What happened to ABC and Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t censorship. It was worse.

The debate rages: Is ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel censorship? It wasn’t. It was something much worse, even if his suspension soon ended.

ABC announced the suspension days after Kimmel’s on-air comments suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s apparent killer, Tyler Robinson, was “one of” the “MAGA gang.” This was false: from everything we now know, Tyler Robinson was motivated by leftist ideology to murder Kirk. ABC is a private company with the right to fire anyone it thinks exercises poor judgment on air. And there exists no explicit government edict banning speculation about the motivation of murderers. So it was not an act of censorship in the traditional sense.

But censorship is not the only way the government can violate the First Amendment, which strips government of all power “of abrid