The Social World

Tag: Jimmy Kimmel

  • Is Brendan Carr a ‘great American patriot?’

    Is Brendan Carr a ‘great American patriot?’

    “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show in September. Carr was leaning hard on ABC affiliates after Jimmy Kimmel made a slightly poor taste, but hardly out-of-bounds, comment about MAGA’s relationship to Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson. Carr then laid out his FCC doctrine quite clearly.

    “Companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

    In other words: nice TV channel you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Carr didn’t try to hide what he was doing or saying, and people were alarmed. No less an adversary of liberals than Ted Cruz compared Carr to a mob boss and called his threats “dangerous as hell.” Given that later in the week, after he returned to the airwaves, Kimmel said Cruz’s statements often made him “want to throw up” (and also said Cruz looks like Gargamel, the evil wizard who torments the Smurfs), Cruz clearly didn’t express those concerns out of a spirit of friendship with Kimmel. In Cruz’s eyes, the head of the FCC was presenting a danger to the principle of free speech, the unmovable bedrock of American society.

    The Kimmel affair was most Americans’ introduction to Carr, and what they saw made them uneasy. Not so Donald Trump, who referred to Carr as a “great American patriot.” As is so often the case, the biggest requirement to be a member of the Trump court is not just competency (though that helps), or even loyalty (mandatory), but willingness to deploy every power at your disposal to destroy Trump’s enemies, real or perceived. And few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Carr.

    Carr, a Republican, entered the FCC’s orbit during the Obama administration as a legal advisor to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. Trump nominated him as a commissioner in 2017. During Trump’s first term, Carr devoted most of his energy to two projects that were uncontroversial, at least to the public at large: streamlining the rollout of 5G towers and advocating for the repeal of net neutrality. He met with opposition and criticism from Democrats, but it was hardly headline-making stuff.

    Few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Brendan Carr

    The ground shifted in 2022 when Carr began communicating with Wesley Coopersmith, the chief of staff to the president of the Heritage Foundation, about writing the FCC section of Project 2025, a blueprint for establishing a conservative philosophy at the deepest levels of government. “I would be interested,” Carr wrote. “Provided doing so clears ethics review.” Somehow it did clear the ethics review, because Carr agreed to do the work pro bono. Carr’s chapter is actually quite wonky, if definitely Republican-tinged, including proposals for deregulating wireless services, eliminating regulations that prevent growth in broadband coverage, and banning TikTok to protect government security. There’s also a substantial section on “reining in Big Tech.” So, unlike a recent South Park episode that depicted Carr flying around Mar-a-Lago, propelled by explosive diarrhea, he’s actually a serious person. He’s also a full inside-the-court type, visiting Mar-a-Lago and occasionally sporting a gold lapel pin featuring the President’s face.

    In 2022, speaking out against Twitter and other social networks’ repression of conservative viewpoints, Carr tweeted that “free speech is not a threat to democracy – censorship is.” He also said that “political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech” and “people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” He was an advocate of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, saying it might “bend Twitter’s content moderation towards a greater embrace of free speech.”

    In 2023, he tweeted, “Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Then Carr took charge of the FCC, and the authoritarian’s dream came true. Upon Trump’s election, he issued a statement that the FCC should be “reining in Big Tech, ensuring broadcasters operate in the public interest and unleashing economic growth while advancing our national security interests and supporting law enforcement.” In this case, though, the “public interest” seemed to directly align with the Trump administration’s interests.

    Eyebrows were raised further when the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger the same week that CBS canceled the show of Stephen Colbert, a frequent, pompous and obnoxious Trump critic. At the time, CBS cited the show’s low ratings and Colbert’s excessive salary, both verifiable facts. But when Sinclair and Nexstar, broadcast syndicates with strong Trump ties, said they were pulling Kimmel’s show after his comments about Kirk’s death – and ABC decided to take Kimmel off the air – the decision-making process became murkier.

    As Johnson put it after his interview with Carr, “It’s called soft power. The left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the right has learned how to wield power as well.” There’s certainly truth to that. Liberal soft power ran Roseanne Barr out of the entertainment industry on a rail, forcing her off her high-rated sitcom because she made a racist joke about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. Trump himself was banned from some social media sites for a few years. But there’s still something particularly uncomfortable about the idea that private broadcast companies, which depend on the federal government for licenses, might be bullied into making editorial decisions because politicians and their regulators take issue with their programming.

