‘The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart Plays Montage of Conservatives Lying on TV to Prove That It’s Not Illegal

As all of the most powerful Republican politicians and the mainstream conservative media keeps reminding us, no one has the right to go on TV and tell lies, celebrate political violence or dehumanize political opponents — so do them a favor and ignore all the times they’ve done all those things over the last few months.

This week, Bob Iger and the Walt Disney Company made the executive decision to cower in fear of President Donald Trump and his FCC Chairman, Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr, after Carr publicly threatened to “take action” against ABC if it didn’t punish late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for his criticisms of how the political right has covered the murder of Charlie Kirk. Just hours after Carr issued his ominous warning of “we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,” Iger indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and the entire Republican party began its victory lap on Twitter and on TV.

According to Trump, Carr and their cronies at Fox News, the FCC using its power to silence a critic of the President isn’t a violation of the First Amendment because, in their assessment, Kimmel is a liar, and lying on TV simply isn’t allowed. In response, The Daily Show aired a supercut of all the most egregious lies that Trump and the right-wing media have told on live TV in recent memory:

In Stewart’s sarcastically servile opening on The Daily Show tonight, he highlighted the blatant hypocrisy of the federal government and its subservient media machine when they claim that the FCC is within its rights to silence any uppity late-night host who tells an untruth on the air. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that Fox News itself fired its biggest star Tucker Carlson in the fallout of a $787 million defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems over demonstrably incorrect claims made by Carlson that the 2020 general election results were fraudulent.

But even in Carlson’s case, neither the FCC nor the courts could kick him off the air, as that decision had to come from the Fox brass, who only fired him after his egregiously racist internal messages came to light. The federal government ultimately had nothing to do with Carlson’s dismissal — and he actually, factually lied.

The remarks from Kimmel that upset Carr and the conservative outrage industry weren’t remotely defamatory — they weren’t even wrong. In the offending monologue, Kimmel criticized how the right has tried to paint the alleged shooter of Kirk as a radical transgender rights activist while wholly ignoring the possibility that he could have been a conservative like them, remarking that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

There is no consistent set of rules by which Kimmel’s comments correctly identifying the Republican playbook could justify immediate government intervention and censorship while Attorney General Pam Bondi can claim that “crime is at an all-time high right now” without repercussion. And, to Fox News and the federal government, that’s exactly the point.