The hosts of “Morning Joe” called out U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr on Thursday for celebrating Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, despite spending years warning about the dangers of government censorship.
“He’s long spoken out against government censorship and for freedom of speech,” “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski said of Carr, before citing multiple tweets and quotes that he gave between 2019 and 2023 on the topic. In one of them, the current FCC head said, “Free speech is the counterweight. It is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”
Wednesday, however, Carr spoke in support of Kimmel being punished for his comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Trump administration’s response to it. Carr accused Kimmel of engaging in some of the “sickest conduct possible” and remarked, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” In response, Brzezinski pointedly asked, “What does ‘this’ mean?”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video below.
“Morning Joe” guest and Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith chimed in to recount an experience he had with Carr when he spoke to the FCC Chairman in February. “I sort of said to him just to set up the conversation, ‘Don’t you think, [regardless of] whatever else we’re talking about, the thing that Americans mostly worry about is a government crackdown on speech?’” Smith recalled. “[Carr] said, ‘No.’ He thinks, in his experience in the last few years, the biggest threat to speech was the big social media companies.”
“The way [the Trump administration] sees speech is via their own experiences in the late 2010s, the early 2020s, of fighting with social media platforms,” Smith explained. “Now, they feel like, ‘Look, they did it to us. We’re going to do it to them. Don’t worry so much about these legal details.’”
Meanwhile, regarding Kimmel’s suspension, “Morning Joe” co-host and Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Lemire warned, “This is what happens when you start censoring speech. We’ve heard the warnings. If comedians can’t joke about the government in charge, that’s a very, deeply slippery slope.”
