Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵Thread🧵

The outrage over Kimmel’s canning is incredibly stupid, but it’s also enormously rich coming from the same media outlets who have cheered the government actually censoring people, particularly during COVID.

Let me know if you can spot the difference in tone? ⤵️

This @CNN headline made me think this story needed a thread.

Kimmel’s suspension is “straight from a European strongman’s playbook,” per @CNN’s @brianstelter.

When Biden cracked down on free speech during Covid, CNN hyped up the effort.

Few promoted the government’s actual attack on free speech more aggressively than the same @brianstelter now calling a comedian’s shelving evidence of autocracy, or something.

And that’s even before you talk about @brianstelter’s campaign to censor Fox News. (H/t @tomselliott).

How is this not censorship?

But this hypocrisy was everywhere.

The Kimmel firing allegedly shows Trump’s power over the media, per @AP.

Do you remember when Biden called on social media firms to censor what it deemed “disinformation” on Covid, even when much of that was anything but?

@AP cheered it on.

This from @politico is so rich.

Kimmel’s suspension “set off furious debate over free speech.” But when Biden actually tried to limit online speech, Politico lionized the “counterpunch on misinformation.”

A lot of outlets made clear with their headlines how outlandish their claims were. @nytimes was a little more coy, but read further and you get the “most punishing government crackdown” language.

But when the government actually does crack down on speech? Then it’s noble.

Kimmel going off the air is a “brazen attack on free speech,” but objections to actual moves to curtail free speech are a dereliction of a court’s responsibility. @voxdotcom

Kimmel getting the boot is government “censoring you in real time,” but when the government actually does censor you in real time, a court pushing back is “a weaponization of the courts.”

Okay, @guardian

And as others have pointed out, there’s plenty of hypocrisy here otherwise.

@RepJeffries urged Fox to muzzle or cut ties with Tucker Carlson over disinformation.

Now, he’s incensed that Kimmel got the boot. (H/t @greg_price11)

And of course his co-signer @SenSchumer did the same.

Maybe the funniest about-face comes from @NPR, who like Hollywood and Democrats are up in arms about the “government censorship on Kimmel’s firing.

Back in 2023, NPR was instead upset that government *wasn’t* policing speech from cable news.

(It’s also worth noting that none-other-than Jimmy Kimmel celebrated Tucker’s firing.)

Schrodinger’s deplatforming reins supreme for @BulwarkOnline and @JVLast (h/t @Heminator)

Government action against speech is either “one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism” or a “big win in the battle of ideas” depending on what @dpakman thinks about the party doing it. (H/t @RealSaavedra)

And mind you, as @brithume has explained well, the idea that Kimmel is the victim of having his first amendment rights trampled on is bogus.

So much of this outrage over Kimmel is so nakedly contrived to try to score political points, painting Trump as some kind of dictator to score clicks.

Don’t buy it.