“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr said on September 17. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“This” #1 was talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s claim that “the MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who [allegedly] murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

“This” #2 was Carr’s threat, as chair of the US Federal Communications Commission, against the broadcast licenses of the 200+ television stations which, as affiliates of Disney-owned ABC, carried Kimmel’s show.

Within hours, two multi-station ABC affiliates — Nexstar and Sinclair — fled in terror, announcing that in the future they would pre-empt Kimmel’s program with other content. Shortly after that, Disney capitulated to Carr’s extortion and suspended the show “indefinitely.”

There’s nothing new about “jawboning,” the practice of politicians and bureaucrats using political condemnation, often coupled with regulatory or legal threats, to bludgeon private sector actors into submission.

The term comes from the Bible. Samson, we’re informed in Judges 15, “found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.”

The Biden administration jawboned social media platforms, in public and secretly, to suppress dissenting opinions (supposed “misinformation”) on the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that refusal might jeopardize those platforms’ liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Republicans! — condemned that kind of jawboning when Biden and Co. did it.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Democrats! — condemns it when Trump and Co. do it.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass is Biden or Trump.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass’s jawbone is Jen Psaki or Brendan Carr.

It doesn’t matter whether the target is famous or unknown, rich or poor, right or wrong, good or evil.

Using government threats to suppress discussions the government doesn’t want us to have is both an evil in itself and a reversal of proper roles. It’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to decide what the rest of us may think or say, it’s our job to tell the politicians what they may or may not do.

Carr’s ability to take down — or, more likely, temporarily inconvenience — someone Donald Trump doesn’t like, because Trump doesn’t like him, belongs in the “may not do” category.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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