Free Speech Means The Freedom To Criticize Trump

Since Donald Trump's second term began, the President has been attacking critics of his administration. With the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump has used Kirk's tragic death as a pretext to try to use the government to clamp down on his critics, especially on the Left.

Last week, Trump's Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened television network ABC if they didn't take late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air for comments that he made against the MAGA movement. The next day, Kimmel was suspended.

Though, Kimmel was reinstated this week, Trump has called for the termination of late night comedians Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers for using Trump as the butt of their jokes.

Among the first groups that authoritarian governments around the world target are comedians and political satirists.

During the 1960s and 1970s, American comedians Lenny Bruce, the Smothers Brothers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor were in the vanguard in the fight for free speech in the United States.

Here is a youtube video on how I created this cartoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PHOrX2LWM4

REFERENCES
"Trump Invokes Kirk’s Killing in Justifying Measures to Silence Opponents" by Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Andrew Duehren, Kenneth P. Vogel and Katie Rogers for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/us/politics/trump-kirk-free-speech-h…

"The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon" by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover for FIRE
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/trials-lenny-bruce-fall-and-rise…

"Lenny Bruce" by David Schultz for the Free Speech Center At Middle Tennessee State University
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lenny-bruce/

"Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" by Karen Aichinger for the Free Speech Center At Middle Tennessee State University
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/smothers-brothers-comedy-hour/

"Looking back: George Carlin and the Supreme Court" by Scott Bomboy for The National Constitution Center
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/george-carlin-and-the-supreme-court

"Free Expression Walks into a Bar, Part 2: How Stand-up Comedy Became the Target of Censorship" by Dax D'Orazio for the Centre for Free Expression
https://cfe.torontomu.ca/blog/2022/06/free-expression-walks-bar-part-2-…