It was a pure lie. Following widespread criticism, Nextstar Media Group said its ABC affiliate stations would not run Kimmel’s show over the comments.
[snip]
Nonetheless, the professional censorship class on the left has suddenly discovered the First Amendment.
Harry Sisson took to X to claim “We are witnessing the most brazen attack on free speech in modern American history. Elon, Trump, and MAGA said they were free speech warriors. It’s the exact opposite.”
Matt Yglesias wrote on an entire article about “MAGA’s scary clampdown on free speech.”
David French called Kimmel’s removal a “direct attack on free speech.”
[snip]
The left cheered the cancellation, with French posting: “Roseanne canceled. Who could have possibly foreseen that a toxic person would be so toxic?”
No handwringing about censorship then.
Where were the hysterics when President Donald Trump was deplatformed in 2021? The “Twitter Files” even revealed that Twitter employees acknowledged on internal channels that Trump’s tweets after January 6 did not violate any policies — yet they banned him anyway.
The left celebrated.
[snip]
French said it was an “actual exercise of liberty,” and called the suppression of free speech “appropriate.”
Vox’s Aja Romano reassured Americans that deplatforming Trump isn’t a free speech issue. Rather, it is “effective at rousting extremists from mainstream internet spaces. It’s not a violation of the First Amendment.”
When Megyn Kelly was fired by NBC in 2018 after Kelly questioned whether blackface Halloween costumes were always racist, The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix mocked her, writing: “But Kelly is shrewd in plenty of other ways. In the next phase of her career, perhaps she will use her firing to fashion herself into a martyr for the so-called suppression of free speech.”
No defenders of free expression, no cries about censorship, just applause.
[snip]
Speaking of the Hunter Biden laptop, no one raised any alarms when conservatives were being locked out of their Twitter accounts for sharing the New York Post’s bombshell story. In fact, left-wing media outlets gave cover to Big Tech, with NPR framing their reporting on the censorship as Twitter and Facebook merely limiting “the reach of an article with unconfirmed claims” before couching that with a note that so-called “experts warn that social media platforms are full of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
No one clutched the First Amendment when The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson was locked out of his Twitter account for stating the obvious fact that then-U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine is a man. It was near radio silence from the left when YouTube censored Sen. Rand Paul for disagreeing with the government about CDC guidance.
[snip]
Partially because it’s one of their own. But even more so because, as Rahm Emanuel once said, never let a crisis go to waste. The left doesn’t really care about Kimmel or free speech. But by pretending that this is some unprecedented Trump crackdown, they get to smear Trump as a dictator or authoritarian to delegitimize his presidency. It’s not about defending free speech, it’s just about exploiting a convenient storyline to keep their narrative of Trump-is-authoritarian alive.
This article has been updated to clarify that Rahm Emanuel suggested never letting a crisis go to waste, not former President Barack Obama.
* Original Article:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/18/6-times-leftists-melting-down-over-jimmy-kimmel-were-happy-to-deny-conservatives-free-speech/
