“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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“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump and his allies will understandably want to use the event to call out a tide of left-wing intolerance and violence. But they need to strike the right tone — or they risk squandering Kirk’s legacy.”

Value, with legacies as with everything else, is subjective. Whether you’ve invested well, or squandered, a legacy comes down to what you’d prefer to accomplish with that legacy and whether you succeed or fail at it.

In a perfect world, Charlie Kirk’s supporters would focus on, and mine the legacy value of, his reputation as an advocate of free speech and debate. Whatever one thinks of the views he promoted and defended, there’s 24-karat gold in the notion that verbal argument is, in both moral and practical terms, better than physical violence as a means of resolving disputes.

We do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, prominent figures on the “MAGA” right — including but not limited to the president and vice-president of the United States — look at Charlie Kirk and see their very own Horst Wessel.

Like Kirk, Wessel was an accomplished advocate and public speaker for his political party: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party, aka the Nazis. Unlike Kirk, Wessel was also a violent “stormtrooper” who engaged in street violence against the Nazis’ opponents.

Like Kirk, Wessel was murdered at a fairly young age. Like Kirk (for the moment, anyway), the motives behind his murder were unclear.

Joseph Goebbels immediately and successfully began promoting Wessel as a martyr to the Nazi cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Adolf Hitler’s political opponents.

Goebbels’s MAGA equivalents are already hard at work promoting Kirk as a martyr to their cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Donald Trump’s political opponents.

For years, I’ve heard from some quarters that Trump is “literally Hitler.”

We’re about to find out whether, and if so to what extent, that’s true.

If he and his underlings continue with the Horst Wessel approach, and use Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to call for more heads on more pikes in Kirk’s name, it’s almost certainly true.

If he and his underlings take a few deep breaths, examine their own motives and souls, and turn Kirk’s funeral into a celebration of free speech and open debate, it probably isn’t.

Either way, they’ll only have squandered Kirk’s legacy if they don’t manage to squeeze whatever they’re after out of that legacy.

As for the rest of us, we avoid squandering it by paying attention to how it’s used.

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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On September 10, Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal looked at the state’s law against “open carry” of firearms, looked at the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment, and noticed that the latter supersedes the former.

Five days later, Florida Attorney General James Uthmier issued “guidance to Florida’s prosecutors and law enforcement,” notifying them that “as of last week, open carry is the law of the state.”

Well, not “as of last week,” actually. Try “as of 1845,” the year Florida became a state. Per Madison v. Marbury, “an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.” It just took a long time for the fake “law” to be noticed and nixed by a court.

Such a straightforwardly correct court ruling, and its relatively quick acceptance by a power-hungry politician whom one might expect to reflexively contest it, may seem strange even by Florida standards (interestingly, the now-common “Florida Man” phenomenon emerged a few months after I moved to the state … make of that what you will).

Even stranger, though, is the reaction I’m seeing from some hoplophobes — people who suffer from an irrational fear of guns — in Florida (and elsewhere, but let’s stick to Florida).

Yes, they’re scared, but that kind of goes with the whole “irrational fear” thing, doesn’t it?

For some reason, though, they say they’re MORE scared of “open carry” than of “concealed carry.” They’re more spooked by the thought of seeing a single 9mm pistol on someone’s belt at the grocery store than by the knowledge that there are 20 others, concealed inside jackets, purses, etc., in that same store.

Florida only recently became constitutionally compliant on “concealed carry” with the elimination of its permit requirement, but that permit system had already been in place for decades. Any time you’re in public in Florida — or in any of the other 49 states — there’s a good chance that someone within your visual field is packing a pistol inside his or her jacket, purse, etc.

If I suffered from an irrational fear of a ubiquitous inanimate object — more than 100 million Americans own more than half a billion guns; that only a tiny fraction of a single percent are ever used to kill people is what makes the fear so irrational — I’d much rather be able to see and avoid that object and those carrying it than live in constant knowledge that they’re probably all around me, all the time. Just sayin’ …

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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