By Joshua Haigh

Copyright news

Society as we know it has reached a turning point, and the history books will look back on this period in decades to come, and what happens next is imperative.

The tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk and its subsequent fallout have reached a boiling point, and Jimmy Kimmel being torn from the air on Thursday, just months after Stephen Colbert had his own show cancelled amid murky motives, moves the US one step closer to becoming a fascist society where freedom of the press no longer exists.

Kirk rose to infamy in 2016 when Donald Trump was first running for US president. He frequently made public appearances campaigning for him, and has been credited by the broader media for influencing many voters, especially Gen Z men, to show their support for Trump in the voting booth.

While Kirk insisted that his brand of politics encouraged conversation, regularly visiting college campuses to debate liberal students, he is on record saying numerous incredibly divisive and abhorrent things.

Kirk invoked a Bible verse about stoning gay people “to death” on a June 2024 episode of his podcast with Jack Posobiec, calling it “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

Kirk claimed on an April 2022 episode of his podcast that trans people are responsible for inflation.

Kirk blamed the decline in the so-called traditional “American man” on trans people and said society should have “just taken care of” trans people, “the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s” — which included lobotomies, shock therapy, and involuntary institutionalisation.

After reports that the person who shot up a Catholic school in Minneapolis was trans, Kirk blamed all trans people for the violent attack.

For clarity, according to The Advocate, out of more than 4,600 mass shootings between 2014 and 2024, only six involved transgender suspects — just 0.128 per cent. The rest were overwhelmingly heterosexual men.

None of these remarks had Kirk banned from visiting college campuses, or axed from TV and radio appearances.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Jimmy Kimmel, who had his show ripped from the schedule on Thursday after he poked fun at Trump’s behaviour in the days following Kirk’s death.

And to be clear, Kimmel himself has previously condemned the shooting of Kirk in a statement.

FCC head Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of any stations that continued to air Kimmel’s content.

“It’s time for them to step and say this garbage … isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” he said.

While his threats should have been empty, after all, the FCC is prohibited by law from “interfering with the power of free speech” or from “employing the power of censorship”, ABC went ahead and put The Jimmy Kimmel show on “indefinite hiatus”.

While there is an exception to the ruling that allows for the FCC to interject in cases of “news distortion”, Kimmel’s crass joke about Trump’s actions in the days following Kirk’s death hardly amounts to the public being knowingly deceived.

Things become more murky when a mere Google search finds that the largest owner of local radio stations in America, Nextar, hours later condemned Kimmel’s remarks as “unacceptable”.

Nexstar is currently in the process of purchasing one of its biggest US rivals for over AU$12 billion, in a merger that will require the approval of the FCC.

This is where the problem lies with the weaponising of “free speech” only when it serves one political movement.

When Trump came to power, his cries of “fake news” came across as nothing more than a joke to many. But not anymore. Since his second term began, this rhetoric has taken on a life of its own to the point where Trump and his army of followers appear under the impression that anything not spun to their own narrative is not only “fake news,” but also an active attack on so-called “free speech”.

Many minorities, especially those within the Black, Asian and queer communities, have become increasingly fearful of an increasingly visible and insidious tide of racism and homophobia around the world that has, for far too long, been cloaked under the championing of “free speech”.

Controversial Barstoolsports creator Dave Portnoy rushed to social media following news of Kimmel’s axing to label the move a mere “consequence” for his actions. But why does Kimmel poking fun at Trumps actual actions deserve “consequences” while bigoted, racist and homophobic language and rehotic don’t? Oh yes, because as long as Portnoy doesn’t feel targeted then he’s seemingly for it.

Let’s be very clear here; freedom of speech does not and should not include targeting people for their skin colour, gender or sexuality. These things are not political; they are facts. A person’s identity that they are born with is not something they can choose to believe in or not. You can choose not to recognise it, and that would make you a bigot. And while you’re within your rights to identify as such, it should not be celebrated as a victory for freedom of speech, but instead a moral failing of a society we have evolved into since the dawn of social media wreaked havoc on how we treat each other. Disagreeing on political issues, such as where more funding should go, is a perfectly normal thing for the left and the right to disagree on; those disagreements are how society moves forward once a solution is reached. However, disagreeing on the notion that women should have the right to do what they want with their bodies, or that gay people should have equal rights, is not the same. Basic human rights at their core should never be up for debate, and the sooner people stop confusing the two, the better.

Someone’s murder should never be celebrated. It’s a tragedy what happened to Kirk in front of his children. However, a person not mourning the loss of someone who actively campaigned for their rights to be removed is not the same as someone celebrating a public assassination. There is a nuance there that is being overlooked for the sake of political point scoring.

This notion that there is no longer such a thing as “fact” and instead only “leftist” or “right-wing” opinions is doing untold damage to the institution of journalism and the freedom of the press.

A perfect homegrown example of a victim of this new war within media is Channel 10’s The Project, which was axed earlier this year. The show, once celebrated by viewers for its diverse opinions and debates, fell victim to exactly what once made it so beloved. Those on the right felt it catered to a “woke” audience, while many of those on the left thought it gave voice to right-leaning figures such as Steve Price.

It’s a two-pronged issue, and one that, unless fixed, is going to dominate politics for the foreseeable future and create further divide in a society already crippled by our determination to blame each other for systemic issues in our society that were and always have been created and perpetuated by those in power.