The Easy Way or the Hard Way

The whole thing began on a podcast — because of course it did. The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a man named Brendan Carr who looks like he was raised in a windowless room reading nothing but enforcement memos, sat down across from a podcast host named Katie Miller — wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the same Stephen Miller who appears to subsist entirely on dehydration and grievance — and explained, in the bored cadence of a man reading aloud from a takeout menu, that the FCC was going to start accelerating the broadcast license review process for The Walt Disney Company.

This is what the new authoritarianism looks like: business casual, conversational, with the production values of a real estate seminar.

The trigger was a joke. Specifically, it was a joke that Jimmy Kimmel told on his show — a sketch presented as an alternative White House Correspondents' Dinner speech — in which Kimmel observed that the First Lady has the demeanor of an expectant widow. It was a light roast about an age difference, the kind of joke that has been told about every politician's spouse since the invention of marriage. Kimmel later defended it on his show as not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination, which is the kind of clarification a comedian should never have to make on a Monday night.

But here we are. The First Lady declared the joke hateful and violent on X. The President called for Kimmel to be fired. And Carr — who in September told a different podcast host that media companies could do this the easy way or the hard way — apparently found a hard way. On April 28, the FCC ordered Disney to file a license renewal application for all eight ABC-owned television stations within thirty days. These licenses were not due for review until 2028. The FCC has, in a single procedural maneuver, brought 2028 forward two years and nine months, which is the regulatory equivalent of a landlord knocking on your door at three in the morning to ask if you're really using your security deposit.

This is the part of the dispatch where I should explain what an early license renewal actually means in practical terms. It means lawyers. It means thousands of pages of filings. It means a hearing designation order if Carr decides — and he will get to decide — that any of the eight stations are not operating in the public interest. There is a 73% chance that somewhere in Burbank right now, a Disney compliance officer is staring at the ceiling tiles in a conference room asking herself if she should have gone to law school in Toronto instead.

The official cover story for all of this is Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Carr criticized them on the podcast. He did not specifically mention Jimmy Kimmel Live!, because he didn't have to. The whole point of using DEI as the pretext is that it allows the regulatory hammer to come down on a comedy program for telling a joke without the regulator ever having to admit that's what's happening. It has the structural integrity of a screen door on a submarine, but that's not the point. The point is the screen door is on a submarine and now you have to spend two years in court explaining that you didn't put it there.

Watching this unfold is like watching two raccoons fight over a pizza box in a Wendy's parking lot, except the raccoons have law degrees and the pizza box is the First Amendment.

The FCC's lone Democratic commissioner, Anna M. Gomez, called the order the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First Amendment to date. She added that as part of its ongoing campaign of censorship and control, the White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and this FCC has now answered that call.

The FCC has just pulled out a sword to hang over every single news organization in America. And to say: you report things that Donald Trump doesn't like and your entire station, your entire outfit, your entire business model could just disappear in the blink of an eye.

That was Senator Elizabeth Warren, talking to NPR, sounding like a woman who has been watching this slow-motion regulatory mugging long enough to recognize the choreography. Andrew Schwartzman, a public-interest media lawyer who has been doing this since before broadband, called it harassment and said Carr knows full well that he lacks any legitimate legal basis for taking action against these broadcasters. He's trying to harass and bludgeon them. This is the consensus view of approximately every First Amendment advocate not currently on the White House holiday card list, and it does not appear to have made the slightest impression on the Chairman, who is reportedly already drafting his next podcast appearance.

Here is the genuine horror at the center of all this, and it has nothing to do with Jimmy Kimmel, who will be fine, because Jimmy Kimmel has the kind of entrenched broadcast contract that requires an act of Congress to dislodge. The horror is the chilling effect, which is operating exactly as designed. Somewhere in a writers' room in Hollywood right now, a segment producer is killing a joke about Melania Trump because the legal department flagged it. Somewhere in a Sinclair-owned newsroom in Ohio, a station manager is reading the FCC order and doing the math on what happens if he runs an investigative piece about ICE. The transmission lines are intact, the cameras still work, the late-night studio audience is still being herded in for the 5:30 taping. The First Amendment is technically still on the books. It's just that now everyone in the building has reread their employment contracts and cancelled their plans for any joke that might make the wrong widow weep on social media.

There is a 61% chance that within a week some entirely different broadcaster — let's say one of the Sinclair affiliates that has gotten cocky — receives a friendly call from the FCC's enforcement bureau about a complaint that an FCC commissioner heard about on a podcast hosted by the wife of a White House staffer. They will resolve it quietly. They will have to. Their lawyers will tell them this is the easy way.

I would put the over/under at four episodes before the next light roast gets killed in the writers' room and never makes it to air. I would bet that on Kalshi, but I have a feeling the platform has already received its first FCC inquiry.

Anyway. The FCC has the regulatory finesse of an HOA president who just discovered email. The Republic appears to be on fire. The comedians, as the ancient Greeks could have warned us, are paying the bill.