By Perry Bacon

Copyright newrepublic

So the coalition of people who defended Kimmel and objected to ABC’s decision was unusually large, powerful, and politically diverse. Even conservatives such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul said bluntly that Carr had overreached. Famous actors and actresses rallied behind him, with some threatening not to work with ABC in the future. Democratic politicians, usually wary of taking any kind of strong stand, almost universally embraced him. Perhaps most importantly, it appeared that thousands of Americans had canceled their subscriptions to Disney-owned streaming services Hulu and Disney+, threatening the company’s bottom line.

Kimmel, with such a strong support base, got his job back within a week. But the fact that he was removed in the first place remains alarming. Carr was willing to directly inject himself in television programming to silence a critic of conservatives, directly contradicting the First Amendment. And companies such as Disney, Nexstar, and Sinclair that control the lives of so many writers, actors, and other creative types showed they would distance themselves from one of the most famous television personalities in the country at the drop of a hat. Kimmel can’t feel very comfortable about speaking his mind in the future, and I would say the same for even centrist white men at other major networks.

And the free speech climate is much worse for anyone who isn’t a centrist white man and friends with Jennifer Aniston. Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil were detained by ICE in part for writing op-eds critical of Israel. Over the last year, The Washington Post forced out its liberal opinion writers, CBS pushed out longtime news executives, and MSNBC fired longtime political analyst Matthew Dowd for comments about Kirk that were even more innocuous than what Kimmel said. Publicly criticizing the Trump administration and America’s conservative movement remains a risk to your career and potentially your safety because both the government and many media outlets won’t tolerate such speech.