Jimmy Kimmel appears at the Walt Disney Television upfront in New York on May 14, 2019.

President Donald Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of government and society intensified on Wednesday with the suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel by ABC’s parent company Disney following threats from the Federal Communications Commission.

The suspension of Kimmel’s late night talk show is the gravest and most clear attack on free speech rights in generations. FCC chairman Brendan Carr publicly called for Kimmel to be removed from the air over a joke he made about how the Trump administration sought to cast blame on anyone to their left for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The pressure to fire Kimmel was backed by threats to pull broadcast licences of ABC affiliates if the comedian wasn’t taken off the air.

This is blatantly illegal. The First Amendment explicitly protects against government censorship of speech. The government cannot threaten broadcasters to censor speech or punish speakers for their speech no matter what the person said.

“This is beyond McCarthyism,” Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”

It is also the latest dead canary in the coal mine of Trump’s attempt at authoritarian consolidation. By forcing the suspension of Kimmel, Trump is seizing control over the media. He is dictating what can be said and who can say it. This is an effort to strike fear in the entertainment industry and the press, and destroy their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened to pull its broadcast license and those of its affiliates on Sept. 17.

That this crackdown focused on a comedian is in line with the recent history of authoritarian consolidation efforts.

“Comedy doesn’t change the world, but it’s a bellwether,” Jon Stewart, the on-and-off host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, said in 2022. “When a society feels under threat, comedians are who get sent away first.”

After winning election in 2000,........

© HuffPost