be a live recording next week. So if you're a subscriber, stay tuned for all the details about that. We appreciate y'all. Thanks for listening. Keep your heads up, keep your feet on the ground, and don't give in. We'll catch you next time.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.