http://newiprogressive.com/images/stories/S5/jimmy-kimmel-talks-2025-s441.pngFree speech dies when leaders get to decide what’s “acceptable,” and America is one tantrum away from making that mistake.

LAKE GENEVA, WI - Here’s the dirty little secret every dictator knows: the first step to power isn’t winning hearts and minds. It’s shutting them up. Hitler did it with book burnings and propaganda. Stalin did it with gulags. Mao did it with humiliation parades and “thought reform.” North Korea still does it by banning internet, jokes, and reality itself.

And now Donald Trump — thin-skinned, grievance-soaked, wannabe strongman — is trying to add America to the list.

### Free Speech Under Siege — Late Night Edition

When Jimmy Kimmel cracked jokes after the Charlie Kirk assassination, ABC yanked his show off the air faster than you can say “political pressure.” Affiliates blocked it, advertisers fled, and the FCC chair — a Trump crony — threatened action against ABC for not being “in the public interest.” Translation: say anything critical of Dear Leader Trump, and you’ll pay.

Stephen Colbert? He called it what it is: censorship. He even resurrected his old Colbert Report swagger to hammer the point home. And he’s right — because if comedians can’t mock politicians without losing their shows, we’re not a democracy anymore. We’re a dictatorship-in-training.

### Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook

Let’s be clear: Trump doesn’t just dislike criticism. He wants it outlawed. He calls reporters “enemies of the people,” brands every tough question a “witch hunt,” and uses lawsuits as gag orders. Now he’s openly celebrating Kimmel’s suspension, drooling at the thought of silencing Colbert, and dreaming of the day when all media outlets carry only one story: how great Donald J. Trump is.

That’s not America. That’s Stalin’s Moscow. That’s Mao’s Beijing. That’s Kim Jong-un’s Pyongyang. And now, apparently, it’s Trump’s fantasy White House.

### The Shameful Choir of Enablers

And don’t kid yourself: Trump’s not pulling this off alone. Every Republican lawmaker, media executive, and trembling yes-man who goes along with this gag order is just as guilty. If you cheer when your guy silences a comedian, don’t pretend you care about the Constitution. You’re not defending America. You’re dismantling it.

Because here’s the thing: free speech isn’t about protecting speech you like. It’s about protecting speech you hate. If Trump and his followers can’t handle a late-night joke without reaching for the censor button, they don’t want freedom. They want control.

### The Cost of Silence

History is littered with the corpses of societies that gave dictators the power to decide what people could say. Nazi Germany. Stalin’s Russia. Mao’s China. North Korea today. The pattern is always the same: kill free speech, kill the truth, kill the people.

Trump and his sycophants are running the same playbook — weaponizing outrage, bullying the media, and twisting government power into a gag order. And the rest of us? We either stand up now, or we watch the First Amendment bleed out on live TV.

New on *Don’t Blink!*: *Dictators Hate Free Speech — And Trump Wants to Muzzle It in America*. When Trump cheers censorship, it’s not about “fake news” or “decency.” It’s the same old dictator playbook. Read my takedown of Trump and the spineless enablers helping him suffocate free speech — and share it before they try to silence us all.