The Kimmel Suspension Shows How Fake Authoritarianism Becomes Real
Jamelle Bouie warns that Trump's administration is creating an "illusion" of total control. ABC helped make it reality.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie posted a really important TikTok last month that feels eerily prescient right now.
When he made it, things already felt like they were spiraling out of control. But now? Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Jimmy Kimmel got yanked off the air for making pretty mild comments about it. People are getting fired left and right for social media posts. It feels like we're watching democracy collapse in real-time.
But Bouie made a point that's been bouncing around in my brain since I rewatched it this week: This administration wants you to think it's already game over. They want you to believe we're living in a fully consolidated authoritarian state where resistance is futile. And here's the thing: we're not there. Not yet.
The administration is absolutely taking authoritarian steps (and the Kimmel suspension proves his point perfectly), but as Bouie explained weeks before any of this happened, they're desperately trying to create what he calls a “hyperreality” where they've already won. They're building, in his words, “real-life AI slop, this simulacrum of an authoritarian state” and hoping that if enough people believe it's real, it'll become real.
And it's kind of working. Not because the government is all-powerful, but because companies like ABC are preemptively falling in line. They're doing the regime's work for them.
After massive public backlash, Disney reversed course Monday and announced Kimmel will return Tuesday. But for six days, they showed us exactly how this works. And Sinclair and Nexstar still won't air him. The threat worked, even if only temporarily
Anyway, watch this. He recorded it before Kirk's assassination, before the Kimmel suspension, before this latest wave of capitulation. That's what makes it so unsettling — he saw exactly where this was heading. Then let's talk about what happens when corporations help build the very authoritarianism that doesn't actually exist yet—but might soon, if they keep this up.
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Transcript:
This administration desperately wants you to believe that you are living in a fully consolidated authoritarian state. And everything it does is geared towards creating that illusion. Its propaganda is geared towards creating that illusion. The utterances from the administration are geared towards creating that illusion. Its policy actions are geared towards creating that illusion.
But you have to understand that it is an illusion. This is not to say that the administration isn't taking authoritarian steps or that it doesn't want us to be a consolidated authoritarian state. It's not to say that they do not want to turn Trump into some sort of god-emperor of the United States whom you cannot challenge. But the reality of the situation is not that.
All the authoritarian steps the administration has taken have to be balanced against the ways the entire society is pushing back. And yes, there are prominent examples of prominent organizations — media organizations, law firms, colleges, universities — falling into line. But part of the reason why you know those is that the administration itself is quick to hype them up, quick to present them to you as more evidence that you've already lost. There's no use fighting back because you can't win.
What the administration doesn't talk about are all the times that they've lost. All the times they've lost in court. All the times they've failed to pressure colleges and universities into doing their bidding. All the times that law firms have rejected their push to have them submit to them. You're missing all the times that states and colleges have actively pushed back — pushed back against ICE, pushed back against DHS — have undermined the administration's ability to work at will. You're missing the way that as elections are beginning, the administration's allies are losing. You're missing the way the administration itself is deeply unpopular. It seems to know it's deeply unpopular, hence the effort to try to get its allies to gerrymander its maps as much as possible.
Authoritarianism is a spectrum. We're on the path to some kind of authoritarian state, but we're not really there yet. There's still quite a ways to go. The administration knows this, which is why it wants to create this illusion that, again, its victory is a fait accompli. And so with its visual propaganda and its rhetoric, it's trying to create a hyperreality where it's already won, and the only thing you have to do is submit. It creates this real-life AI slop, this simulacrum of an authoritarian state in hopes that it can make that simulacrum a real thing.
But it's not real. Not yet.
And I'm making this video just to remind you of that—that you can still freely dissent in this country. You can still freely politically organize against the administration. You can still freely join with tens of millions of your fellow Americans to say that we don't want this. When you look at the collapse of authoritarian regimes in recent memory, what you see is exactly that: civil society standing up and saying no.
So stand up and say no.
Alright, so here's what's been eating at me since watching Bouie's video.
He talks about the administration creating this “simulacrum” of an authoritarian state, this fake version they're hoping becomes real. And you know what? The Kimmel suspension shows exactly how this works. ABC wasn’t ordered by a court to act. Congress didn't pass a law. The FCC chair just made some threats on a podcast, and boom, Kimmel's off the air for nearly a week.
Yes, Disney brought him back after the outcry got too loud to ignore. But for six days, they proved they were willing to silence one of their biggest stars based on nothing but threats. That's the point. The damage is done.
This is the self-fulfilling prophecy Bouie's warning about. The authoritarianism isn't fully real yet, but when Disney acts like it is, when they suspend their biggest late-night host because they're scared about their pending deals getting blocked, they're helping make it real. They're building the thing that doesn't exist yet.
Think about what actually happened here. Kimmel said the “MAGA gang” was trying to characterize Kirk's killer as “anything other than one of them.” Was that the best way to word it? Maybe not. But FCC Chair Brendan Carr called it “truly sick” and suggested affiliates might lose their licenses if they kept airing the show. Within hours, Nexstar (which has a $6.2 billion merger pending that needs FCC approval) announced they wouldn't air Kimmel. Then ABC just... folded. For six days. Until over 400 celebrities signed an ACLU letter. Until protests erupted outside Disney studios. Until even some Republicans like Ted Cruz said this had gone too far.
No legal process. No actual government action. Just threats and corporate cowardice.
This is worse than what Bouie describes as organizations “falling into line.” These companies aren't being forced at gunpoint. They're voluntarily constructing the authoritarian apparatus because they've done the math and decided their mergers and deals matter more than pushing back. Nexstar wants to buy Tegna. Disney wants to sell that ESPN stake. So they're acting like we already live in the authoritarian state that Trump wants.
And that's how democracies actually die. Not through some dramatic coup, but through a thousand acts of preemptive surrender. Every company that fires someone for a social media post about Kirk, every TV station that drops Kimmel's show, every media outlet that softens its coverage... they're all helping create the reality that Bouie says is still just an illusion.
Disney's reversal doesn't erase what happened. For nearly a week, they showed every comedian, every journalist, every person with a platform exactly what the new rules are. Speak out of turn and you're gone — at least until the backlash becomes too expensive. Most people who get suspended or fired won't have Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep signing letters for them. They'll just be gone.
The really infuriating part is that this proves both halves of Bouie's argument. Yes, the resistance is real (and it actually worked this time — the massive pushback forced Disney to reverse). But also yes, the authoritarianism is advancing, not because Trump has consolidated power, but because corporations showed they’re willing to hand it to him. They only stopped because we made them.
Bouie ends by saying we can still stand up and say no. He's right. And the Kimmel reversal proves it can work. But we need to say it to Disney and ABC and Nexstar and Sinclair, too, not just to Trump. Because for six days, they were the ones actively turning the fake authoritarian state into a real one. They could stop have stopped this immediately if they just... didn't play along. It took massive public pressure to make them remember that.
The administration knows it's deeply unpopular. Bouie points that out. They know they don't have the actual power to force this stuff through legitimate channels. That's WHY they're creating this illusion, this performance of total control. But it only works if everyone plays their assigned role.
ABC showed up for six days to rehearsal, knew their lines, and helped put on the show. They didn't have to. The reversal proves they never had to. But they did it anyway, and that's what makes this so maddening and so important to understand. We're not watching democracy get murdered. We're watching it commit suicide. But maybe, just maybe, we can still talk it off the ledge.
Great post. Very important that we show that “they don’t own us” (to borrow from the series finale of ANGEL).