FCC Chair Brendan Carr Used to Love Free Speech and Late Night

Pointing out the hypocrisy of people who have no integrity has gotten incredibly tiresome. Oh, the Republican Party pushes Christian values but has repeatedly chosen a cruel, greedy, thrice-married adulterer as their leader? That same Republican Party claims to be the party for “everyday Americans” but regularly passes policies that rob the working class and enrich billionaires and corporations? Highlighting these discrepancies hasn’t mattered or slowed down President Trump’s authoritarian takeover. 

But it can’t be ignored, even if it feels repetitive. This brings me to Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. He has been the face of the Trump administration’s removal of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC. As a guest on a right-wing podcast, Carr publicly threatened the network hours before Kimmel was removed from the airwaves on September 17th. In the days since, he’s taken victory laps, promising that the administration “wasn’t done yet.” 

Carr’s enthusiasm to gut the First Amendment and take Trump’s critics off air is — shocker — directly in opposition to his own statements in recent years. 

In 2022, Carr wrote on X, “President Biden is right. Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”

Naturally, that wasn’t the only time Carr spoke out against censorship. In fact, other people have been helpfully compiling old posts from Carr where he advocated for the First Amendment and free speech. My favorite?

“Free speech is the counterweight — it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream,” Carr wrote in 2023. 

True! 

Even as recently as March, Carr was promising a new era of free speech. “In America — we are returning to our free speech tradition and … across the government, we are encouraging our technology companies to stop the censorship,” Carr said during a conference speech.

A CNBC host confronted Carr with his old statements. “How do you square what you’re saying with those old posts?” Squawk Box co-anchor Carl Quintanilla asked Carr. 

“I’ve been very, very consistent when it comes to the internet,” Carr responded. “We want wide open, robust debate. And there’s no public interest standard there. There’s no licensing obligation there. But again, broadcast TV is simply different.” 

Carr’s definition of consistency seems as flimsy as his definition of authoritarianism.