ABC took comic Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air indefinitely on Wednesday, just hours after Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr called his comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination “truly sick.”

Jennifer Huddleston, a free speech scholar with the Cato Institute, said the FCC's action amount to a form of censorship called "government jawboning."

"Not necessarily by directly requiring a program be removed, but by indirectly indicating that a program is disfavored. Indicating that they may look at things like a broadcast station's licensing or other deals that a parent company may be involved in," Huddleston told the AP.

It was the kind of brute force response that Donald Trump and his loyalists have routinely flexed since the Republican president returned to the White House with a vow to retaliate against critics and political opponents. Trump’s reach has extended deep into the private sector, using the apparatus of the federal government to pressure companies to make changes that can reshape the public dialogue.

Trump has already reached settlements with ABC and CBS over their coverage. He has filed defamation lawsuits against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Republicans in Congress stripped federal funding from NPR and PBS. At the FCC, Carr has used his influence to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to root out what he describes as liberal bias.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, Trump has clamped down more firmly, with broader implications for the future of free speech protections that have been a bedrock of the American political system.

Attorney General Pam Bondi recently said that “we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Her words alarmed advocates who fear an elastic definition of the term could be used to criminalize dissent.

The First Amendment is widely viewed as protecting even the most disparaging remarks, and the Supreme Court said in an unanimous opinion last year that “government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

Huddleston said Kirk spoke out against hate speech law as "problematic" and something the government could abuse.

"There is a sense of irony that when we're seeing responses to what is a tragedy of political violence during someone exercising their rights to free speech and free expression that at times we're seeing the government call to rein in those very rights of free speech and free expression," Huddleston said.

Bondi later revised her comments to say she was focused on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence.”

When it comes to the potential erosion of freedom of speech in the U.S., Huddleston believes it will look less like an authoritarian regime and more like Western democracies in Europe.

The 27-nation EU has cracked down on Big Tech companies with sweeping rules. The bloc’s Digital Services Act aims to clean up social media and online platforms and its Digital Markets Act is designed to prevent digital monopolies and address hate speech and disinformation.

"I think there's reason to be optimistic that the First Amendment can weather the test of time and can weather constitutional challenges. But I do think it's also important that we really recognize why we need to cherish those values and why we need to cherish them, not only for people that we may agree with, but for people that we disagree with," Huddleston said.