1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

FCC chairman Brendan Carr should be removed from his position, or at a minimum called to account before congress. He should be asked what has changed from his prior position on government censorship and freedom of speech. In 2019. Carr posted on social media, “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in. The name of the ‘public interest’ ’.’ In 2021, he wrote, “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” In 2022, Carr posted, “political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” In 2023, he said, “free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarians dream.” Yet now, Carr criticized Kimmel's remarks, calling them part of a "concerted effort to lie to the American people". He then issued a warning to ABC's parent company, Disney, stating, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," and that "the FCC is going to have remedies that we can look at" if the company did not address Kimmel's conduct. His conduct flies in the face of free speech. I am appalled.