STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT: Hollywood Discovers the Virtue of Free Speech.
Consider a letter sent on Tuesday—also the day of Kimmel’s return—by lawyers for Alphabet (formerly Google) to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
It says, “Senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding certain user-generated content related to the Covid-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies. While the company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user-generated content.”
Translation: The Biden White House pressured Alphabet, just as the Trump administration jawboned ABC and Disney.
According to Alphabet’s lawyers, the Biden administration coerced YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet, to ban users for so-called medical misinformation during the pandemic. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis, one of the most prominent politicians in the country, was censored by YouTube for having the temerity to host a conversation with medical experts who said forcing children to wear masks was a bad idea.
Unlike the brief confrontation over Kimmel, the victims of this campaign were mostly not high-profile celebrities, but normal people, including scientists, without deep pockets and big platforms.
Another difference is that Hollywood liberals were largely cheering this state-led campaign against misinformation. While the big platforms were banning users who questioned whether the Covid vaccines really stopped transmission of the virus, or experts like Jay Bhattacharya who questioned the efficacy of widespread lockdowns, late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert were running cringe-inducing skits urging viewers to take the shot.
Alphabet was not the only company pressured by the Biden administration. Twitter was also targeted. So was Facebook, as its CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in 2024 in testimony before Congress. Some of this was out in the open. Biden himself said on July 16, 2021, that social media companies that allowed medical misinformation on their platforms were “killing people.” Kate Bedingfield, who was the communications director for the Biden White House, said that social media companies should be “held accountable.”
In private, the White House went so far as to recommend individual accounts of users who should be deplatformed or whose reach should be limited. These included the current director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, who was blacklisted by Twitter after correctly pointing out that Covid-19 was more lethal for older people.
Still though, won’t someone consider the talk show host briefly given a timeout by ABC? Kimmel: ‘Hard To Tell The Difference’ Between Gulags and America.
That’s when [Ethan] Hawke made his analogy, “Well, I’m glad to have you back in the United States of America… I was told you were sent to a Russian gulag, but luckily, you’re back.”
An appreciative Kimmel concurred, “Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s hard to tell the difference now between the gulags and the United States.”
Hawke then had some final bits of praise, “But last night was amazing. And we’re all really proud of you.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could not be reached for comment.
Related:
I note that almost every conservative news or commentary site that matters is now online and/or behind a subscription wall. It occurs to me that this now represents a dangerous single point of failure.
— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) September 25, 2025