As with our friends at the WSJ editorial board, we’re getting nervous about a new “cancel culture” trend on the right.  Brandon Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcasting license if they didn’t “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel: “Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Commerce Committee, says that Carr crossed a line. “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.'”

This is the same abuse of power that the Biden administration asserted to bully companies to change their behavior and bend to the left’s political will. Remember, many AOC and Elizabeth Warren disciples have used ugly tactics to call for the firing or silencing of media figures they didn’t like, from J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle to Joe Rogan, to us!

A good way to end these dangerous threats to our First Amendment right to free speech would be to shut down the  FCC – an obsolete relic of the New Deal era.

Tom Hazlett, a former chief economist at the FCC, has documented how the authors of the 1927 Radio Act that presaged the 1934 creation of the FCC, “explicitly wanted to keep (broadcasting) authority centralized and political, sidestepping the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”