It’s not easy playing both a libertarian and a supporter of President Donald Trump. Here you have an administration that, more than any other in American history, rests and wriggles on the whims of one man who would be king — who, indeed, asserts a unique and unchallenged right to insert himself into every aspect of American life.
Trump’s is not a night-watchman state, limiting itself to simply arbitrating property disputes between the idealized robber barons of an Ayn Rand novel, but an interventionist busy-body that quite simply cannot mind its own business. From a White House toilet, the U.S. president publishes dictates on everything from the plaques at historical museums (can’t we make slavery seem, I don’t know: better?) to the way players return kicks at NFL games (no “Sissy Football” says a man who opposes the concept of exercise).
To be a libertarian and MAGA requires a good deal of pretending not to see what the American state is up to. It also, from time to time, demands a good, principled denunciation, lest the man of principle (these are libertarians: it’s almost always a man) be accused of condoning some glaring contradictions.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., decided over the weekend that it was time for one of those periodic displays of not standing for it.
“Absolutely inappropriate,” Paul said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when asked about the Trump administration pressuring another late-night comedian off the air. “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this,” he said, referring to the MAGA FCC chairman who had told ABC that it could remove Jimmy Kimmel from its evening lineup itself, billed as “the easy way,” or big government would have to step in and do it “the hard way.”
Kimmel’s offense, ostensibly, was wrongly attributing the assassination of Charlie Kirk to a member of Trump’s MAGA movement; police have not established a motive. But Trump had long sought the removal of Kimmel — whose remarks centered not on the political identity of the killer, but how Jeffrey Epstein’s former friend was quick to exploit the murder — just as he had the cancellation of Stephen Colbert. Following ABC’s decision to indefinitely suspend the offending comic (bringing him back Tuesday, the network announced, after facing an expensive backlash), Trump again argued that it should be “really illegal” for any media outlet to criticize him too much.
Good for Paul, then, calling this out. But then he continued, driving home how playing a MAGA libertarian in 2025 also requires playing rather dumb.
“People have to also realize that despicable comments — you have the right to say them, but you don’t have the right to employment,” Paul said. In the private marketplace of ideas, he argued, an employee can be summarily fired if the boss doesn’t like it. “The FCC should have nothing to do with it,” he said. “But I do think that, you know, a couple of the networks pulled out. Sinclair pulled. They were disgusted by the comment. That’s their right.”
Libertarians like Paul have consistently embraced the concept of private tyranny, where one’s employer is entitled to rule as a strongman, but this is not even that. The corporate disgust that Paul cited was only aired after the chairman of the FCC — the government agency that has the power to approve or deny corporate mergers — issued his ultimatum. After that, Nexstar Media Group, which owns a slew of local ABC affiliates, said it would no longer air “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Does Nexstar have a $6.2 billion merger on the line, requiring FCC approval, you might ask? Yes, it does!
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“Nexstar needs Brendan Carr’s help to get this deal across the finish line, and not only that, it needs the agency to change the rules around broadcast ownership limits to allow for it to happen,” Politico’s John Hendel explained.
And as Rolling Stone reported, the decision to pull Kimmel was made, per inside sources, because, while multiple executives felt that the comedian “had not actually said anything over the line,” the “threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”
The conservative-libertarian line on the censorious wisdom of the free market, which appears to be providing cover for the government censorship they claim to abhor, was also taken up by Carr himself, suggesting appearances are indeed reality. After Nexstar did as the government censor wanted, Carr praised the decision as a sign of a “healthy, functioning market.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who once campaigned on his and Paul’s “likeminded views, especially on liberty,” was a bit more honest about the threat of state force used to coerce Kimmel off the air. On his podcast, the lawmaker-pundit compared Carr to a mobster telling a business owner, “Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
But even as the senator criticized the threatening rhetoric, he praised the outcome. “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said. I am thrilled that he was fired,” Cruz said. The threats from Trump’s FCC were “dangerous” not because of the demonstrable outcomes so far — critics canceled over a stinging joke; journalists pushed out and news programming tweaked to please the White House — but because, down the line, some liberal might actually abuse their public office.
“They will silence us,” Cruz said. “They will use this power and they will use it ruthlessly.”
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And that’s the Trump administration’s principled, right-wing critics in a nutshell: As freedom of speech is under assault, the actually-existing powers that be are critiqued only in the context of potentially, in the future, empowering the real enemies of liberty on the other side. Cruz, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, could demand real answers from the FCC and push back on what his Democratic colleagues describe as an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.” So far, though, he hasn’t announced a hearing or even sent a sternly-worded letter; since commenting on the FCC-Kimmel brouhaha, he has, instead, released two more episodes of his podcast.
It has always been a bit of a farce, the way America’s right-wing libertarians speak up for “freedom” only when a government, led by Democrats, is explicitly involved. But in this case, when the government is crudely threatening its opponents over speech it wishes to squash, the reply is: companies are free to do what the state censor wants, and we, the defenders of liberty in this age of Trump-branded tyranny, are free to believe in coincidences.
Authoritarianism is not a hypothetical Democrat censoring ads for ivermectin, and it’s not something that we should fear slipping into; it’s happening now. Even with ABC having announced it will be airing Kimmel again, its local affiliates have said they will not: Nexstar, deciding the public should be shielded from any further merger-threatening jokes, and the conservative media company Sinclair, which has bought up a score of local television stations across the country, saying it would force-feed viewers its own pro-Trump news programming instead. And as this is happening here, the right-wing defenders of liberty are telling us loud and clear, in word and in deed, that they won’t be doing anything about it.
