Jimmy Kimmel Didn't Have Free Speech. None of Us Do.

By now, you've heard about Jimmy Kimmel. Disney pulled him off the air "indefinitely" for criticizing Trump and MAGA. He accurately described what they're doing, exploiting Charlie Kirk's assassination to strip away more of our human rights. Yes, it was wrong to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. It's a disturbing development.

But did Jimmy Kimmel have free speech before Trump?

I'm going to go with a no on that.

Jimmy Kimmel wasn't talking about the climate crisis. He wasn't talking about Long Covid. He wasn't talking about Gaza, except for one time I've found when he rightly condemned an unhinged AI video showcasing the very real plans to turn it into a resort. But that's the exception that proves the rule.

It has always been just fine to slam Trump for his distasteful articulations of plans that are simply quiet policy under different administrations.

It's mainly an aesthetic choice.

I'm not here to beat up on Kimmel. I'm here to explain something that could make us all smarter, and it's called the discursive formation.

Foucault introduced us to the term "discursive formation" in his 1969 book, Archaeology of Knowledge. In short, he was talking about censorship without censorship. In public discourse, certain rules form that dictate who can say what, under what circumstances. Certain beliefs and ideologies become dominant.

Others become taboo.

Ironically, the same week that Kimmel got canceled, Bernie Sanders did something significant. For the first time, he described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. You can read about it here. This should be getting a lot of attention, but it's not. Instead, the "resistance" continues clinging to the Epstein files as their best chance to eject Trump from power. The blue internet is focused on Kimmel, on Epstein, on the latest scandal, on anything except the bigger picture.

Meanwhile, Trump prepares to sell TikTok to a group of billionaires that include Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen, the same crew that's been censoring networks and buying up platforms like Substack. It's irony on steroids that Biden was the one who signed the TikTok ban into law. It was Democrats who pushed the narrative that TikTok posed a risk to everyone's personal security. How much of a risk do you imagine TikTok will pose to Americans under the leadership of fascists? Perhaps they didn't see this coming, but some of us did, and we tried to warn them.

They didn't listen.

Here's the thing: Democrats may never engage in the overt forms of censorship that strip talk shows away from comedians. That doesn't mean they don't censor information. It doesn't mean they're against propaganda.

It's just as bad.

Look at the most popular liberal voices. They're not allowed to say certain things. They're not allowed to talk about certain topics. It doesn't matter how important those topics are. It doesn't matter what the implications are.

It doesn't matter how true.

We can look at our own lives for even more sinister examples. What happens when we try to talk about any of the problems we want to address? What happens when we try to express our needs to our communities?

Our families?

There's only one real difference between us and Jimmy Kimmel, and it's that he had a platform to take away. Many of us never had that platform to begin with, because we never said the things that would grant us one.

That's how a discursive formation operates. It ensures that only the ones who express the right viewpoints and subscribe to the right philosophies ever gain the influence or the authority to be listened to.

Jimmy Kimmel may have been canceled officially by a fascist, but he was already pre-censored by a neoliberal government and a willfully uninformed public that simply doesn't want to know what's going on, and attacks anyone who dares to try and explain it to them with any sense of urgency or conviction.

Both sides have their own discursive formations. We're seeing them in real time. In one sphere, you can only talk about Charlie Kirk as a martyr. Anything else gets you doxxed, fired, harassed, or threatened with death. In the other, you can only talk about Palestinian suffering if you refrain from using certain words like "genocide," unless you do it between election cycles. And you can only talk about Jimmy Kimmel as a victim of a fascist administration, not a willing participant in a media industry that was already engaging in their own forms of censorship.

The end result is a pantomime of free speech, where comedians pretend to speak truth to power and networks like Disney run shows about standing up to fascism, but then silence their own voices the minute they try to do anything like that in real life. So, Jimmy Kimmel's free speech wasn't merely silenced this week. It was regulated and monitored the minute he was given a microphone.

Our speech is silenced the minute we sit down at the dinner table. We're not allowed to talk about what's going on, except with one or two trusted friends or family members. So, we all know what it's like to be censored. We all know what it's like to have important, urgent things to say, that nobody wants to hear.

Anyone who cares about Jimmy Kimmel now might want to think about the last time that doomer friend of theirs tried to talk to them about something important, and they rolled their eyes or simply told them to go away.

That's the real lesson here.

At least in my view.

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