    But Carr meets the boss’s approval, and that’s all that matters. On Friday, September 26, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is Smart, Tough, and a True American Patriot. He is supported by MAGA, like few others. Keep up the GREAT work, Brendan. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The bully doctrine

    The bully doctrine

    When the suspended late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel got his show back in late September, he did not apologize for the callous remark that briefly drove him off the air. Kimmel had accused Donald Trump and his followers of harboring and inciting the man who assassinated the activist Charlie Kirk, a beloved friend to many in Trump’s circle. This brought threats from one of Trump’s communications officials, then boycotts by two major station operators and finally Disney’s suspension of Kimmel. On his return, the comedian cracked a joke about Trump: “I don’t like bullies,” he said. “I played the clarinet in high school.”

    Weird thing to say. With tempers running so high, why would an impenitent enemy settle for calling Trump a “bully?” Why not call him a censor? A dictator? A traitor?

    Because today, “bully” has somehow become a worse insult than any of these things. The reason has nothing to do with reality. In real life, bullies are like Moe, the lumbering, mop-headed mauler in Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is small and Moe covets his school lunch. He makes credible threats of violence, conveyed by a clenched fist or a muttered insult, to get it. Whether or not you think Trump is a bully, both he and Moe must be reckoned with. Bullies can be dangerous and effective.

    Not so the “bully” of today’s political cliché. On the one hand, he’s utterly evil – intimidating others for no reason at all. His goals don’t even rise to the level of Moe and his school lunch – they’re mere pretexts. Trump doesn’t want to secure the Mexican border against immigration. He wants to put children in cages.

    On the other hand, he’s a pathetico. The key trait of today’s imaginary “bully” is this: he’s a coward. He’s like a macho man in an Italian comedy. All his roaring toxic masculinity is a front. Eventually he will run squealing away, like the pusillanimous little sissy he is at heart. Democrats cling to the fantasy that anyone they label a “bully” will wimp out. Last election season, California Governor Gavin Newsom called on fellow Democrats to “punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.” Has that worked out? When Trump advanced his tariff plans in March, a Miami Herald correspondent urged massive resistance: “The only way to fight bullies,” he wrote, “is to stand up and watch them cower.” We’re waiting. The “bully” story is the familiar parable of Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938, retold for people who know more about pop psychology than history.

    We have convinced ourselves that Putin will back down if only we provoke and insult him enough

    If the world really functioned this way, it would be a convenient thing for politicians. The essence of politics, after all, is enlisting supporters in battles of various kinds. It’s easier to do that if you can pretend that high-stakes conflicts are actually low-risk. All you have to do is “stand up” to the bully. For 20 years, we have convinced ourselves that Vladimir Putin, possessor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, will “back down” if only we provoke and insult him enough. How do we know this? Because he is a “bully” – in fact, a “schoolyard bully,” which conveys that opposing him will be no more difficult that opposing a child. Again, we’re still waiting.

    Like a lot of what professes to be age-old wisdom, our picture of the bully is actually a recent ideological invention. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the graph showing the use of the word “bully” over the past two centuries is shaped like a hockey stick. Never a particularly common word, it makes an almost vertical leap sometime in the 1980s, to the point where it is today used about ten times more frequently than it was back then. Similarly, expressions involving the things you do to bullies – whether “standing up to” or “calling out” – have also roughly doubled since Ronald Reagan’s day.

    That is no coincidence. Sometime around the end of the Cold War, Washington began to need this redefinition of “bully” – mostly because it was intent on using the so-called “unipolar moment” to push others around. In 1999, the United States launched the first interstate war in Europe since World War Two in order to discipline Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević for his anti-terrorist actions in the province of Kosovo. As one foreign policy expert put it, Milošević was “a playground bully who would fight, but back off after a punch in the nose.”

    Then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s advisors took to calling Milošević the Bully of Belgrade, just as defense experts in the two George Bush presidencies referred to Saddam Hussein as the Bully of Baghdad. The Iraq War that the younger Bush launched in 2003 has indeed gone down as a landmark in the history of bullying, though not for anything Saddam did.

    American policymakers persist in making bullying our model. “Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies,” said Obama advisor Susan Rice on a recent podcast. “And they back down when people stand up to them.”

    The Bully Doctrine boils down to this: the more threatening a person is, the less threatening he is. Where does this bizarre idea come from? Perhaps it is a holdover from an age of gentlemanly manners when, for instance, bragging about money was a sign you didn’t have any. Perhaps it comes from the age of Freud, when people understood human personality traits as compensations for deeply felt, hidden inadequacies. But it seems more likely that our ideas of bullying arise from stupid after-school specials and Disney films – and that we believe them out of wishful thinking. It’s a poor compass for navigating a dangerous time.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Kimmel makes the case for free speech

    After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. 

    Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” He quickly delivered a tearful apology to the friends, family, and devotees of Charlie Kirk and an equally tearful praise of Erika Kirk’s astonishing forgiveness of her husband’s assassin. Kimmel said he believes in the teachings of Jesus, and that Erika Kirk’s words “touched me deeply.”

    But the majority of Kimmel’s opening monologue was a full-throated defense of himself, and of freedom of speech. He joked that he’d received a job offer from Germany. “This country has become so authoritarian that the Germans are offering me a job,” he said. 

    He thanked Republicans like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Rand Paul who stood up for him. “People who I never would have imagined… said something very beautiful on my behalf… I don’t agree with many of those people on most subjects. Some of the things they say even make me want to throw up. It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did. And they deserve credit for it.”

    Specifically, he singled out Ted Cruz, who really went to bat for Kimmel in the last week. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said. “If Ted Cruz can’t speak freely then he can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.”

    Above all else, Kimmel, quite correctly, made one thing clear: “Our government cannot be allowed to control what we can and cannot say on television… This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

    Meanwhile, the Donald was attacking on Truth Social. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” said the President of the United States about a late-night comedian. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”

    Kimmel had not yet seen this post. Even as Trump was ranting about him after an eventful day at the UN, Kimmel started taking digs at Trump, showing a clip where Trump said Kimmel had “no ratings.” 

    “Well,” Kimmel smirked triumphantly. “I do tonight. He tried to cancel me, and he instead forced millions of people to watch my show. That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein Files to distract from this.“

    Kimmel pointed out that Sinclair and Nexstar, who own 20 percent of ABC affiliates, were currently keeping him off the air in Seattle, Portland, Washington, DC, and his wife’s hometown of St. Louis, “so I guess they’ll have to watch this on YouTube or whatever.”

    He said “I never thought I’d be in a situation like this,” but the one thing he learned from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and other childhood heroes is that “silencing a comedian is un-American.”

    After a commercial break, Kimmel aired a meh skit where Robert DeNiro played an anonymous tough-guy mob boss type who was now running the FCC. Those jokes didn’t really land, but then Kimmel got in some good jabs about Trump’s weird visit to the UN, calling him “Ramblestiltskin.” He had special fun with Trump’s press conference yesterday where the President went on an all-time rant against Tylenol. “Follow the medical advice of Donald Trump,” Kimmel said, “and you too can look like a glazed ham with deep vein thrombosis.”

    Just like that, America was great again.

  • Extreme Makeover: White House Edition

    Extreme Makeover: White House Edition

    One of President Trump’s unique gifts is that he can simultaneously hold two truths to be self-evident. That’s how the White House managed to send out a press release yesterday with the headline “FACT: Evidence Suggests Link Between Acetaminophen, Autism.” Cockburn supposes it’s fact that evidence “suggests,” but it’s really just bet-hedging.

    Concurrently, Trump manages to present himself as the great preserver of classical architecture and American tradition, yet is on the verge of unveiling a gaudy “Presidential Walk of Fame” on the White House Colonnade. Though right now there’s brown paper where the presidents will be, the Walk of Fame will feature black-and-white portraits of all of them, including two of the late great Grover Cleveland and two of Trump himself. The portraits will, naturally, be placed in gold-effect frames.

    Trump told the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese earlier this month that there’s nowhere else in the United States where you can see photos of all the US leaders together except for a private presidential area in the Washington Hilton. Cockburn doesn’t think that’s true, but he’ll roll with it. He supposes visitors to the White House could use a reminder as to what Benjamin Harrison and Calvin Coolidge really looked like. But according to Trump, no one will ever see Joe Biden’s face. “We put up a picture of the autopen,” Trump told the Caller.

    Fact: Evidence Suggests that Trump Is A Next-Level Troll Who Will Never Let A Grudge Go. Sounds true to your correspondent.

    On our radar

    TECH TROUBLE President Trump had to contend with a broken autocue and a broken escalator as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly this morning.

    BOLSONARO JR. CHARGED Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair, has been charged by Brazil’s top prosecutor. Eduardo, who moved to DC in February, stands accused of lobbying the US to sanction Brazil over his father’s coup trial.

    KIM POSSIBLE Jimmy Kimmel will return to the airwaves tonight (in most locations) after a week’s suspension for inaccurately commenting on the death of Charlie Kirk.

