Silencing Kimmel Means Silencing You
When Private Companies Do the Government's Dirty Work
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This is a mini-post addressing Kimmel’s suspension and return to ABC.
When you read this list, what do you think of?
Joe Rogan
Ted Cruz
Clay travis
Ben Shapiro
Candace Owen
Tim Dillon
Andrew Schulz
Rand Paul
Mitch McConnell
I can guess your thoughts:
Conservative. You’d be right about all except 1.
Republican. You’d be right about all except 2.
Politically motivated. You’d be right about all except 3.
You ready? They all condemned the suspension of Kimmel and praised his return. Wait… why?
I could not, for the life of me, understand why people on the right were happy Kimmel got suspended. It made no sense.
After watching Roseanne get the ax, Gina Carano get bounced over a tweet, and Trump get banned from Twitter. And millions of verified shadow-banning conservative posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all through Covid.
If this is on your memory, why, for the love of the man down by the river, would you enjoy Kimmel’s removal for speech? This is exactly what you used to get fired up about.
The primary reason that list of people stood in solidarity about this issue is because they remember. If the FCC has that kind of control, we are all doomed. Unfortunately, this isn’t new.
There have been a few Supreme Court cases involving private companies acting on behalf of the government, but one of the more important ones happened to be in my area. Brentwood high school, in Brentwood, TN, sued the TSSAA, the primary governing body for high school athletics in Tennessee. They sued declaring that the TSSAA had acted on behalf, or in place of, the government. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Brentwood High won.
The ruling was that the TSSAA had acted on behalf of the government, thereby removing its protections as a private company and becoming subject to government regulations and policies.
What does this have to do with anything? When Twitter, FB, and IG were removing conservative posts, we now know they were doing so at the request of the federal government. Which makes them acting on behalf of the government and subject to first amendment protections of citizens.
Meaning, they can be sued for violating First Amendment rights.
So this concept isn’t new. The government keeps trying to dip its feet in the private domain masking as private companies that do their bidding. And it’s usually aimed at conservatives. But this time it hit Kimmel. Here’s the problem, if they are willing to take out Kimmel, you’re next. Regardless of your political affiliation.
You better hope the federal government doesn’t continue to be in the speech suppression business. Because if you open a history book, you’ll see where this ends up. And it’s catastrophic.
Stay Classy GP!
Grainger
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A lot of folks of the right started off by espousing the principles they saw people on the left abusing.
But instead of adhering to those principles themselves once they got power, they zoomed right past and went for the "how do you like it when someone does that to you" approach.
It's a human tendency. It never works, though.