Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Is Shocking, But the Worst Could Be Yet to Come

In the week since Charlie Kirk was killed, members of the Trump administration have been honoring him by using one of his favorite platforms — the right-wing podcast — to continue his tradition of threatening people who say things he did not like.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said while speaking on pundit Benny Johnson’s podcast on September 17. Carr was responding to a question from Johnson about comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who suggested on his late-night show that members of the MAGA movement were trying to “score political points” on Kirk’s death, comments Carr called “truly sick,” adding, “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

A few hours later, ABC announced that it had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show.

The Kimmel suspension happened just days after Vice President JD Vance criticized an op-ed in The Nation while hosting Kirk’s own podcast on September 15, erroneously accusing the piece’s author of celebrating Kirk’s death. Vance also falsely claimed that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation. (Neither foundation currently funds the outlet, and Open Society never has.)

“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,” Vance said, vowing “to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”

The comments were meant to terrify, and they did just that. They were shocking, but they were not unexpected.

Last year, as the world began to come to terms with the potential implications of another Donald Trump presidency, we wrote about the playbook we anticipated his administration and its allies would use to clamp down on dissent. Drawing on detailed plans and documents published by two right-wing think tanks, we anticipated a wide variety of attacks. In the documents, the Heritage Foundation and Capital Research Center identified a litany of tools in their arsenal to suppress the left. Those range from attacks on the immigration status of people who speak out, to threats to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status.

They also include frivolous lawsuits that could weigh organizers down, including sweeping RICO charges, which are famously easy to abuse; under them, prosecutors can lump together wide varieties of activity under the umbrella of a conspiracy and make criminal charges simply by association.

In our analysis of those right-wing plans, we perceived that the right seemed poised for a broader attack, unlikely to stop at setting up a few specific scapegoats and relying on a climate of fear to do the rest of their work. While certain activists and movements — especially people working in solidarity with Palestine — would surely have bigger targets on their backs, we warned, the broader progressive movement could easily be ensnared.

We see now how the language Vance is using — both the specific threats and the references to nebulously defined “networks” — echoes what we read in those documents last year. Back then, we voiced our fear that the new administration would use the battering ram of the state to target a broad range of left movement infrastructure: activists, of course, but also independent media, as well as the legal groups that serve as a crucial avenue of defense, and the foundations that provide financial support.

As Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made clear on Monday, the administration is indeed preparing to identify how to take out the entire progressive civil society ecosystem. Kirk’s killing may offer them the opportunity to attempt that with a few forceful knocks — unless we act.

As JD Vance and Stephen Miller made clear, the administration is indeed preparing to identify how to take out the entire progressive civil society ecosystem.

While speaking with Miller on Kirk’s podcast, Vance acknowledged the blowback he anticipates receiving for the wide-ranging crackdown they have in store. “You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,” Vance said. “No, no, no, we’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

What does violence look like to them? According to Miller, it is “the organized doxing 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, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.”

These are no off-the-cuff remarks. That same day, Trump himself said he would be willing to classify “Antifa,” short for anti-fascists, as a domestic terrorism group, despite the fact that there is famously no single antifa group. Trump followed that up on September 17 with a social media post announcing he would do just that, stating that he would be “designating ANTIFA” as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”

“I will also be strongly recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices,” Trump wrote.

There is no actual system for slapping the terrorism label on a domestic group. The State Department can add groups to its own classification of foreign terrorist organizations, but no such official list exists for domestic groups. But while Trump didn’t explain how he might enact this classification of “Antifa” from a legal or logistical standpoint, the threat of the terror label alone is enough to cause concern.

Once a set of accusations has been marked by the “terror” label, it’s no surprise when declarations of “war” follow. As Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski wrote a decade ago in urging progressives to disavow the “terror” framing, “The ‘terrorism’ frame offers only intensified surveillance, policing, and deployment of military force as its preferred strategies for creating safety and justice.”

