Satire, MAGA and the First Amendment
Melania Dump decries Jimmy Kimmel's rhetoric while her husband's violent rhetoric and actions continue. This is why satire and satirists like Kimmel remain vital.
In the early months of Dump’s first term, I listened to an interview conducted with Preet Bharara. It was shortly after Dump fired him as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
I remember Bharara telling the interviewer that Dump does not laugh. That is what struck Bharara right away when he met with Dump right before Dump terminated him.
Unless their “humor” comes at a vulnerable person’s expense, Dump & Fiends are humorless. They punch down not up. Satire only punches up. That is why they don’t understand satire and its necessity.
Satire is a specific rhetorical device. It uses hyperbole, euphemism, incongruence, reversal, caricature, parody and irony or sarcasm. Satire highlights and reveals the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of those in power and the harm they inflict.
A famous satirical essay you may have read in high school or college is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Satirist Andy Borowitz writes one of my favorite Substacks The Borowitz Report. To my dismay, Comedy Central canceled the eternally brilliant satire The President Show during Dump’s first term.
After the attempted assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner last Saturday, Melania Dump’s ubiquitous outrage broke through the news’ unending and thrashing waves. Once again, Jimmy Kimmel was the target. And once again, Melania ’s words displayed cognitive dissonance.
Kimmel told his joke two days before the WHCA dinner. Dump’s appetite for liquidating the First Amendment is ingrained into his thin-tangerine skin. I suspect he became hungry for the first amendment even before he learned at Roy Cohn's odious knee. Melania’s umbrage with Kimmel just created a convenient reason for Dump to further tighten his tiny bruised hands around free speech’s neck.
Along with Dump & Fiends calling for Kimmel's firing, the FCC is reviewing ABC's licenses. FCC chair and Dump toady Brendan Carr denies Kimmel's joke and Dump’s vicious hate for him are the reasons for the FCC's actions.
Carr by the way wrote Project 2025's chapter on the FCC.
This month The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ends CBS’s coward to Dump & Fiends. Unlike last September, ABC, according to Eliza Bechtold of The Conversation, now defends Kimmel’s free speech. Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell ensured by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision that the first amendment protects satire.
Bechtold concludes:
By expressly linking Democrat criticisms of the president, and pointed critiques (however off-colour) from Kimmel and his fellow political satirists to an upsurge in political violence, the Trump administration is trying to silence criticism of its actions. But it’s also clear that this behaviour is precisely what the first amendment prohibits.
Ironically, the media often portrays these episodes as “feuds” between Trump and his critics.
But when viewed through the lens of the first amendment and its core values in this context, the stakes are much higher. These episodes constitute an effort to wrest control of public discourse by interfering in the marketplace of ideas in order silence those critical of the government.
And history tells us that a government that can silence its critics often does so in pursuit of unchecked power. Viewed through this lens, perhaps the greatest threat to American democracy is the government itself.
If the FCC pulls ABC's licenses, more than Kimmel's show and ABC may be at an end.