Yes you

The authoritarian consolidation of the president and the company of President Donald Trump intensified Wednesday with the suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel of the Matrix company of ABC, Disney, after the threats of the Federal Communications Commission.

The suspension of the Kimmel night interview program is the most serious and clear attack against the rights of freedom of expression in generations. The president of the FCC, Brendan Carr, publicly requested that Kimmel was removed from the air by a joke he made about how the Trump administration sought to blame anyone to his left for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The pressure to fire Kimmel was backed by threats to extract ABC affiliate transmission licenses if the comedian was not taken out of the air.

This is blatantly illegal. The first amendment explicitly protects against the censorship of government discourse. The government cannot threaten the announcers to censor the speech or punish the speech for their speech regardless of what the person said.

“This is beyond McCarthyism,” said Christopher Anders, director of the Division of Democracy and Technology of the American Union of Civil Liberties. “Trump officials repeatedly abuse their power to stop the ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write and even joke. The actions of the Trump administration, combined with the capitulation of ABC, represent a serious threat to our freedoms of the first amendment.”

It is also the last dead canary in the coal mine of Trump’s authoritarian consolidation attempt. By forcing Kimmel’s suspension, Trump is taking control over the media. He is dictating what can be said and who can say it. This is an effort to affect fear in the entertainment industry and the press, and destroy their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

Evan Agostini through News

That this repression focused on a comedian is in line with the recent history of authoritarian consolidation efforts.

“The comedy does not change the world, but it is a chimney,” said Jon Stewart, The Daily Show of Comedy Central, “when a society feels under threat, comedians are sent first.”

After winning the elections in 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin forced the cancellation of a comedy puppet show that mocked him during his electoral campaign. In Egypt, both the elected government of Mohammed Morsi and the Military Government of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, which overthrew Morsi in a coup d’etat, persecuted the comedian Bassem Youseff, who criticized Morsi’s government and made comments that were seen as critics of Islam, and finally they took him out of the air in 2014.

Trump is following the example of these authoritarian. And it is not a matter of laughter. If you can’t make a joke, how can you say something critical of the regime, even something vile, with a serious face?

Trump has also been helped for decades of Laxo antimonopoolio compliance and decades of media mergers that he has seen the entertainment industry consolidate in less and less conglomerate. The unbridled condensation gives Trump less objectives on which to focus their attention, and an immense leverage of companies that seek favorable regulation or government approval for additional mergers and acquisitions.

Tom Brenner/The Washington Post through Getty Images

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a comedian who frequently grows to Trump and conservatives, was abruptly canceled After the FCC approved the purchase of Paramount, the News parent company, to Skydance, a conglomerate of media owned by David Ellison, the son of the Oracle CEO and Trump’s supporter, Larry Ellison. That agreement came with News stipulations for make your coverage more conservativeincluding the installation of an ideological story to increase bias for conservatives. According to reports, David Ellison is also Looking to buy the conservative site The Free Press and install your editor, Bari Weiss, as head of News.

Skydance is now in conversations to buy Warner Bros Discovery, a conglomerate that CNN has. Although cable television is not regulated by the FCC, the regulator reviews media mergers. I could create another pressure point for the FCC to force another media company to bend to conservative demands on coverage. Even without such stipulation, Ellison could demand that CNN alter its coverage to support Trump.

And on Tuesday, the Larry Ellison Oracle was announced as one of the three companies established in Buy Tiktok’s American arm. It was also said that Marc Andresen, the head of the Silicon Valley A16z Risk Capital firm, which supports Trump, was one of the three buyers. According to the reports, that purchase also gives Trump Power about the social media company, and the government received a seat of the Board in the new company based in the United States.

This is the consolidation style of regime media Recently seen under the Autocratic Hungarian president, Viktor Orban. Trump’s supporters come to Orban as a model to follow, fetiating him in their events, including the Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Conference on Conservadismo.

But the United States is not Hungary. Or Russia. Or Egypt. None of these countries have a constitutional right to freedom of expression and a free press like the United States or have a culture that supports freedom of expression, expression and press.

Trump’s effort to destroy freedom of expression will surely be intensely unpopular in a society where freedom of expression is a primary value. The courts are likely to be, too, that they also find it illegal. Meanwhile, this repression is designed to instill fear in all, from rich televised comedians to the regular Joe that only publishes online. He just remembers, fear is the mental murderer.