    For Pete’s sake

    Kamala Harris’s unearned redemption round got off to a predictably rocky start last night with an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, one of the few media outlets that’s still interested in her. Harris called President Trump a “tyrant” and compared him to a “communist dictator.”

    The newsworthiest bit of the overlong interview came when Maddow and the former vice president discussed Harris’s running-mate selection process, which gets ample treatment in her memoir 107 Days (out today!). Harris told Maddow that she didn’t pick Pete Buttigieg because he’s gay. Maddow responded “that’s hard to hear.”

    Then Harris hedged. She said she didn’t pick Mayor Pete because Donald Trump “knows no floor” and, in a 107-day campaign, having a gay running mate would have opened the campaign up to attack. “To be a black woman running for president, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man. With the stakes being so high, it made me very sad. But I also realized it would be a real risk,” she said. Not very “brat,” if you ask Cockburn! Instead, she picked Tim Walz. The rest is herstory.

    Buttigieg, whatever you might think about him, has developed a rare ability among Democrats to meet Republicans where they’re at and talk to them like they’re human beings.

    Cockburn thinks that the likes of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Tony Fabrizio and Ric Grenell could attest that homophobia isn’t one of our “communist dictator’s” sins. Is there anti-gay sentiment in the Republican base? For sure. Can Mayor Pete handle it? Absolutely. Harris a disastrous candidate for president? Signs point to yes, and this press tour has no floor.

    To Russia without love

    As the world’s leaders are welcomed to New York – and its traffic – for the United Nations General Assembly this week, Cockburn has his eye on a colorful character who’s headed the other way. Here’s to Tara Reade, best known for her sexual assault allegations against then-senator Joe Biden. Reade has been granted Russian citizenship after defecting there two years ago. In a television clip from state-owned network RT, Reade thanked her friends Maria Butina – convicted in 2018 for acting as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the US, now a member of the Duma for the Putin-aligned United Russia party – and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, for whom Reade now works.

    “It was very scary facing possible prison in the US if I went back,” Reade told her RT colleague. “They said I violated sanctions for being on Channel 1 and had issue with me working for RT. And I’m very proud to work for Russia Today, so, I’ve been very outspoken and pro-Russia and the Biden administration didn’t appreciate that.”

    Cockburn can see how Reade moving to Russia more than a year into the Ukraine war might have been a bit of a sticking point for the American government. поздравления to her all the same.

    Knowing your enemy in NYC

    On Saturday night, threading his way through the pullulating streets of Midtown Manhattan, Cockburn made a fresh visit to the spectacular rooftop aerie of the genial Know Your Enemy co-host Matthew Sitman who was celebrating his 44th birthday. Celebrants included journalistic worthies such as John Ganz, the author of a bestselling book on the paleocons, Lydia Polgreen and Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times, Justin Vogt of Foreign Affairs, David Klion of the Nation, Matthew Boudway of Commonweal and Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest. Sitman himself could be heard learnedly talking about the conservative political theorist and demigod Leo Strauss’s classic text, Persecution and the Art of Writing. Know your enemy indeed.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.





  • Jimmy Kimmel is back

    Jimmy Kimmel is back

    Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.

    It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch.

    The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points. One is that Kimmel’s audience, like that of his mainstream peers, is a shriveled replica of Johnny Carson’s huge numbers. The second is that celebrity culture, represented by those 400 signatures, is badly out-of-touch with a broad swath of the American public and clueless about the most important lesson in marketing: don’t insult your audience. When you do that, the audience walks away, as they have from Bud Light beer, Jaguar cars, and Cracker Barrel restaurants.

    It’s even dumber to alienate your viewing audience when the media environment is as tough as it is today. With the internet and stream content, the market has grown more and more fragmented. As it has, the profitability of late-night shows has shrunk. Their traditional format has also grown stale. After the host finishes a short monologue, he sits behind a desk and talks with one guest at a time. The guests are familiar faces, fresh from Botox, promoting their latest ventures.

    With this reduced viewership and dull format comes reduced profitability. The only winner has been a show with a different format and a different political angle. Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld is funny and snarky, but he never takes himself too seriously. He sits in a circle of chairs, talking with a group of guests, some of them regulars, some new for that episode. The goal, which has been wildly successful, is to draw in younger, more conservative viewers, who already like Fox News, and, according to polling, are shifting from Democrat to Republican.

