Trump Supporters Are Lying About Biden ‘Censorship’ To Justify Brendan Carr’s Unconstitutional Kimmel Threats

Free Speech

from the reading-comprehension-would-be-nice dept

Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd “low ratings” defense—because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden ratings revelations and just hours after the chair of the FCC threatens them with “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And also, if it was low ratings, how do you explain why they brought the show back after less than a week? When that collapsed under basic scrutiny, they pivoted to something even more dishonest: claiming Brendan Carr’s explicit threats to Disney are somehow identical to what the Biden administration did, and falsely claiming this makes hypocrites of those who agreed with the ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.

This false equivalency isn’t just wrong—it’s embarrassingly so. But since MAGA supporters are now running with it (and some mainstream outlets are credulously repeating it), it’s worth demolishing the argument piece by piece. Of course, the people pushing this narrative won’t bother with the details and will immediately skip to the comments to shout “you lie!” without addressing the actual points raised here as to why they’re wrong, but for everyone else, let’s dig in.

You can see some of this nonsense in a NY Times article over the weekend by Peter Baker, in which a White House spokesperson claimed (falsely) that (1) Trump supported free speech, and (2) Biden censored social media:

Asked about the disparate justifications offered by Mr. Trump and administration officials, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “President Trump is a strong supporter of free speech, and he is right — F.C.C. licensed stations have long been required to follow basic standards.” She added that “the Biden administration actually attacked free speech by demanding social media companies take Americans’ posts down.”

Vice President JD Vance likewise pointed to allegations of censorship lodged against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to defend the Trump administration’s actions. “The bellyaching from the left over ‘free speech’ after the Biden years fools precisely no one,” he wrote on social media on Friday.

That NY Times article was even worse originally, as there was a quote from so-called “presidential historian” Craig Shirley claiming (falsely) that “President Biden” forced social media companies to deplatform Donald Trump in 2021:

If you can’t see the screenshot, it says:

Craig Shirley, a presidential historian and biographer of President Ronald Reagan, said Mr. Trump’s experience was so searing that he did not believe the president would improperly restrain others’ free speech, whatever his public exhortations.

“We all especially know Biden used government to censor Trump, kicking him off many media platforms, a clear violation of the law,” Mr. Shirley said. “As his own First Amendment rights were abridged, my guess is he’s especially sensitive to anyone else seeing their First Amendment rights taken away.”

Except that’s just factually wrong, as even a basic understanding of linear time (let alone a simple fact check) would have determined. Donald Trump was banned from most platforms on January 7th and 8th in 2021. When DONALD TRUMP WAS PRESIDENT, not Joe Biden. It was literally impossible for Biden to “censor Trump” at the time. Indeed, when it happened we wrote an article about why this clearly was not censorship, but a difficult choice private companies had to make about encouraging safety. You know, like how the MAGA crowd is now demanding that platforms silence anyone who speaks ill of Charlie Kirk.

The Times later quietly removed the first half of Shirley’s quote without noting the correction—a telling admission that even they recognized how factually bankrupt it was. Beyond the basic chronological impossibility, the entire premise is absurd: Trump was deplatformed by private companies exercising their own editorial judgment in the days after he had actively encouraged the storming of the US Capitol in an effort to prevent the peaceful handover of power… not government coercion.

That said, this idea that Biden “censored” people on social media keeps making the rounds, and in particular some have been arguing that the Supreme Court said that this was okay in Murthy vs. Missouri, and are then claiming that people who supported the administration in that case have nothing to complain about. Here are a few examples:

All three of those tweets are just factually incorrect in embarrassing ways. Many people have pointed out to them in the replies (correctly) that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy was about standing, not the merits, but that’s not even what’s so egregious here.

The more important thing is the reason why the Murthy ruling was about standing, which was that the Supreme Court correctly found that none of the plaintiffs in the original case presented enough evidence to suggest they have standing to challenge the administration’s actions. Five times in the ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett mentions “no evidence.”

The clear implication, which all these people pointing to Murthy are missing, is that if they had actual evidence of coercion by government officials then they would have had standing. Nothing (literally nothing) in the Murthy case “blesses” or “supports” the idea that it’s okay for government officials to coerce intermediaries into silencing speech. It just says you can’t just claim that happened without any evidence to back it up.

At no point did the ruling condone government pressure on intermediaries to silence speech. Quite the contrary. Rather, the ruling in Murthy (and also confirmed a few weeks earlier in the Vullo ruling, which was heard on the same day as Murthy, so clearly both issues were on the Justices’ minds) was:

1. No, the government cannot coerce intermediaries to suppress speech that is protected by the First Amendment
2. But if an intermediary suppresses your speech as a private entity, to have standing, you need to show that it was actually in response to government pressure and you can’t just handwave that away.

To understand this, it really helps to read Vullo and Murthy together (again, remembering that the two cases were effectively heard together). We quoted from Vullo a lot in our first post, but as a refresher, from the opinion:

A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others. What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression….

This is the core distinction that bad faith readers of what happened keep ignoring. There is a fundamental difference between using the bully pulpit to persuade and using the power of the government with threats to punish in a manner that is coercive.

The Supreme Court in Vullo and Murthy made it clear that government coercion is not allowed. The people claiming Murthy said otherwise either didn’t read or understand Murthy, or they’re bad faith liars.

While the Murthy ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, at no point did it say it made it okay for government actors to make coercive threats. It said the opposite. Indeed, contrary to the various tweets saying Murthy blessed what Carr was doing, it says that if you can show actual coercion from a specific government actor, then you have standing to make a case. From the majority decision:

But we must confirm that each Government defendant continues to engage in the challenged conduct, which is “coercion” and “significant encouragement,” not mere “communication.”

Carr’s actions provide a textbook example of the coercion that Murthy and Vullo prohibit. He went on a podcast, explicitly threatened a media company with regulatory retaliation (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”), and hours later that company folded. The “traceability” that the Murthy court said was missing from the Biden administration’s communications? Here it’s a straight line drawn in neon by Carr in public with him yelling to the cameras “I AM ENGAGING IN COERCIVE ACTIVITY.”

This failure to establish traceability for past harms— which can serve as evidence of expected future harm—“substantially undermines [the plaintiffs’] standing theory.”

But here there’s very clear “traceability.” Carr went on a MAGA influencer’s podcast in the morning, said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and specifically said that the FCC would investigate both Disney and affiliates if they didn’t take action over Kimmel’s First Amendment protected speech. Under Murthy that very much violates the First Amendment, not the other way around.

And this is only reinforced by the ruling in Vullo, which was more explicit:

The Court explained that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the “threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression” of disfavored speech.

So people trying to argue that Murthy made this okay, or even that people who supported Murthy are now regretting it, are simply ignorant or lying. Neither is a good look for professional commentators.

Murthy (and Vullo) supported the long-held understanding that, under the First Amendment, government actors cannot threaten intermediaries in a coercive manner to get them to suppress or punish protected speech. Carr did threaten intermediaries to punish such speech, and thus it is entirely consistent with the ruling in Murthy that he violated the First Amendment.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, abigail jackson, brendan carr, coercion, craig shirley, donald trump, evidence, free speech, jawboning, jimmy kimmel, joe biden, murthy v. missouri, persuasion, standing, supreme court, vullo
Companies: disney