By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Charlie Kirk was the antithesis of Jimmy Kimmel. Kirk was tremendously influential with the youth while Kimmel's sanctimony is reserved for a dwindling audience of the blue-state elderly among coastal elites. Kirk sought good-faith debate while Kimmel relied on monologues of smears. Kirk was fundamentally decent, while Kimmel is callous and cruel.

This week's headlines reveal another difference between the men: the reaction to Kirk's assassination is a grassroots movement, while the fury resulting from Kimmel's suspension is the result of an entitled bureaucracy accustomed to an unaccountable monopoly on the public's resources.

Corporate media and its kept activists have howled in response to Kimmel's suspension, but none of its leaders offer an answer to a simple question: why should the First Amendment protect an ideologue's right to make millions from lies on government-subsidized public airwaves, in defiance of market trends, but not independent Americans' right to dissent from predictable media orthodoxy?

The litany of attacks on free expression is familiar. We've been exposing this and fighting it for five years with mountains of documents drawn from FOIA and court discovery. We've exposed the methods, funding, cut-outs, and algorithms. We have all the receipts, tens of thousands of pages of them.

New York Attorney General Letitia James used the weight of the state to demolish VDare, Peter Brimelow's website dedicated to immigration. The Biden Administration coerced Big Tech into suppressing critics of the regime's Covid policies.

Merrick Garland's Department of Justice sentenced Douglas Mackey to prison for lampooning Hillary Clinton. Climate scientists bankrupted journalist Mark Steyn for mocking them. President Biden weaponized international legal systems against Pavel Durov and Julian Assange for facilitating the free flow of information.

From Peter Brimelow to Tucker Carlson to Bobby Kennedy to Mark Steyn to Alex Jones, the victims of the war on free expression were all independent voices who committed no crime other than deviating from the tenets of the deep state. That heresy led a parade of Democratic figures, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, law professors, and left-wing media to call for the removal of First Amendment protections that obstruct their agendas.

"The First Amendment stands as a major roadblock for us right now," John Kerry remarked last year ahead of the presidential election. During the pandemic response, the Democratic Party attempted to obliterate that "roadblock."

During oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said to the plaintiffs: "My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.." After all, the public needs "accurate information in the context of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic."

White House advisor Andy Slavitt lobbied Amazon to ban politically unfavorable books and demanded Facebook remove memes ridiculing the Covid vaccines. Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty coerced Big Tech companies to remove "mal-information," meaning true content that cut against official narratives. In April 2021, he strong-armed Google into ramping up its censorship operations and told executives that his concerns were "shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH."

"Are you guys f***ing serious?" Flaherty asked Facebook after the company failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. "I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today." At other times, Flaherty was more direct. "Please remove this account immediately," he told Twitter about a Biden family parody account. The company complied within an hour.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote a letter to Amazon threatening that selling Bobby Kennedy's books were "unethical, unacceptable, and potentially unlawful."

The Department of Homeland Security, th...