    Gutfeld, unlike Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, is performing on a conservative cable channel, not a mainstream network meant to appeal to all viewpoints across a wide demographic. Kimmel and Colbert seem to have missed the point, turning their mainstream broadcast slots into tendentious political platforms, mimicking MSNBC and CNN just as those cable networks were imploding.

    Kimmel and Colbert’s decision to alienate half their potential audience is far different from the older, blander days of late-night talk shows, when the hosts poked gentle fun at both sides. Their goal was to appeal to the Upper Midwest as well as the Upper East Side and to provide calming entertainment to a broad national audience as they eased into bedtime. It’s not rocket science, and they knew it.

    No one understood this logic better than Johnny Carson, by-far the most successful late-night host of all time. “Tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton, any comedian, used his show to do serious issues. That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” he told CBS’ Mike Wallace in 1979. “It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling.”

    Gee, I hope Kimmel and Colbert don’t get that feeling. But, of course, they got it long ago. They chose to become political tribunes, a posture that appeals to some, alienates others, and fits better into a Hollywood party than a bed-time TV slot.

    If Hollywood’s reaction to Kimmel’s troubles has been predictable, the reaction from Republican politicians has been more interesting – and surprisingly varied.

    They were unified, naturally, in lambasting Kimmel for his malicious and factually incorrect statement that Charlie Kirk was killed by a MAGA supporter. He wasn’t. Kimmel should have known that – or shut up. The assassin was a crazed, left-wing ideologue, living with his transgender lover, and outraged at Kirk’s traditional Christian morality and willingness to debate issues that the assassin deemed beyond debate.

    Now that Kimmel understands his misstatement, you might expect an apology. If so, you must be waiting for the Easter Bunny to arrive with your breakfast omelet. (When Kimmel goes back on the air, ABC will almost certainly force him to apologize. Kimmel and his team will negotiate to water it down as much as possible. The network will surely want pre-approval on anything he intends to say. They know Kimmel’s own judgment could land them in even more trouble.)

    What’s new and unexpected is not the conservative revulsion at Kimmel’s comments but the pushback against the Trump administration for pressuring ABC and Disney. The leader of that pushback is Sen. Ted Cruz, aided by Rand Paul, and their target is Brendan Carr, the outspoken head of the Federal Communications Commission. Since the FCC controls broadcast licenses for TV and radio stations (not for cable or social media), his threats to reconsider ABC’s licenses pose a serious financial risk for that network and its corporate owner. Ted Cruz likened Carr’s threat to that of a Mafioso boss. He’s right.

    The crucial distinction here is between pressure from a government agency and pressure from private citizens, station owners and advertisers. It is perfectly fine for a conservative media company, like Sinclair, to say they will not resume broadcasts of Kimmel’s show. They own the stations, and they can choose what to broadcast, within broad limits. Likewise, it’s perfectly fine for left-wing owners, or those in progressive markets, to say, “Let’s bring Kimmel back now! Our audience wants it.” It’s fine for the Acme Manufacturing Company to announce it will no longer advertise its Wile E. Coyote products on the Kimmel show. Or that they’d love to buy more advertising there.

    Why is pressure from the government unacceptable? Because it carries the implicit threat to use the full force of the Executive Branch to harm the target. That’s why it was wrong for the public health agencies under Trump 45 and Biden to pressure social media companies to block alternative views about Covid, hoping to quash dissent.

    We now know that the dissenting voices were often more accurate than the government “experts.” But even if the dissents had been mistaken and the CDC experts correct, the pressure from official sources would have been wrong. We are much more likely to find the right answers when we allow a vigorous public debate. We are much less likely to find it when the mailed fist of government suppresses our First Amendment freedoms.

    The point here is not that “both sides do it” when they are in power. Sadly, they do. The point is our country and our citizens are best served by free and open debate, not the hidden, suppressive hand of the state. It is best served by letting viewers, advertisers, and media owners make their own decisions, after they’ve heard various voices.

    Yes, publicly-licensed airways are subject to a few reasonable restraints. But those restraints shouldn’t be stretched to bind and gag alternative views. We also need a lot more self-restraint from powerful bureaucrats, who are all-too-ready to silence and punish anyone they oppose. When their self-restraint fails, we need the freedom to call out the miscreants in government, just as we need it to call out failed comedians for their malign and ignorant comments.

  • Press-pool stew

    Press-pool stew

    Looking for a good time, sweet’eart?

    Team Trump is back in Washington today after their sojourn to Britain for a state visit. The President took to the Old Country with the gusto of an American girl on study abroad: castles, royals, knights, fancy dinners, all the pageantry. “I saw more paintings than any human being has ever saw, and statues,” he gushed to the press pool on the flight back.

