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Yurumi | Deposit Photos |
America feels anything but balanced right now.
I won't belabor the details of Charlie Kirk's murder and subsequent lionization by the right; you've no doubt heard more than you want to about it. What I want to focus on is how Kirk's death is being used as an excuse by the Trump regime to crack down on dissent. First it was Stephen Colbert; this week, it was Jimmy Kimmel. Both comedians have criticized Trump for laughs in their nightly monologues.
I've been reminding folks for months now that TV networks aren't licensed by the FCC, so they have no license to be yanked, no matter how much Trump complains about them. But the regime has figured out an end run, and I'm kind of mad at myself for not considering the possibility. See, Kimmel's show went away because Nexstar, a company that owns the largest number of local stations in the country, wants FCC approval to buy Tegna, a company that owns the stations that were spun off from Gannett when it split its broadcast and print divisions in 2015. To boost its chances for approval of the deal, Nexstar told Disney, which owns the ABC network, that because of Kimmel's remarks about the Kirk shooting, it would pre-empt his show for a night. Another major (and very conservative) station group owner, Sinclair, announced it would do the same thing. So Disney put Kimmel's show on indefinite suspension.
Nexstar says its decision to pre-empt the show had nothing to do with its pending deal with Tegna. But come on.
The folks who are saying this is a blatant violation of the First Amendment are right. The First Amendment literally guarantees us all the right to criticize the government without fear of retribution.
And yes, that covers comics. It especially covers comics. There's a long, long history of people poking fun at the powerful. You've heard of court jesters, right? They weren't there just to be fools. And in ancient Ireland, the chief job of a bard at court was to literally sing the praises of the monarch and tell him where he screwed up. Being the target of a bardic satire could ruin your reputation -- and spell the end of your reign of power. Better to laugh it off and plan to do better, moving forward.
Trump, of course, has no sense of humor. It's been said that his hatred of Barack Obama goes back to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011, when Obama roasted Trump for claiming that Obama was born in Kenya.
I'd never seen that video until just now. It's pretty brutal. A different person would just laugh it off, but you can tell Trump doesn't think it's funny at all.
Obama was prescient about one thing, though, and it starts at the 4:45 mark. Needs more gilding, but other than that, it's spot on.
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The point is that the Trump administration is trampling all of our democratic norms, and with these attacks on the First Amendment, it's a short step from silencing famous people who criticize the administration to silencing everyone. Is it too late to stop them?
This week, Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa on The Daily Show. (You can watch the interview here.) Ressa is a Filipino American journalist who was arrested dozens of times by the regime of Rodrigo Duterte, starting when Duterte was elected president of the Phillipines in 2016. She quoted a recent study that found 72 percent of the world's countries are now under authoritarian rule. And yet, she is optimistic, noting that Duterte was arrested in March of this year to face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
She warns that it takes very little time to lose your rights, and much longer to get them back.
The Wheel turns. We may not have hit bottom yet. But the sooner we stop the descent, the sooner we can start the long climb back up again.
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These moments of unbalanced blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! But don't let yourself by silenced in advance.