Two developments have raised to a new level the long conservative drive to control American culture. President Trump and his aides have declared that they will use all the tools federal power gives them to silence criticism in the media, and MAGA-aligned billionaires have bought major media outlets and begun moving them to the right.
The most stunning development is the decision by ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of threats by Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC stations because of Kimmel’s comments about the suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
President Trump then made clear this was no one-off case. He said that the major TV networks had been overwhelmingly “negative” about him and suggested that “maybe their license should be taken away.” The administration has also threatened to prosecute what it calls “hate speech” from the left and to revoke the tax-exempt status of foundations loosely connected to media that have criticized Trump.
Defenders of free speech should be grateful for these open and flagrant threats. Trump might have tried to silence critics by indirect means with plausible deniability. But by his own words and deeds, he has brought home to millions of Americans three things that his critics would have otherwise had more trouble establishing.
First, Trump’s open efforts to take Kimmel and other critics off the air have demonstrated the hypocrisy of MAGA’s claims to defend free speech. Trump has turned the Little Cancel Culture of undergraduates and online herds into the Big Cancel Culture of the state. If you didn’t like Little Cancel Culture, you should hate Big Cancel Culture.
Second, targeting popular late-night TV hosts makes clear that the threat Trump poses is not just to the “radical left.” In principle, Americans should care equally about the rights of any dissenter, no matter how radical or obscure. In practice, though, most people respond more to the silencing of people they’re familiar with who obviously aren’t spouting violent “hate speech.” Mockery of the president is not explicitly mentioned in the First Amendment, but it is a deeply cherished American right.
Third, Trump has created what might be thought of as a “teachable moment” about the First Amendment and the limits of governmental power. When Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would prosecute “hate speech,” it immediately led to discussion of the Supreme Court’s repeated insistence that hate speech, however offensive, is constitutionally protected. The conservative justices have been unambiguous about this point; in a 2017 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito said the government could not constitutionally prevent “speech expressing ideas that offend.” Speech advocating violence loses constitutional protection only when the speaker intends to incite and is likely to produce imminent lawless action. There is obviously no way that the speech denounced by Bondi, JD Vance, and others in the administration fits that description.
Instead of the state directly censoring or taking over independent media, oligarchs aligned with the regime run media on the regime’s behalf.
I don’t mean to celebrate Trump’s flagrant attack on the First Amendment. It is obviously dangerous, and it will have serious consequences even if Trump’s prosecutions and denials of tax exemptions are eventually overturned. But because this attack is so conspicuously unjustified and flies in the face of what conservatives, the courts, and Trump himself have said in the past, it creates opportunities for successful countermobilization.
The same cannot be said of the second line of the right-wing attack: the takeovers of media by MAGA-aligned billionaires. This is the phenomenon that social scientists describe as “media capture,” originally described a decade ago in countries such as Hungary and Turkey. Instead of the state directly censoring or taking over independent media, oligarchs aligned with the regime run media on the regime’s behalf, while the regime subjects owners of dissenting media to hostile enforcement of regulatory, tax, and other laws and forces them to shut down or sell. The political capture of communication also involves control of online digital platforms to throttle dissent and magnify messages favorable to the regime.
Three of the richest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison—have been playing this Trump-adjacent role in the United States, transforming traditional media outlets and social media platforms into tools of right-wing political influence and cultural control. This adds oligarchical heft to Rupert Murdoch’s existing influence operation, through Fox News and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal (though the Journal has lately shown some admirable independence of Trump not just in its opposition to his tariffs but in its coverage of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein).
When Musk took over Twitter, he was supposedly going to restore free speech when, in fact, he made it a megaphone for his own right-wing views. Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013, is a somewhat different but related case. During Trump’s first term, the Amazon founder not only underwrote the Post’s losses but protected its journalists, telling them, “I’ve got your back,” as former executive editor Marty Baron recalled in a 2023 book. But with Trump back in office and all the tech oligarchs seeking his favor, Bezos has reoriented the Post editorially in a right-wing direction. As Baron, no longer at the Post, said in February: “You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a vengeful president.”
Ellison, chairman of Oracle, and his son David are on the verge of outdoing Musk and Bezos as agents of right-wing media transformation. With his father’s money, David’s company Skydance has acquired Paramount, which includes CBS, where he is installing conservatives to run the news coverage. Skydance-Paramount is also preparing a cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which would bring it another major news outlet, CNN. Finally, Oracle is leading a consortium to acquire TikTok, which would give the right another social media platform, this one with considerable influence on the young. Trump has used his power as president to steer control of TikTok in this direction.
These and other efforts to capture the media need to be seen in the broader context of the right-wing campaign to dominate American culture, from popular entertainment and social media to the universities, science, and the arts. Politics, conservatives have been saying, is downstream of culture, and they are moving upstream to its sources. British socialists used to say they wanted the state to control the “commanding heights” of industry. Conservatives are using state power to control the commanding heights of culture, and they are at war with the elites who they see as dominating those heights today.
But culture is a tricky thing to try to control. I am not sure it can be commanded from any heights. The changes since the mid-20th century in thought, feeling, and identity that conservatives are fighting are now deeply rooted in social relationships and how people think about themselves. Not only are these changes hard to reverse; by their very efforts to control culture, Trump and his allies may be making more enemies than friends. Probably the worst way to wage that battle is to take on the comedians. In the battle between Trump and the late-night hosts, it remains to be seen who will have the last laugh.
What I worry about more is the long-term right-wing capture of media and digital platforms, including the infrastructure of AI. The First Amendment provides a basis for a legal fight against Trump’s use of state power to silence dissent, but it is no help in dealing with the capture of media and infrastructure by MAGA-aligned billionaires. Antitrust law may be of some limited assistance, but we likely need a whole new way of thinking about the defense of political and cultural freedom against concentrated private power aligned with the state.