OPINION: By Walter Curt
A week like this is a gift to the amnesiacs in our political class—the folks who yank the fire alarm and then look shocked when the sprinklers go off. Jimmy Kimmel gets yanked off the air, the left clutches pearls and screams “censorship,” and suddenly we’re all supposed to pretend the last decade didn’t happen. ABC pressed pause, affiliates preempted him, and the ACLU mobilized a celebrity letterhead brigade—then the show was hurried back on as if nothing ever happened. Spare us the morality play. If a late-night host’s suspension is an existential threat to speech, what exactly were the deplatformings, shadow bans, and “misinformation” dragnets that scrubbed conservative voices for years? Even Google now concedes what many of us have been saying: senior Biden officials leaned on them—“repeated and sustained outreach,” “press[ing] the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content”—pressure the company itself called “unacceptable and wrong.”
Yes, Kimmel’s suspension provoked a chorus of First Amendment defenders. Fine. But let’s not confuse a weeklong drama over a network show with the systematic throttling of debate that became standard operating procedure in Silicon Valley. Alphabet’s counsel told the House Judiciary Committee, in black and white, that White House officials pushed to take down COVID content that didn’t violate YouTube’s rules, and pledged not to outsource moderation to paid “fact-checkers” or keep people locked out over rules that no longer exist. Translation: the rules were capricious, political, and enforced at the government’s prodding. If conservatives had said that out loud two years ago, they were told to put on a tinfoil hat and enjoy the algorithm. Now the company itself says the quiet part plain.
And while the left was still composing haikus about Kimmel’s right to monologue, news dropped that James Comey has been indicted. Cue the outrage machine: “weaponized DOJ,” “dictatorship,” “retribution.” These are the same people who cheered as the legal system was turned into a battering ram against their chief political opponent—criminal probes layered atop civil lawsuits layered atop novel legal theories, all delivered with the sanctimony of “no one is above the law.” When the targets were Republicans, “accountability” was the word of the day; when the boomerang comes back, it’s “banana republic.” If the standard is that lying to Congress and obstructing proceedings are prosecutable offenses, I don’t recall a footnote that said “unless you used to run the FBI.” The indictment exists; the counts are specific; Comey will have his day in court like everyone else. Welcome to the rules you wrote.
“Weaponization,” though—that’s rich. Where was this sudden reverence for political neutrality when New York opened a one‑year legal window tailor‑made to revive decades‑old allegations and unleash a blizzard of lawsuits, including against Donald Trump? Albany called it the Adult Survivors Act and insisted it was about justice; in practice, it let stale claims back in the door and put a target on the back of one man the left cannot abide. You can defend the policy choice if you like—but don’t pretend it wasn’t a conscious decision to change the rules of the game midstream. That window is how E. Jean Carroll’s case proceeded years later. The law changed; the cases changed; the headlines changed. We remember.
And while we’re on memory: twice in the last campaign there were attempts on Donald Trump’s life—once in Butler, Pennsylvania, and once at his Florida golf course. Those are not metaphors. They’re bullets and indictments and grand juries and trauma that doesn’t clock out at midnight. We can argue all day about rhetoric and responsibility, but the fact pattern is not in dispute: there were two assassination attempts, one of which just produced a guilty verdict. If you want national stability, it helps not to pretend the attempted murder of a presidential candidate was a “local news” blip.
So when the same coalition that cheered deplatforming, “disinformation” panels, and “fortifying” elections suddenly finds religion on civil liberties because a TV comic went dark for a week, forgive us if we don’t join the candlelight vigil. When the same pundits who called lawfare “accountability” decide that a federal indictment of a onetime FBI director is the end of the republic, don’t expect a violin solo. A movement that spent years normalizing extraordinary measures—impeachments as ritual, prosecutions as politics, censorship as “safety”—has precious little credibility lecturing anyone about norms. The standard you enforce on your enemies will eventually be enforced on your friends. That’s not karma; it’s arithmetic.
Do they think we’ve forgotten how this all got normalized—how “content moderation” became a euphemism for viewpoint discrimination, how “safeguards” became pretexts, how “fact‑checking” became a cudgel that always seemed to swing one way? Do they think we can’t read a letter from Alphabet’s own lawyers acknowledging that government officials leaned on them to remove content that didn’t even violate the site’s rules? Do they think we didn’t notice how quickly the “weaponization” label drops when the targets are on the other team? The inconsistency would be funny if it weren’t so corrosive.
I can already hear the rebuttal: “But Kimmel!” Folks, if your yardstick for free speech is whether a multimillion‑dollar TV star can keep his prime‑time platform uninterrupted, you’ve missed the point. The real test is whether ordinary Americans—nurses, soldiers, teachers, truckers—can say what they believe without a government‑media‑tech scrum conspiring to throttle them under the banner of “trust and safety.” That’s the speech that was throttled, quietly and relentlessly, and only now are the gatekeepers admitting even a fraction of what was done. It wasn’t just one show for a few nights; it was the public square for years.
Mercy is not amnesia. If there had been one standard all along—don’t criminalize politics, don’t censor lawful speech, don’t rewrite statutes to settle scores—we might be in a different place. But the people who opened these doors now want to slam them shut the moment a draft blows back in their direction. No, we don’t have sympathy for a sudden case of selective civil libertarianism. No, we won’t pretend the last ten years were a bad dream. And no, we’re not going to “be cool” while the same people who jailed Trump supporters by the hundreds for federal process crimes gasp at the prospect of legal process applied to their own heroes. The republic needs one set of rules, applied evenly, remembered faithfully.
So, do they think we’ve forgotten? Not a chance. We remember the suspensions, the subpoenas, the shifting goalposts, the lectures about “democracy” that always meant “sit down and take it.” We remember the two assassination attempts, and we remember who shrugged and changed the subject. We remember a techocracy that decided it should be our nanny and a legal class that decided it should be our conscience. And we remember that none of this ends until the standards stop bending—until censorship is wrong no matter the target, lawfare is wrong no matter the partisan, and justice is blind again. Until then, don’t ask us to be cool. You taught us better.
