For decades, conservatives and far-right adherents have cried that “radical leftists” and the “anti-Christian left” are censoring their freedom of expression. Many still believe this even when a Republican presidential administration is in power. And now that same administration is going after their “political enemies” in line with the dark legacy of President Richard Nixon.
The hypocrisy here is that swaths of the political right, long warning of that censorship, are increasingly using state authority to regulate speech in ways they once denounced. It’s evident.
President Donald Trump’s censorship machine is full steam ahead. Across the country, there is a clearer picture of how the president’s administration is actively targeting opponents, critics and entire groups of people it characterizes as threats to some imagined status quo of national society.
As of this writing, what I view as one of the most blatant attempts to censor one such group of people comes from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Brendan Carr, the FCC’s chair and a strong proponent of Christian nationalism, announced a public notice seeking comments from parents and consumers about the national television content rating system to be amended to penalize youth programming that depicts transgender and other LGBTQ+ materials.
A self-declared free speech champion, Carr’s public notice and his overall track record as chair of the country’s chief communications regulator demonstrate a cognitive dissonance torn by the loyalty he espouses to Trump’s presidency and his claims of standing for the First Amendment.
This contradiction serves as an entry point into a larger pattern in which censorship increasingly functions as a defining feature of reactionary right-wing politics, which defines Trump’s tenure.
Reactionary Extremism and Censorship
Censorship is not unique to one political ideology. Any action could be considered censorious if it is a restriction on some form of expression and speech, regardless of the person or people who are backing such efforts. It isn’t a far-fetched claim that nearly everyone supports the theoretical freedom of expression as in the abstract of reality. However, many disagree as to regulating and even potentially eliminating types of expression they view as harmful and damaging to society.
A body of evidence points to recent trends in censorship deriving from categories of far-right reactionaries that wield state power. The European Center for Populism Studies finds that reactionary populism is “practically synonymous with the ‘radical right.’” And that “it is most associated with anti-immigration policies and extreme nationalism.” Further, academics view the current beneficiaries and perpetrators of fake news and conspiracy theories to be the far-right. In a study published in “The International Journal of Press/Politics”, researchers found “radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation.”
The researchers added, “Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation.” In such characteristics, it becomes consistent with claims made by the far-right that they are targeted for censorship and supposed persecution—including from fact-checkers and misinformation researchers, as is often decried among those in these spaces.
Additional research from the same peer-reviewed journal also strongly associates media distrust with rising right-wing nationalism. Such an association builds on followers of politicians like Trump, who are told by such figures to be wary of the news media. His die-hards take that at face value. Researchers in this article note that when there is “nationalist sentiment and leaders who leverage this sentiment to encourage censorship,” it is done from the “bottom-up” and “has led to increased media restrictions from the top-down.” The researchers explained that they “posit that bottom-up censorship will erode media credibility and make people more accepting of [the] top-down media restrictions, which could…lead to nationalism unchecked by the fourth estate.”
The FCC and the Tools of Right-Wing Outrage
I digress, as this is simply a part of the wider argument. If you refer to the FCC as an example, again, the communications regulator is “barred by law from trying to prevent the broadcast of any point of view.” Nevertheless, the commission remains and has long been mired in freedom of expression controversies, including whether content is “profane,” “indecent” or “obscene.”
A coalition letter by First Amendment scholars, civil liberties advocacy organizations and media experts that was sent to Brendan Carr in September 2025 took issue with the commission chair’s warnings and threats to pull TV and radio broadcast licenses due to “news distortion” and biases.
Such a letter is in response to Carr’s ongoing campaign, endorsed by President Trump, targeting the TV network ABC and its parent, The Walt Disney Company. At the time of this writing, too, the political class is still reacting to the latest alleged assassination attempt on the U.S. president during this year’s edition of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. First Lady Melania Trump and her husband are stoking the flames, once more, targeting ABC, its parent company, and the popular comedian and critic of President Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Reportedly, Jimmy Kimmel was commenting on President Trump’s age, poking fun at his wife for being an “expectant widow.” The widow joke was delivered during an airing of his show on Thursday, April 23. He hosted a segment on that episode about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he delivered the joke. Subsequently, the would-be assassin, Cole Allen, charged a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton, which served as the venue for the annual event of the media’s elite. Aside from the dinner being a bastion of the past and an outdated homage to a previous era of oppression, the dinner often featured comedians roasting U.S. senior leadership.
Melania Trump’s complaint against Kimmel came days later, and there is no clear connection between the intentions of Cole Allen targeting the members of government and Kimmel’s jokes.
Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped Trump-aligned groups from submitting complaints to the FCC. The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) association told the FCC that ABC should be under investigation for the joke of Trump’s wife having “the glow of an expectant widow.” CNN has also reported that all eight of the stations owned and operated by ABC have been called in for early renewal review, with the expectation that the license renewals could be held pending the inquiry into Kimmel and whether he will be fired by the network. Troy Miller, NRB’s president and the chief executive officer, shared, “When influential voices joke about death or treat political opponents as disposable, it contributes to a culture where violence feels thinkable to the already unstable. National platforms carry real weight, and with that comes responsibility.”
I do highly suspect this complaint will boil down to a consequential First Amendment flashpoint, including whether or not the FCC buys into the NRB’s claim that Kimmel violated standing legal doctrine such as the Brandenburg test. According to U.S. Supreme Court case law, the standards outlined in the Brandenburg test are the controlling standards for evaluating the limits of speech advocating for violent, unlawful conduct, including acts like harm to senior government leaders.
Nothing about Kimmel’s performance violated clear standards in this legal test. NRB, using the FCC as a vehicle of ideological brinkmanship, dismisses this longstanding legal precedent that has been applied to protecting forms of expression I would consider to be purely hate speech. If NRB can even justify and connect Kimmel’s joke of the expectant widow as “imminent lawless action,” it does so at great cost to its own credibility in defending free speech for itself and the member companies it represents. And what emerges from episodes such as these is not merely a dispute over taste in comedy or decency, but a pattern in which outrage is operationalized as a potent political tool to wield. This is characteristic of Trump, which he displays to the public.
Never in my life have I seen a presidency go after political enemies as Trump has during these past few years, even before his return to office after winning in November 2024. What is most insulting to the American public is the lack of self-awareness, including the fact that the same man who was targeted in multiple attempts on his life has joked about killing and praising the deaths of his late “political opponents.” Case in point: Robert Mueller, Rob Reiner, John McCain, and John Lewis.
That’s what kills me. It’s laughable, insulting and emblematic of the post-truth presidency.