Exactly How Much Should I Be Freaking Out Over This Jimmy Kimmel News?
By now you’ve seen the news: On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission chair and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr successfully pressured Disney’s ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air indefinitely due to Kimmel’s Monday-night remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the administration’s response.
Here is the @JimmyKimmel clip on Charlie Kirk that provoked the ire of the Trump administration:
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 18, 2025
pic.twitter.com/b3qAW0ZDUm
On Wednesday, Carr told a far-right podcast the FCC would move to revoke ABC’s affiliate licenses unless Kimmel was punished for his comments, while Sinclair and Nexstar — both of which own many of ABC’s affiliate stations — said they’d stop airing the show. Within hours, the network capitulated to the administration’s threats, marking a dangerous escalation in Trump’s project of dismantling of the United States’ democratic institutions and norms. How worried should we be about this development? And how does this moment track with the authoritarian takeovers we’ve seen elsewhere in the world? To figure these questions out, I called up two experts: Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University sociologist who has studied Hungary’s descent into dictatorship, and Jason Stanley, a fascism scholar who fled the U.S. earlier this year and currently teaches at the University of Toronto. Here’s what they said.
What should we make of the FCC intervening to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air?
As Stanley sees it, the government has been cracking down on the media through pricey lawsuits and internal pressures since Trump returned to power in January. He pointed at how Joy-Ann Reid’s firing from MSNBC and Stephen Colbert seeing his show end were not explicitly presented as decisions forced by Trump, but there were indications that executives were trying not to infuriate the administration: Reid has said she believes the network’s “discomfort” over her coverage of Trump played a role in her firing, while The Late Show cancellation came after Colbert called a $16 million settlement between Trump and CBS on his 60 Minutes lawsuit a “big fat bribe.”
But now, there’s no pretense at all about their intentions, Stanley says. “The FCC is simply saying, ‘We don’t want any criticism of MAGA. We don’t want anyone pointing out that we’re using this moment to target the political opposition, so get rid of that guy or we’ll take you off the air,” he says. “Nobody’s pretending.” This is a classic authoritarian move, he adds.
Scheppele says the playbook is one that was followed in Hungary, too. “What both these governments do is they threaten the owners of these private organizations with regulatory punishments,” she says. The threat of the Trump administration withholding approval for a merger can be enough for a corporation like ABC to comply with its demands. She adds, “Here you are seeing these behind-the-scenes uses of the regulatory and fiscal power of the state coming down on people, but you’re also seeing tanks in the streets.”
Is this media crackdown similar to that of authoritarian countries?
Scheppele points to Russia, Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey as examples of authoritarian regimes that can instruct us on what sort of playbook the Trump administration is running to stomp out dissenting speech. “The shutdown of the space for free debate is obviously a big part of autocratic capture. It starts as it has here by making unclear what the rules of the game are. What can you say? What can’t you say? Do you know if it’s gonna change by tomorrow?” she says. “That uncertainty leads people to over-censor themselves, which is ultimately what these autocrats want, which is just to have less criticism out there. They get people to self-censor by taking some very visible cases where the rules were unclear and then suddenly cracking down on them as if the person has committed a major crime.”
Additionally, there’s a record of oligarchs in other countries controlling media outlets when they are not under state ownership. In the U.S., there are several Trump-allied tycoons who are in charge of publishers and broadcasters who have the power to dictate coverage so it’s more favorable toward the administration: Just look at Jeff Bezos’s recent changes at the Washington Post — which fired Karen Attiah, its only remaining Black writer in the “Opinion” section, over her social-media posts in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting — or David Ellison’s ownership of CBS, where he is attempting to stay in Trump’s good graces.
Should we be worried that the Trump administration is moving toward conducting an authoritarian capture then?
Stanley and Scheppele say there are other signs of authoritarianism present, including the attacks on universities, law firms, and other media; the immigration crackdown and the federalization of the National Guard; and the fact congressional Republicans follow Trump’s orders and the Supreme Court has voted almost in lockstep with him.
The federal government’s vast footprint has made a lot of the compliance possible, adds Scheppele. “With universities we’ve now seen that Trump can cancel all the science grants and can suddenly put a new punitive tax on university endowments. He can change whether international students get visas to come to their universities. He can threaten to withhold their nonprofit status for tax purposes, so you see boards of trustees saying, What will it take to get out from under this pressure so that our university will survive?” she says.
She continues, “It’s a pattern across all these sectors where the government is weaponizing either the funding that these institutions need to keep going, the regulatory approvals, or as in the case of the law firms, Trump was saying we will prevent you from entering any federal building. How can you represent clients if you can’t enter a federal courthouse? This weaponization of government power turns every interaction each of us has with it into a potential site for transactional pressure. This is how dictatorships behave.”
What are experts most concerned about right now?
They are worried about what comes next and how quickly the administration is moving. “We’re only eight months in and it’s gone very far,” Scheppele says. Stanley says we’ll likely see nonprofits attacked like it happened in Russia and Hungary. Trump has promised as much in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting, which his administration has falsely blamed on left-leaning groups. “The NGOs will be attacked as terrorist supporters. They will continue the attack on the media,” Stanley says. “They’re now moving into the phase where it’s much, much more explicit. And then ordinary citizens who speak out will be targeted.” He pointed specifically at how Vice-President J.D. Vance has encouraged people to turn others into their employers over remarks or posts around Kirk’s assasination.
Our ability to vote and have a free and fair election hangs in the balance, too, says Scheppele. “The Trump administration is trying everything it can to rig the elections for next time, from getting friendly states to gerrymander to give them a few extra seats in Congress, all the way to trying to pretend like everybody has to show proof of citizenship to be able to vote,” she adds.
So, is there any way people can fight back?
Yes. Overall, Scheppele says the current landscape is really dire, but there are already mechanisms that are surviving the stress tests: Lower courts have stopped many of the administration’s unconstitutional plays, and Democratic-led states have implemented their own policies to fight back. “I don’t want people to panic, but the farther it gets, the harder it is to reverse,” she says. “That’s why acting today is gonna be much better than later.”
First, even if it is overwhelming, you need to pay attention. Stanley recommends following the work of experts and independent media, including Attiah, fellow fascism scholar Timothy Snyder, commentator Reid, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Mehdi Hasan’s outlet Zeteo, among others. “There’s a lot of media that have been complicit in juicing the moral panic that underlies Trumpism,” he says. “Don’t look at those people. Look at the people who’ve been warning about this for years instead.”
Second, it’s important to identify your community — your loved ones, your neighbors, your professional networks, and your social groups — and organize on how to best support each other. “For example, if you’re a lawyer and a member of the bar association, your bar association needs to defend judicial independence. If you’re in a university, ditto,” Scheppele says. “If you’re an ordinary person, ask how the local social services in your area are being impacted and figure out how we can help our neighbors who are losing health care or being impacted by unemployment.” Additionally, she adds that you can use this opportunity to educate those who haven’t made the connections yet between the current administration and the ways it is impacting people’s daily lives.
Finally, Scheppele believes that people should continue to speak up, because stifling speech and criticism is a key goal for authoritarian regimes. So contact your elected officials at the local, state, and federal level. Go protest. Make your voice heard online and in real life. “You can mobilize pushback. If you can resist, if you can call it out, if you keep yelling that this is not how democracies work, then maybe you can stall it before it gets totally entrenched,” she says. “They can’t repress all of us.”
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