America is not just moving towards fascism. America is already an authoritarian state.
ABC television’s recent indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! for clearly political reasons would have been outrageous on its own, but it also tellingly echoes previous, similar examples.
On Thursday, July 17th, 2025, late show host Stephen Colbert announced that CBS was cancelling his Late Show as of its May 2026 end of season. While CBS justified the cancellation by saying it was for financial reasons, their move came three days after Colbert criticized the decision by Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, to pay Donald Trump $16 million in settlement over his allegation of bias in a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Suspiciously, at the time Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media needed approval from the Trump administration.
Earlier, in the late 1960s, CBS had quickly found success, particularly with younger audiences, by airing a variety show featuring clean-cut looking musicians and comics the Smothers Brothers, However, despite their relatively conservative appearance, the Smothers Brothers reflected their audience, with their Comedy Hour increasingly using satire to criticize U.S. politics and the ongoing Vietnam War – much to the dismay of CBS.
CBS censors tried to rein in the Smothers Brothers with little success. By 1968, censors were demanding that finished shows be delivered ten days early for pre-broadcast review. Battles about content continued. Then on April 4, 1969, CBS CEO William S. Paley abruptly cancelled the show.
In a 2007 interview, Tom Smothers reflected on the dangers of media censorship, pointing out that their Comedy Hour had been cancelled due to pressure on CBS by newly elected U.S. President Richard Nixon.
Part of what makes Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension so outrageous is that is was clearly orchestrated by the current head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr. It was Carr’s threats to investigate and potentially end ABC’s broadcast license over a monologue by Kimmel that led to the ABC suspension.
Carr’s threats will have sent a frightening chill down the backs of every major television network CEO. The licenses that permit them to broadcast could be at risk any time Brendan Carr – or in fact Donald Trump — disagrees with something that has been said on their network. It’s notable that Trump not only celebrated Kimmel’s suspension but then urged NBC to get rid of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers.
It’s fair to say that, effective immediately, all networks will feel increasing pressure to practice self-censorship. Any network losing its FCC license to broadcast would go bankrupt virtually overnight. Institutional investors in a network’s stock will make it very clear to boards of directors that stock prices could collapse any time the network disobeys the FCC.
If a network CEO wants to keep their job, they will be forced to kowtow to Donald Trump and his henchman Brendan Carr. Trump has once again stressed that critical coverage of him is illegal and has proposed that federal regulators should consider revoking the broadcast licenses of networks that give him bad publicity.
And of course, the FCC threat is just one of the many outrageous actions Trump appointees are inflicting on various government departments and employees, supported by a tragically compliant Congress and Cabinet. Many result from what has been termed “Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech.”
Media uproar about the Jimmy Kimmel suspension unfortunately resulted in an equally outrageous development not receiving the follow-up news coverage it deserved. I am talking about the August firing of Susan Monarez, the former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
A Trump appointee, Monarez recently explained to a Senate committee that she had refused to agree to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s (RFK) demands to pre-approve his hand-picked committee’s vaccine recommendations and to fire career scientists. She had insisted on being guided by science. This was too much for RFK. So, he fired her.
The heads of all departments and agencies in the U.S. government now know their jobs are on the line if they do not obediently follow orders from the Trump administration. Gone is the time-honoured practice of department heads acting in a non-partisan way.
There is some good news. After five days of massive public pushback against ABC and particularly against ABC’s parent company Disney, Jimmy Kimmel has been reinstated and is back on the air. And the pushback was indeed massive. A significant number of people cancelled Disney Plus subscriptions and Disney vacations, while many celebrities threatened to boycott Disney.
Most significantly, fact-checking group Snopes confirmed that between Kimmel’s September 17th suspension and September 22nd, Disney’s valuation had dropped by $6.4 billion and looked to quickly become worse.
Public pressure works and money talks. One can only hope that Americans finally wake up and begin to push back forcefully.
If they do not do so soon, it will be too late. Fascism will continue to become more and more entrenched in American society.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (September 26, 2025): 424.29ppm
One year ago (September 21, 2024): 422.19ppm
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