    He even managed to dodge the most difficult question in his joint press conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, flatly claiming “I don’t know him, actually,” of ousted UK ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over new revelations of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s some departure from their Oval Office meeting in May, when Trump complimented Mandelson on his “beautiful accent.” Both Trump and Mandelson feature in the financier’s 50th birthday book; only Trump contests the authenticity of his entry.

    Having a less joyous time in Blighty? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was spotted by a couple of journalists wandering around the car park of Chequers, the PM’s stately home, without security. The Secretary is shorter than you’d expect, a senior Westminster source tells Cockburn: “He really is Lil’ Marco.”

    And while Donald and Melania had the honor of being hosted by the King and Queen at Windsor Castle, the traveling press corps’ lodgings were somewhat less illustrious. They were put up in the May Fair Radisson, a hotel that often receives guests partaking in illicit activities. “Scandalized American reporters were clutching their pearls after being approached by icky pimps and drug dealers on the street outside, who kept mentioning cocaine and women,” one reporter told Cockburn. “One could barely make it across the street to Sainsbury’s for supplies without being propositioned. Prostitutes in fake furs and teeny dresses loitered in packs outside of Sexy Fish, the restaurant catty-corner to the backside of the May Fair.”

    A veteran reporter described the scene inside the hotel to Cockburn: “Worthy-looking American journalists in shirts, chinos, dad sneakers and baseball caps wandering around with their credentials, while shifty-looking clients and their female companions were slinking in for a bit of afternoon nookie. It made for an interesting crowd at the bar.”

    On our radar

    XI TIME President Trump spoke with President Xi Jinping of China this morning. In a Truth Social post, Trump said the pair had “made progress” on issues including fentanyl, trade, Russia-Ukraine and a TikTok deal, agreed to meet at APEC in South Korea and visit each other’s countries.

    AOC TIME Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s team are positioning her to run either for the US Senate or the presidency, per Axios.

    PLAN B TIME Wealthy Americans are acquiring second passports in Latin America and Asia for tax purposes, according to a report in Business Insider.

    ‘Je suis Jimmy’

    It’s all hands on deck for the world of light entertainment after ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, an act that Hollywood is treating as if it’s part of a Stalinist purge. Panic is only increasing as rumors fly that the FCC is coming for The View next. We should be so lucky. Cockburn doesn’t really care about daytime TV schedules as long as The Young and the Restless is safe.

    Now Jimmy Fallon has mysteriously canceled public appearances, hoping that if he remains invisible, they can’t touch him. Meanwhile, Marvel actor Tatiana Maslany encourages people to unsubscribe their Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundles, but if her woeful She-Hulk show didn’t cause them to jump ship, then this certainly won’t. Marc Maron, who’s already self-deported from his podcast, warns on Instagram Reels of a Hitlerian-level emergency. Last night Jon Stewart convened an emergency satirical episode of The Daily Show, where he dressed like Donald Trump and appeared with a White House-style gilded backdrop, begging Dear Leader to have mercy on him. “Tonight, we are all Jimmy Kimmel,” Stephen Colbert said on his own canceled show. Speak for yourself, Stephen!

    Adam Carolla, Kimmel’s former co-host on The Man Show, is probably the best person to comment on this situation. On his podcast, he called Kimmel a “very good guy and a generous guy,” even though he thinks Kimmel was “inaccurate” in the Charlie Kirk/MAGA comments that led to this mess in the first place. “I don’t like the government getting involved,” Carolla, a Republican, said. “I just want people to speak and then the ratings will do the talking.” And now, girls jumping on trampolines.

    This week in free speech

    Charlie Kirk died demonstrating his commitment to free speech and open debate. In the nine days since his assassination, America has seen its Attorney General looking to punish “hate speech” and its Vice President using a guest-host slot on Kirk’s show to encourage citizens to call the employers of people they perceive to be celebrating Kirk’s death. It’s not clear who gets to decide what constitutes a “celebration,” versus a crass joke or commentary. The employer? The government? A mob on X?

    Speaking of X, “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk called for the streamer Steven “Destiny” Bonnell to be jailed for incitement to murder and domestic terrorism. Bonnell has made a series of unsavory comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder. And according to reporting from Ken Klippenstein on Substack, “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’.” Specifically, “Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremists’ (NVEs).”