After Kirk’s killing, like clockwork, the “terrorism” label has been deployed hand in hand with the war label. “Civil war” mentions surged on social media, and far right figureheads from Andrew Tate to Steve Bannon to Alex Jones and many more announced that a war had arrived, with some explicitly calling for escalated violence.

During his interview with Vance on Kirk’s podcast, Stephen Miller declared something of a holy war, with state violence as the primary weapon: “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 [leftist] networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Calling the current moment a “war” is not simply a provocation; it’s a strategic move. In wartime, many rules fall away. Crying “war” is the public-discourse equivalent of declaring martial law; “war” means the norms and laws change. State-sanctioned murder — including mechanisms like an increased use of the death penalty and state-justified police-perpetrated killings, as well as jailing and confinement without due process — become not only admissible, but normalized practices.

Indeed, the right’s calls for indiscriminate criminalization have been rampant — as have enthusiastic calls to abandon the usual limits on state power. Far right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a history of concretely impacting Trump’s decisions, suggested, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.”

Calling the current moment a “war” is not simply a provocation; it’s a strategic move. In wartime, many rules fall away.

The administration itself has hit similar notes: Speaking to NBC News, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson unleashed a torrent of allegations against left-wing organizations writ large, from fueling “violent riots” to coordinating doxing attacks.

“The Trump administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” Jackson said. “This effort will target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”

The administration has considered using RICO charges to do this. Trump himself has repeatedly suggested going after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros using such racketeering and conspiracy charges. Supposedly intended for targeting organized crime, RICO laws have long been controversial due to the expansive powers they can give prosecutors and their ability to capture people in their dragnet. Republican lawmakers are seeking to add more powers to that list. This summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) proposed a bill that would add rioting to the list of potential RICO offenses. This would allow prosecutors to conduct sweeping investigations of foundations and people, such as Soros, that they allege are funding “riots.”

Beyond organizations, the threats of prosecution are also being leveled against noncompliant individuals: Pam Bondi is currently threatening to criminally prosecute an Office Depot employee who refused to print a customer’s flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil.

As Trump and his lackeys use the aftermath of Kirk’s killing to quash leftist speech and organizing, we must be clear about the fact that plenty of these tactics are not new; this sweeping crackdown is not simply a reaction to an instance of violence. It is an exploitation of Kirk’s killing to further the ultimate goal of a right-wing movement hell-bent on winning more power.

Vance’s threat to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, for example, is clearly reminiscent of the infamous “nonprofit killer bill,” which would have given the Treasury secretary the authority to strip tax-exempt status from nonprofits they unilaterally deemed to be “terrorist-supporting organizations.” After failing to pass the standalone bill in Congress in November, Republicans attempted to stick the provisions of the nonprofit killer bill into their massive budget bill this summer, though it was eventually removed. It is not law.

The absence of such a law has not stopped those on the right from trying to use other mechanisms to further the nonprofit killer bill’s goal of suppressing progressive civil society. And the attempt to investigate left groups does not come from the Trump administration. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is perhaps most famous for demanding in The New York Times that the Trump administration send the military to cities to quell uprisings for racial justice in 2020. Now, he has moved on to demand that the Internal Revenue Service investigate groups he does not like, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The use of RICO charges to go after the left, too, does not begin or end with the Trump administration. In Georgia, the state’s attorney general stuck those charges on dozens of Stop Cop City organizers who were fighting the construction of a massive police training facility in Atlanta. While a judge eventually dropped the charges, fighting those charges still sucked up crucial time and resources from abolitionist organizing. And in 2017, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, filed a RICO suit that accused environmental groups like Greenpeace of a racketeering conspiracy over the pipeline protests. When that was thrown out, the pipeline company filed a similar suit in a North Dakota court and won a staggering $660 million from the environmental organization.

And, of course, it is critical to point out how the bipartisan targeting of the Palestine movement for the past two years has made much of this specific moment possible. While the assault on free speech has certainly escalated in the last week, it is impossible not to look at the precedent set by college administrators, private employers, Congress, and both the Trump and Biden administrations for their sweeping crackdown on people who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

That crackdown intensified with the Trump administration’s attempts to deport scholars based on their speech, activism, or family ties. While the courts have stopped the deportations of academics like Badar Khan Suri and Rümeysa Öztürk for their speech for now, an immigration judge has ordered Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, to be deported to Algeria or Syria, unless Khalil is successful in an appeal.

