Politico, ‘Dangerous as hell’: Cruz blasts FCC’s Jimmy Kimmel takedown:
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.
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