    All of this is unfolding in parallel to the investigation and charging of Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s accused assassin, as FBI and state officials in Utah uncover more details about his actions, connections and beliefs – and people online seize on them to prove the Kirk murder reaffirms what they’d already decided about it beforehand.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • Don’t cry for Jimmy Kimmel

    The defenestration of the supposed talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, for the inflammatory remarks that he made during the monologue in his show on Monday night about Charlie Kirk, is both an unexpected and deeply predictable development. It was unexpected because Kimmel clearly believed that he was, like Lehman Brothers, “too big to fail,” and was therefore within his rights to make such comments as how “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” And it was deeply predictable because Kimmel now becomes the latest scalp that the right have seized this year, and perhaps the most high-profile yet. 

    In truth, Kimmel – whose show Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead! as it has been pulled, or “pre-empted,” from the ABC schedules “indefinitely,” which means that the chances of its returning are negligible – was a marked man. It is, of course, possible that he may return in some form on a streaming service such as Netflix, and whether such employers of his as the Academy Awards are sufficiently cowed to take him off their roster remains to be seen. Certainly, the left will see the firing as Kimmel as a political action, and President Trump’s open gloating that the decision was “great news for America” will embolden his opponents even further, perhaps turning Kimmel into a martyr for supposed free speech. 

    If this does happen, they have picked the wrong person. In truth, Kimmel’s schtick wore thin a long time ago, and his continued presence hosting one of the nation’s late-night talk shows owed as much to a lack of imagination on the part of executives and producers as it did genuine talent. If there is a more irritating, drawn-out and smug running “joke” than his manufactured feud with Matt Damon – something that may have been briefly amusing for a couple of gags, but has now lasted, in some form, for twenty years (twenty years!) – then I would be horrified to hear about it, but the fake fracas sums Kimmel up perfectly: a bit that may or may not have been amusing for a short time, but was grotesquely overstretched far beyond any enjoyable or even bearable period. 

    Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead!

    The talk show host has form. Many of the things that he should have been cancelled for on previous occasions, such as his donning blackface for a frankly racist impersonation of Snoop Dogg in 1996 and how he made some grimly sexist comments towards Megan Fox in 2009, were brushed under the carpet after Kimmel made the usual non-committal apologies of how “I believe that I have evolved and matured over the last 20-plus years,” even as he suggested that “I know that this will not be the last I hear of this and that it will be used again to try to quiet me.” He has always positioned himself less as a multi-millionaire interviewing celebrities and telling not-that-funny jokes on late-night television and more as a principled one-man source of opposition to Trump and MAGA. This may endear him to those on the left who will see his firing as an act of martyrdom, but for those on the right, or even of no political allegiance whatsoever, Kimmel’s attacks on the present administration will seem less like bravery and more like a childish urge to bear-bait. 

    Well, the bear has bitten at last, and apart from the fully paid-up devotees of this persistent man, who will be up in arms at ABC’s decision, many will be quietly relieved that Kimmel has been put out to pasture. No more wearisome Matt Damon “jokes”; no more MAGA insults. For any American who believes in dignity in retirement, let us hope that Kimmel enjoys a long and peaceful one, unburdened by the need to share his thoughts and feelings with the world again.

  • Is Trump DC’s Batman?

    Is Trump DC’s Batman?

    What is Washington to make of the President’s efforts to “make DC safe again?” If you’re only capable of measuring Trump’s actions by how authoritarian they appear, then, sure, his declaration of a state of emergency, seizure of control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilization of the National Guard must seem scary. Cockburn empathizes with the small number of DC residents – and larger cohort in other cities and around the world – who see Trump’s use of the powers granted him by the Home Rule Act as concerning. On his Monday evening constitutional around Northwest DC, Cockburn saw a number of arrests taking place, more MPD cars on the street than usual and heard a chorus of sirens cascading into the night.

    Yet Cockburn has lived in this city a while – and therefore knows that in many neighborhoods, the fear of creeping fascism is vastly offset by the sense of lawlessness that has prevailed in the district since the pandemic. Big-brained, extremely serious pundits such as MSNBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian spent yesterday bleating that “total violent crime” is “down 35 percent from 2023.” You might think that serving as a cable news network’s justice correspondent would require you to be able to read graphs – and acknowledge just how much higher violent crime was in 2023 compared to four years earlier, and how DC was a national outlier that year. Perhaps Ken should report to his colleague Steve Kornacki’s whiteboard for some remedial classes.