Those cases were likely top of mind for Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast when he put forth a provision this month that, as The Intercept reported, would allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip American citizens of their passports if he unilaterally determines they “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.” The vagueness is surely intentional, and could include lawyers who provide legal advice, for example, or people who speak out against genocidal policies like Öztürk did. Fortunately, thanks to overwhelming backlash from civil rights groups, Mast backtracked on the provision.

What examples like this do show, though, is that pushback can help stem the fascistic tide. The right is loud. Its actors have a terrifying amount of power and the machinery of the state at their disposal. Nothing about their playbook, though, is inevitable. And we in the media have a specific responsibility in acting as a bulwark.

Media organizations have been quick to point out the various inconsistencies that Vance pushed in his address on the podcast, honing in on the cherrypicked statistics he used to imply that political violence is a bigger issue on the left, and pointing to Vance’s omission of recent violence aimed at notable Democrats, including the assassination of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman in June.

It’s critical for the media to jump in and correct the record — it’s a core responsibility. But calling out hypocrisy and inaccuracy alone won’t save us. We must also shed light on the various mechanisms the administration and its allies have at their disposal to enforce its terrifying agenda, as well as the complicity of organizations willing to do their dirty work.

For example, we must be clear about what Carr meant when he said the FCC could deal with Kimmel’s speech “the easy way or the hard way.”

“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr added. FCC approval is key for networks to maintain their broadcast licenses; it’s even more crucial for networks undergoing potential corporate mergers. That includes Nexstar Media Group, one of the country’s largest TV operators, which runs programming from ABC. The FCC famously approved a controversial merger between CBS parent company Paramount and media company Skydance earlier this year. Even before this week, we already had serious indications that the Trump administration was turning the agency into a political weapon, as Carr started investigations into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at ABC and NBC.

Those of us in the media must call out these power plays for what they are. We must continue to highlight threats of censorship wherever they spring up — from the administration, from corporations, and from college administrators. By persistently investigating and exposing these threats, we can provide the media equivalent of pushback in the streets, and let the administration and its allies know that their attempts at repression won’t come easy.

Finally, funders supporting left and progressive organizations, including movement media, should recognize their power — and refuse to retreat. In fact, now is the time to recognize that left and progressive movements and journalism organizations need more resources, in order to face down threats from the right and keep building a transformed world for us all.

For those of us in the movement media space, the coming months and years will necessitate resources to cover the intensifying mechanisms by which fascism is tightening its hold, from criminalization to fear campaigns to the erosion of democratic systems. And as the administration’s recent threats against media outlets attest, journalism organizations will also need resources to legally defend ourselves against powerful forces, simply in order to maintain our platforms to speak out.

Vance’s erroneous assertion that the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation demonstrate that the right will attack progressive and mainstream funders whether or not they support social justice-driven organizations. While some may be tempted to fund less in order to avoid being targeted, there’s no “safety” in pulling back. So, why not go ahead and throw support behind the wide range of organizations struggling against fascism, which urgently need resources?

As right-wing leaders and influencers wield the “terror” label and threaten to wage war on left organizations, those of us within those organizations need to ground ourselves in our own power. As Vance promises to dismantle progressive networks and the White House compiles its ominous list of left organizations to target, let’s reconnect with our own left lists — strengthening our relationships with each other, deepening our cross-organizational partnerships, and reminding ourselves to have each other’s backs.

As the administration carries out the strategies in its fascist playbook, we can remember we, too, have strategy. Where are we in our own playbooks? Those of us in media can keep seeking new, wider-ranging, and creative ways to raise our voices to counter the vicious rhetoric-turned-policy erupting around us. And instead of heeding the threats of warmongering bullies, we can start each day by rooting ourselves in our solidarities, and in our commitment to a more just, interdependent, and liberatory collective future.