Josh marshall on what to do after the kimmel firing
(This is a shared post from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. I’ve kept all the promotional links because it’s a good thing to join and pay for. -Jim Mahon)
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September 18, 2025 3:10 p.m.
Let me start by noting the obvious: What we saw yesterday with Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC News was a brazen and unabashed attack on free speech in the United States in a way that was unimaginable until a few months ago. It manages to be both shameful in its audacity and criminality while also absurd. It’s not a newspaper being shuttered or a political party being proscribed. It’s a comedian’s show being taken off the air. But dictators and authoritarians never like comedians. They are jesters, not warriors. So their lance strikes and ripostes are oblique in their approach and more difficult to react to.
I don’t want to participate in the, “How bad is this?” discourse. It’s bad. We know that. An apolitical person told me yesterday this whole development was “frightening, scary.” I agreed. So why don’t you seem more upset about it? this person asked. Because I already knew we were here.
All I have time for is what one does in response. So a few thoughts on that front.
First, my perennial axiom: We are in a contest of spectacles of power. The first and most important thing is not to react or complain or bewail but to attack. To this end, where I would start, especially if I were a Democratic elected official, is by taunting every journalist I came into contact with from ABC, CBS and every other news and media organization that is now owned by the White House — which is a rapidly growing list. It may soon include CNN if Paramount/Skydance succeeds in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery. “Yes, I will happily answer your question, but first, how can we trust your company, since it is owned by Donald Trump? You have to do whatever he demands.”
Every time. Attack and attack and attack. Don’t complain. Attack. People are bewildered by what they’re seeing. They don’t like it. Everything that raises the salience of this issue is a win. They want to see someone talk back. There is a rich history which correctly views the tyrant not as a symbol of strength but as a weak and contemptible figure, vain and fragile, addicted to fawning and praise, murdered in his heart by the most innocuous of criticism. The whole system of autocracy is one built on individual degeneracy, the strongman and the toadies together.
Second, be sure to understand why these things are happening. Nexstar is one of the largest owners of ABC affiliate stations, the local stations that are part of the ABC network. It owns or controls more than 200 local television stations. It’s in the process of acquiring Tegna, the next biggest of these affiliate conglomerates, controlling 64 news stations. Local broadcast television is highly regulated on its own, in addition to the antitrust concerns raised by this purchase. The deal requires the sign off of Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr. Yesterday, Carr sent a clear message to Nexstar that if they wanted their merger they needed to do the right thing with Jimmy Kimmel. They quickly announced it was no longer appropriate to air his show on their stations. Nexstar on its own took Kimmel off many ABC stations, and ABC then followed suit by “indefinitely” taking his show off the air. ABC might have acted on its own. But that’s the chain of events.
That’s precisely the same as what happened with the Paramount/Skydance merger. They needed the Trump White House’s signoff. That’s why Paramount/CBS acceded to Trump’s absurd settlement payment over the editing of a “60 Minutes” episode. Every big diversified corporation which owns a media company is highly vulnerable to this kind of blackmail. Any company which operates in the highly regulated broadcast space is also vulnerable. Independent media companies are not. As much as I criticize many of the editorial decisions of The New York Times, they are independent. The Sulzberger family just owns the Times. That’s why Trump’s new lawsuit against the Times will almost certainly go nowhere. There is zero incentive for them to cut a check the way all these other outlets have.
Once you put on the pair of glasses which shows the different between the independent publications and the White House-owned ones everything falls into place. You know what and who you’re dealing with. As I explained yesterday, the pro-Trump Ellison Family is currently trying to move CNN from the partially owned bucket to the fully owned one. We’ll find out soon if they succeed.
Third, taking anti-Trump or in more cases simply non-gelded media off the air doesn’t decrease the demand for such media. If anything it increases it. This can be an opportunity as much as a setback. It’s hard to match the megaphone of even the legacy broadcast stations and their cable pick-up counterparts. But we’ve seen just in the last couple of years how what is essentially the DIY medium of podcasting can generate mammoth audiences and even greater influence. We need wealthy non-authoritarians to step up in building out and investing in this alternative infrastructure that is independent in the way I described above. But it doesn’t need to wait. Kimmel is probably locked into a golden parachute even if he’s permanently taken off the air. But if he wanted to, he could probably have one of the country’s biggest podcasts or YouTube more or less overnight. Others can too. I repeat the salient point. Taking non-gelded media and/or news off the air doesn’t decrease the demand for it. Follow the demand.
Fourth, most elected Democrats remain in the mode of believing they are a party of government temporarily out of power. They are that too. But really they’re an opposition party in the midst of an attempted authoritarian takeover of the American Republic. That means many things. But here’s one of the most important. Last night Sen. Chris Murphy went on Bluesky (and likely other platforms) denouncing Carr’s criminal and unconstitutional actions — a “history making abuse of your power” he called it. Murphy went on to say, “It will define your legacy and one day you will come to regret punishing free speech and trying to destroy democracy.”
It was the best thing I’d seen any elected official say in response to yesterday’s events and one of the only meaningful ones. But on the next round, I’d recommend Murphy put a finer edge on those remarks. I don’t care and I suspect Carr doesn’t care about one day regretting some principle he transgressed. He knows what he’s done. Just one year ago he was on X saying that “free speech” is the “counterweight” to tyranny. “That’s why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream,” Carr wrote at the time. He knows what he’s doing. I want lawmakers to be telling people like Carr and his ilk not that they’ll have regrets but that they’ll face consequences.
I hear all these people telling me how there won’t be a 2026 election, or that it won’t be free and fair or a bunch of other things. My question to them or maybe to you is what are you going to do about it? History is long. No one is in the saddle forever. It is critical for an opposition to give the people a vision of forward trajectory in time, that this isn’t the end of the story, that consequences can be delayed but not evaded. It’s such a demonstrable point. Think even of the longest lasting fascist or authoritarian dictatorships. Franco? About 35 years. Pinochet? 16 years, ousted by a referendum. I don’t imagine this will last for even a tiny fraction of that length of time. My point is simply to demonstrate the incontestable point: no one remains in the saddle forever. That’s true even in the most extreme cases. A reckoning comes and everyone needs to be on notice.
Trump is already unpopular. He is getting more unpopular. His actions are unpopular. It is the elites, the big diversified corporations and monopolies who have tossed aside most rapidly Americans’ instinctive disdain for kings and dictators. It’s down at the most democratic level of our system where the resistance is strongest and growing — juries that refuse to indict or convict amid Trump’s bogus crime crackdown, voters who are showing they’ve had enough. He slashes at the civic orthodoxies and values we were all raised on. This remains his opposition’s greatest advantage. It simply needs to be exploited. Adam Smith says there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. There’s a lot of ruin in a democracy. We’re in a very bad situation. To me, all I care about is what to do in response. These are a few of the many things. If history is long, we are not long. We will all die. The question, as always, is how do we conduct ourselves in the days we have?
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