    Over on CNN, the tenor was sober-minded, data-oriented and measured. “Donald Trump makes himself Batman and the nation’s capital Gotham City,” said DMV native Abby Phillip on her primetime show. Does that make Pete Hegseth Commissioner Gordon and Judge Jeanine Two-Face? There was a minor scuffle on Phillip’s show in her absence last Wednesday, when conservative firebrand Scott Jennings said, “I just know that when we go to CNN in Washington and do a show, they send guards out with us to walk us out 200 feet to the street.” Other guests challenged his claim – but a mole tells Cockburn that CNN changed its security protocol for guests a while back, with a security guard escorting guests to their Ubers for safety reasons.

    Elsewhere in the city, the war of anecdotes rages on. “Hey DC, let’s push back against the negative narrative about our city,” posted the ironically named DC meme account Washingtonian Problems on X. “Share why you love our beautiful home and help show the world the real DC.” The responses are… probably not what they were hoping for:

    “I got mugged last year by a group of teenagers who should’ve been in school while walking back from donating a trunk of school supplies to that same school.”

    “I watched a gang of kids push a cyclist into traffic on 14th St and waited on hold with 911 for 140 seconds until they chased me away.”

    “I moved from my previous apartment in NoMa after four people were shot less than a block away, outside King Street Oyster in 2024. The police blamed the restaurant for failing to lock-up their patio at night, saying it ‘contributed to the group establishing themselves and continue to grow, leading to the gun violence that resulted in four people being shot.’ DC chief of police Pamela Smith ordered the restaurant to close for four days after violating a 2019 ‘security agreement.’ Silent killers: open patios.”

    This morning Cockburn spotted a couple of women around his age, one of them wearing a “the real criminal is in the White House” T-shirt. This is another line that’s been trotted out: how can Trump be a “law-and-order” leader when he incited January 6? Cockburn is no fan of disorder in the district – including what unfolded at the Capitol in 2021 – but he is at pains to point out that hundreds of the attempted insurrectionists, violent and not, faced legal consequences for their actions that day. Several were in jail for three or so years – and the J6 cases tied up the DC courts for months. That’s more than can be said for the juvenile perpetrators of the post-Covid violent crime spike, most of whom got away with a slap on the wrist.

    For the people solely outraged at Trump’s “overreach” this week, Cockburn has to wonder: where was your anger for the many, many people who could have acted before him on DC crime and did next to nothing? For the DC Council, Mayor, police chiefs, judges, housing authorities, the previous attorney general, the previous president… the list goes on.

    On our radar

    LET’S GET IT ON In celebration of the nation turning 250, Dana White confirmed there will likely be a UFC match on the White House lawn. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House. It’s incredible,” White told the Wall Street Journal.

    BOT WARS After alleging that Apple gives ChatGPT preferential placement over xAI in the App Store, Elon Musk announced he will sue for “antitrust violations.”

    NEW TRUMP TRIAL A federal court began hearing testimony yesterday to determine if President Trump deployed the National Guard illegally to squash June’s California riots. Trump appears unconcerned, as he deployed the National Guard the same day in DC.

    The Picture of Barack Hussein Obama

    Another day, another Donald Trump redecorating drama. This week’s outrage comes after a report emerged that Trump has moved portraits of three former presidents – Barack Obama and George Bush Sr. and Jr. – out of view to a “hidden stairwell” where tourists visiting the White House can’t see them. However, they definitely can see a painted rendition of Trump’s “Fight” moment, which has hung in the foyer of the White House since April.

    Giant flags, a new ballroom, endless harrumphing from the opposing side. Is this the White House or an episode of Love It or List It? Cockburn thinks Trump should just keep pushing the boundaries. Take down Washington and Lincoln’s portraits and replace them with a meme painting of a muscular Trump wielding a machine gun and flying bareback on an eagle. Let the man posterize himself. He’s the ultimate man of the people after all, and this is the People’s House.

    Giacomo Kimmel in Diretta!

    On his ex-girlfriend Sarah Silverman’s podcast last week, Jimmy Kimmel announced he has procured Italian citizenship and is considering an exodus because of Trump. Alluding to ICE and deportations, Kimmel said, “I feel like it’s worse than probably even he [Trump] would like it to be.” Kimmel would be following fellow “national treasures” Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres across the Atlantic if he decides to make the switch.

    Cockburn was also amused as the talk-show host got sentimental. “Remember when we almost got arrested at the New York airport for making out in the airport?” Then Silverman clapped her hands to her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh my gosh that was very romantic.” Kimmel added, “Yeah, I was thinking about that on the way over here.”

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.