Speak Up!

My name is Andrew Bell; I live in Anchorage, and while I don’t want to drag other folks into this, you’re welcome to look up where I work. My personal opinion is that Donald Trump is an awful President and an evil man. Here’s why I think it’s more important than ever to say all that:

We’re in the immediate discourse wake of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was itself a violent assault on the free speech rights of all Americans, regardless of opinion. In the online cacophony, there are a whole myriad of people covering themselves in various shades of ignominy by saying things they shouldn’t say, ranging from the very stupid to the actually malevolent. There are also a lot of people reacting in exactly the way you’d expect a normal, decent, human being to react to events in the news, but obviously that doesn’t stick in the brain or catch the algorithm in quite the same way. There are folks on the right citing specific grievances or statements people on the left have done or said which in many cases really aren’t defensible at all, and some folks are understandably upset about what feels like a threat to them – as I often have been by things some folks on the right have said to people like me. I’ve got no quarrel with those folks.

I do have a quarrel with the people who are seizing upon this moment as an opportunity to try to use the political power their side currently holds to get revenge on folks they disagree with because of their resentments, simply on the basis of that disagreement. Kirk’s murderer is in custody and will rightly be prosecuted for this terrible crime against human life, which also was an attack on freedom of speech in practice. That’s a given. What’s not a given is whether or not there will be any consequences, not for the people calling for vengeance, but for the officeholders actually abusing their power to violate the Constitution and suppress speech they dislike – first and foremost, the President.

You may be wondering why I didn’t begin by criticizing Kirk, since that’s what people are supposedly getting in trouble for. I’ve already said what I had to say about our disagreement; the poor fellow is dead and his family is grieving, and I don’t think there’s any real reason for me to say more. I’m criticizing the President, however, because we all know that this attempt to punish critical speech isn’t about Charlie Kirk at all—his death is simply being used as an occasion by Trump to do what he always wanted to do anyway, and punish the only political speech he actually cares about stopping – anything that touches his own ego. The President has made a number of comments which make this motive undeniably clear.

The other person this isn’t about is Jimmy Kimmel, who has momentarily become the face of Trump’s repression of speech, just as Kirk briefly became the face of the victims of political violence in America. Frankly, I can’t believe I’m having to say anything defensive of Kimmel at all, who, if we ignore Trump for moment, is an infamously dull late-night host, who knowingly or unknowingly made a claim about the assassin’s politics that was baseless, false, and stupid, and got fired either for that, or because that provided a good opportunity for the network to prune their expenses (that depends on their internals which I don’t know). But we can’t actually ignore Trump, who has been very clear today as in the past about his desire to suppress the business operations or pull the FCC licenses of networks that criticize him, nor can we ignore his FCC commissioner, who appears to have pressured ABC-Disney into pulling Kimmel’s show, nor can we ignore the context that precedes their explicit remarks—the obvious fact that the network has reason to expect business consequences for criticizing or embarrassing Trump or his allies, or even for failing to flatter him. If Kimmel were fired as a media personality because he said something offensive, that’s one thing; but if he was fired because of implicit pressure of retribution using the power of the executive branch, then that is a complete inversion of the First Amendment.

So for that reason, Trump cannot be allowed to get away with this. He’s tremendously unpopular, but he and his most rabid fans want to use the power they currently hold in government to try to punish or intimidate people who speak up against them, and the easiest way for them to do that is by trying to throw around the weight of the federal government in a way that imposes costs on employers who don’t fire outspoken staff. Obviously there are cases where someone says something so offensive and unprofessional in public that it impacts their ability to do their job; but criticizing, even harshly, or making jokes at the expense of the President or his allies doesn’t rise anywhere close to that level—in fact, it’s perhaps the most typical sort of American political speech. But Trump may succeed at suppressing this simple sharing of political opinion in the public square in practice—the freedom, in some sense the primary freedom our ancestors fought for in the Revolution—if a few people speak out, the least sympathetic ones lose their jobs, and, seeing this, everyone else decides to just bite their tongue in prudence. The one way to fight that is to speak up now, and insist on what we all grew up being taught – that this is in fact a country with freedom of speech, and that it is safe to exercise that freedom in the faith that our fellow Americans will not let us down.

Here are some sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/business/media/abc-jimmy-kimmel.html