Is Brendan Carr a ‘great American patriot?’

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show in September. Carr was leaning hard on ABC affiliates after Jimmy Kimmel made a slightly poor taste, but hardly out-of-bounds, comment about MAGA’s relationship to Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson. Carr then laid out his FCC doctrine quite clearly.

“Companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

In other words: nice TV channel you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Carr didn’t try to hide what he was doing or saying, and people were alarmed. No less an adversary of liberals than Ted Cruz compared Carr to a mob boss and called his threats “dangerous as hell.” Given that later in the week, after he returned to the airwaves, Kimmel said Cruz’s statements often made him “want to throw up” (and also said Cruz looks like Gargamel, the evil wizard who torments the Smurfs), Cruz clearly didn’t express those concerns out of a spirit of friendship with Kimmel. In Cruz’s eyes, the head of the FCC was presenting a danger to the principle of free speech, the unmovable bedrock of American society.

The Kimmel affair was most Americans’ introduction to Carr, and what they saw made them uneasy. Not so Donald Trump, who referred to Carr as a “great American patriot.” As is so often the case, the biggest requirement to be a member of the Trump court is not just competency (though that helps), or even loyalty (mandatory), but willingness to deploy every power at your disposal to destroy Trump’s enemies, real or perceived. And few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Carr.

Carr, a Republican, entered the FCC’s orbit during the Obama administration as a legal advisor to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. Trump nominated him as a commissioner in 2017. During Trump’s first term, Carr devoted most of his energy to two projects that were uncontroversial, at least to the public at large: streamlining the rollout of 5G towers and advocating for the repeal of net neutrality. He met with opposition and criticism from Democrats, but it was hardly headline-making stuff.

Few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Brendan Carr

The ground shifted in 2022 when Carr began communicating with Wesley Coopersmith, the chief of staff to the president of the Heritage Foundation, about writing the FCC section of Project 2025, a blueprint for establishing a conservative philosophy at the deepest levels of government. “I would be interested,” Carr wrote. “Provided doing so clears ethics review.” Somehow it did clear the ethics review, because Carr agreed to do the work pro bono. Carr’s chapter is actually quite wonky, if definitely Republican-tinged, including proposals for deregulating wireless services, eliminating regulations that prevent growth in broadband coverage, and banning TikTok to protect government security. There’s also a substantial section on “reining in Big Tech.” So, unlike a recent South Park episode that depicted Carr flying around Mar-a-Lago, propelled by explosive diarrhea, he’s actually a serious person. He’s also a full inside-the-court type, visiting Mar-a-Lago and occasionally sporting a gold lapel pin featuring the President’s face.

In 2022, speaking out against Twitter and other social networks’ repression of conservative viewpoints, Carr tweeted that “free speech is not a threat to democracy – censorship is.” He also said that “political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech” and “people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” He was an advocate of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, saying it might “bend Twitter’s content moderation towards a greater embrace of free speech.”

In 2023, he tweeted, “Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Then Carr took charge of the FCC, and the authoritarian’s dream came true. Upon Trump’s election, he issued a statement that the FCC should be “reining in Big Tech, ensuring broadcasters operate in the public interest and unleashing economic growth while advancing our national security interests and supporting law enforcement.” In this case, though, the “public interest” seemed to directly align with the Trump administration’s interests.

Eyebrows were raised further when the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger the same week that CBS canceled the show of Stephen Colbert, a frequent, pompous and obnoxious Trump critic. At the time, CBS cited the show’s low ratings and Colbert’s excessive salary, both verifiable facts. But when Sinclair and Nexstar, broadcast syndicates with strong Trump ties, said they were pulling Kimmel’s show after his comments about Kirk’s death – and ABC decided to take Kimmel off the air – the decision-making process became murkier.

As Johnson put it after his interview with Carr, “It’s called soft power. The left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the right has learned how to wield power as well.” There’s certainly truth to that. Liberal soft power ran Roseanne Barr out of the entertainment industry on a rail, forcing her off her high-rated sitcom because she made a racist joke about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. Trump himself was banned from some social media sites for a few years. But there’s still something particularly uncomfortable about the idea that private broadcast companies, which depend on the federal government for licenses, might be bullied into making editorial decisions because politicians and their regulators take issue with their programming.

But Carr meets the boss’s approval, and that’s all that matters. On Friday, September 26, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is Smart, Tough, and a True American Patriot. He is supported by MAGA, like few others. Keep up the GREAT work, Brendan. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.