[This article first appeared at Common Dreams on September 25, 2025.]
President Donald Trump can’t take a joke. Look at the 9:20 mark of this video from the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. As President Barack Obama skewered Trump over his insidious “birther” claim, Trump was “steaming” and “beside himself with fury” at the public humiliation.
Trump is now using the Presidency and F.C.C Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to silence critics. Comedians are near the top of Trump’s hit list because satire is an effective political weapon.
Foreign enemies aren’t attacking the First Amendment. It’s an inside job.
Carr’s Confusion
As Carr observed in 2022:
“Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”
But Carr has now abandoned First Amendment principles that he and conservatives have defended repeatedly:
· In 2018, he told a Senate oversight committee: “The First Amendment operates as a restraint on the government. The idea is that we don’t put a thumb on the scale in favor of one speaker or the other. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage strong, robust — perhaps rough in some situations — discourse.”
· In 2023, he posted: “Free speech is the counterweight—it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”
· And in an interview at an AI and tech conference on September 16, 2025 – the day after Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue mentioning Charlie Kirk – Carr said: “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech.”
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The Belly of the Beast 