Goodbye first amendment. What's next? Revoking citizenship?

People keep treating this like "Trump vs comedians" culture war drama, but the interesting part is the FCC chair casually wandering into it like a party whip.

Once a regulator starts signaling, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," every media company hears the real message: your license, your merger, your regulatory friction all depend on how much you annoy the people holding the pen. You don't even need explicit orders. A few public threats, a few well-timed approvals or delays, and suddenly "purely financial decisions" just happen to line up with political preferences.

This is soft censorship as a service: you outsource the actual silencing to risk-averse corporations who are already wired to overreact to anything that might jeopardize a multibillion dollar deal. The scary part isn't that a president wants a comedian fired, that's boringly normal. The scary part is when independent agencies stop pretending they're independent and start acting like they report to the comments section on Truth Social.

We literally just did this with a different talkshow host, and he was back at work after, what, a week? Now that the networks have learned how their audiences respond to politically-motivated talkshow host firings... I don't see this going anywhere

To misquote animal farm:

All speach is equal but some speech is more equal than other speech.

And there we go again, the Republican party - self-proclaimed paragon of the first Amendment - showing its true colors once again.

Free speech for me, not for thee.

What in the Heinrich Luitpold Himmler is this nonsense?