It never ceases to amaze me how clueless Democrats are. If you’ve ever been around a Democrat, you know that they believe they’re the smartest person in the room. And the second you start challenging their world view they crumble and run for the hills—but not before they lecture you from the moral high ground they pretend to have. Right now, they’ve even cast themselves as the supposed “gatekeepers of free speech.” The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. After years of silencing critics, censoring dissent, and policing thought, they still parade around claiming to protect a principle they clearly don’t even understand.
Their latest meltdown over Jimmy Kimmel ought to make that abundantly clear. Kimmel wasn’t temporarily suspended because of government censorship. He wasn’t silenced by the heavy boot of Donald Trump or the FCC. Kimmel was suspended by ABC/Disney—his own employer—after he went too far by lying about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
That’s not “censorship.”
That’s a multi-billion-dollar media company deciding that one of its high-profile hosts was a liability. The free market at work. Kimmel made himself a headache, and Disney, for a time, decided it wasn’t worth it. Case closed.
But Democrats can’t let it go. Now that Kimmel has returned to television, it makes no sense to say that he’d been pulled by government coercion. His return was proof that this had been a business decision, and statements from ABC/Disney confirmed that.
But has that stopped Democrats from screaming “censorship”? Not in the least.
Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, two ABC affiliates, still won’t air Kimmel’s show. And now Democrats are not only calling that censorship, they're arguing that if a broadcast company doesn’t want to air Kimmel’s show, it’s somehow violating his First Amendment rights.
This is such a gross distortion of constitutional law that it would be laughable if it weren’t being peddled by elected officials who should know better. There is no constitutional right to a prime-time talk show. There is no constitutional guarantee that content will be broadcast nationwide. To argue otherwise is both embarrassing and dangerous.
“It’s outrageous that Jimmy Kimmel is still censored on millions of Maryland TVs because Sinclair won’t stand up to Trump and his FCC’s threats to free speech,” Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in a post on X.
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Outrageous? What’s outrageous is a U.S. senator demanding that a private media company air a celebrity talk-show host’s program against its will, as though Jimmy Kimmel has some God-given right to a late-night platform. He doesn’t.
It isn’t censorship if Sinclair or Nextstar chooses not to waste airtime on him. But it is extremely authoritarian when someone in the federal government is demanding a private company air specific content.
Even more troubling, California State Senator Scott Wiener has floated the idea of breaking up Sinclair as punishment for not carrying Kimmel’s show.
Can’t wait to break Sinclair up. Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy. And although Sinclair isn’t a fan of democracy, most people are. https://t.co/hN77Uiroir
— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) September 23, 2025
Let that sink in. Democrats—who constantly accuse Trump of authoritarianism—are openly threatening to use government power to punish a company for exercising its freedom to decide what programming it does or doesn’t air. That’s the authoritarianism that Democrats have been warning about… right from their own party.
It’s a textbook case of how the Left projects its own authoritarian impulses onto its opponents. To Democrats, “free speech” seems to mean that speech they approve of must be amplified, while any dissenting voice can be silenced. The hypocrisy is glaring: the same people insisting Kimmel has a “right” to be heard had nothing to say when Google admitted it censored conservatives at the request of the Biden administration.
