TheBlaze's Matt Kibbe criticizes FCC's Brendan Carr for “clearly jawboning and threatening ABC and Disney to to get rid of Kimmel”
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From the September 23, 2025, edition of The Shannon Joy Show, streamed on Rumble
SHANNON JOY (HOST): But what did you make of the move last week that was pushed by this administration, FCC, but tragically often, also applauded by so many of our friends and colleagues who supposedly believe in free speech and are against government censorship?
MATT KIBBE (THEBLAZE HOST): You know, the — I had to go back and actually dissect the timeline as to when Brendan Carr spoke up and was clearly jawboning and threatening ABC and Disney to to get rid of Kimmel. And everybody got the timeline wrong because they had a preconceived narrative about what was actually happening. They were hoping that Jimmy Kimmel was getting canceled for the obvious reasons. He's not funny. He's not performing well. And his comments about Charlie Kirk's death were just poorly timed. It honestly wasn't quite as bad as I think some people made it out to be, but it wasn't a joke. It wasn't funny. It was it was just — it was stupid and and ill-timed and offensive.
But in the process of all this, and I talked about this online and I was trying to convince MAGA fans that the thing that the FCC accomplished in doing was making Jimmy Kimmel, who should have been fired for cause, not performing, into a martyr.
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KIBBE: You know, I think that a lot of these guys — we'll talk about the FCC chairman for a minute. Was it conscious? Was it hamfisted? Was it a mistake? I think he's going on Benny Johnson and he wants to beat his chest and show what a tough guy he is.
JOY: Yeah.
KIBBE: And in the process, created a legal narrative that very much looks like jawboning, which, should it come to litigation, is going to create a real problem for the Trump administration. So, it was dumb, it was stupid, was it conscious? I don't know, but it's not free speech. It is the anathema of what the Trump executive order promised us. And I think all of us, particularly people that were hoping for something better from the Trump administration, should be very loud about opposing it.