Sen. Ted Cruz on his podcast Friday admonished Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr for demanding ABC suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show over comments regarding Charlie Kirk — calling Carr’s actions “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’”
“If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like’ — that will end up bad for conservatives,” said the Texas Republican.
And while Cruz said he liked Carr and was “thrilled” to see Kimmel’s show taken off the air, he cautioned that leveraging the FCC’s power to punish certain speech creates a concerning precedent that could leave conservatives vulnerable in a future Democratic administration.
“They will silence us,” said Cruz. “They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly.”
The comments are notable coming from Cruz — both as a loyalist of President Donald Trump and as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has oversight authority over the FCC.
He also joins other prominent GOP lawmakers warning about how the FCC wields its power, as Democrats continue to decry the pressure to suspend Kimmel’s show as a free speech violation.
Earlier this week, Cruz said at a POLITICO AI & Tech summit that the First Amendment “absolutely protects hate speech,” although he added that it doesn’t make people “immune from consequences” from their employers.
During his Monday evening monologue, Kimmel said Republicans were trying to mischaracterize the background of Kirk’s killer for political points and compared Trump’s reaction to the killing as that of a 4-year-old mourning a goldfish. ABC announced Wednesday he would be taken off the air following Carr’s reprimand.
While Kimmel is the most high-profile public figure so far to lose his job for how he characterized the Kirk assassination, multiple academics and a Washington Post columnist have also been let go as a result of their remarks.
US attorney general Pam Bondi’s pledge that the Trump administration will “absolutely target” people who use “hate speech” in the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has prompted criticism of the idea from across the political spectrum, including from prominent conservatives.
Bondi said on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of the rightwing White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that there is “free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society”.
Legal experts and conservative pundits have condemned the comments because there is no “hate speech” exception in the first amendment right to speech and as such, targeting people for their charged rhetoric would be unconstitutional.
There is no unprotected category of speech in the constitution or in the case law called ‘hate speech’,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a Northwestern University law professor. “By being so vague and by talking about speech that doesn’t fit into any legal category, she is basically opening the door for taking action against anyone who engages in speech that the president or the Department of Justice or Stephen Miller doesn’t like.”
Kirk, the founder of the powerful rightwing youth activist group Turning Point and a close ally of Donald Trump, was killed on 10 September at Utah Valley University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.
The murder was part of a wave of political violence in the United States, including attempted assassinations of the US president and the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband.
While some people on both sides of the aisle have spoken about the need for respectful dialogue, Trump and others in his administration have continued to largely blame the violence on the left and warned of a “vast domestic terror movement” prompting fears he plans a broad crackdown on his political opponents.
JD Vanceguest-hosted Kirk’s podcast this week, during which the vice-president urged people to call the employers of people celebrating Kirk’s murder and said that the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.
When asked about Bondi’s comments on Tuesday, Trump told an ABC News reporter: “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC.”
Bondi also threatened to prosecute an Office Depot employee who reportedly refused to print flyers for a vigil for Kirk.
But people on the right who normally strongly support Trump have condemned Bondi’s comments and called for her ouster.
Conservative pundit Matt Walsh, who said after Kirk’s death: “We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” posted on Twitter/X of Bondi: “Get rid of her. Today. This is insane. Conservatives have fought for decades for the right to refuse service to anyone. We won that fight. Now Pam Bondi wants to roll it all back for no reason.”
Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator, also wrote on X: “Our Attorney General is apparently a moron. ‘There’s free speech and then there is hate speech.’ No ma’am. That is not the law.”
And Savanah Hernandez, a commentator with Turning Point, described those words from Bondi as “most destructive phrase that has ever been uttered … She needs to be removed as attorney general now.”
Commentators also pointed to Kirk’s own comments from 2024 concerning the idea of hate speech.
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech,” Kirk wrote. “And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”
Bondi’s talk of targeting people who use “hate speech” is not legal because the “first amendment creates very, very strong protections from punishment for speech that’s offensive or for speech with which people disagree. The bar for punishing speech based on content, and especially based on viewpoint, is extremely, extremely high,” Northwestern’s Kitrosser said.
Following the backlash, Bondi, who already faced calls to resign for how she handled files related to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, appeared to try to walk back her comments on Tuesday.
“Freedom of speech is sacred in our country, and we will never impede upon that right,” Bondi said in a statement to Axios. “My intention was to speak about threats of violence that individuals incite against others.”
Kitrosser, however, said she remained “very concerned as to how broadly they are going to define what is an illegal threat and as to what other loopholes they may try to carve out from existing free speech case law”.
She added: “I think that we all need to remain very vigilant.”
America has a conservative establishment. Its formal name is the Democratic party. Whether it be the federal government, universities, welfare or the regulatory state, Democrats fight to preserve the world as it is or was. “America is already great,” liberals cry, which is another way of saying that things were fine until Donald Trump came along. Their lodestar was Joe Biden, who personified nostalgia. Much of the party is now nostalgic for Biden. You have to be imprisoned in old ways of thinking to believe this is how US liberalism will rebound.
An invigorated US opposition would now be making hay. Trump’s team maintains a “promises kept” tally sheet. To be sure, he has in effect closed the border, demolished DEI quota culture, assaulted the deep state and launched trade wars against the rest of the world. But a big chunk of those who voted for Maga saw these moves as the means of lifting their economic prospects. The opposite is happening, which is why Trump’s numbers are in steady decline. Yet the fall in Democrats’ approval rating is even steeper. In relative terms, Trump’s political dominance has thus grown. Do not bet on a weakening economy changing that picture.
Trump’s genius is to keep pushing Democrats into reactive conservatism. That, plus the average age of the party’s leadership, makes Democrats look like permanently outraged grandparents. Trump’s assaults on pretty much every constitutional norm are indeed terrifying and outrageous. But they are remarkably inoculated against political backlash. To all intents and purposes, opposition to Trump has been reduced to a default outrage machine.
What is the solution? Democrats are a party of America’s professional elites plus various interest groups. And given that Trump won a majority of blue-collar voters, they are no longer the natural home of the working class. Any Democratic recovery would thus start by grappling with the latter’s worldview. The practical difficulty is that the party is shaped by elite professions, particularly law, government, media and academia. Such types often have a hard time concealing their distaste for those who voted for Trump. This is a poor starting point.
Democrats also face a deeper philosophical problem. Nobody knows how to reinvent 20th-century liberalism. In the US that was Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, with updates over the next couple of generations. FDR built that world with “bold persistent experimentation”. His would-be heirs are stuck in a timid, persistent conservatism. They do not “welcome the hatred” of financial and business monopolists as Roosevelt did. They are the party of corporate America. No party in history could ever boast of so many expert fundraisers and humane philanthropists.
Lack of fresh ideas and cloistered demography are definitions of conservatism. If Trump did not exist, would Democrats want to reform the US administrative state? They should want to reinvent it but are now its militant defenders. A system that is so riddled with veto points that it takes years to execute simple projects and requires a PhD to navigate the tax system does not deserve to be defended. The same goes for a housing market that has priced younger voters out of the American dream and elite universities that are biased towards the children of alumni and donors. If Trump is attacking something, it must be defended to the hilt.
That Trump’s actions are destructive is no excuse. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira recently warned, Democrats are placing their chips on the “fool’s gold of midterm success”. Rather than seeking ways of reinventing a system in which America has lost faith, Democrats are betting on Trump’s defeat in next year’s congressional elections. The odds are that Republicans will lose the House of Representatives in 2026 and retain control of the Senate. Such midterm success would be a pyrrhic victory for Democrats. Biden based his 2024 re-election bid on his party’s relative success in the 2022 midterms. Look where that led.
A second piece of fool’s gold is to wait for Trumpism to die out with Trump. Even assuming that he does not launch a coup in 2028, Democrats would be unwise to think their problem will end with Trump. Familiarity with other democracies — Britain’s clueless Labour party, Germany’s moribund Social Democrats, France’s withered Socialists — shows that there is nothing unique to American populism.
The challenge for Democrats is to do what they should be doing were Trump not to exist. His superpower is to stop them from reaching that epiphany.
Facing MAGA 