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When a movement is at war with its own people, there are casualties, and now Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show is one. A local consortium of stations, which .听Rolling Stone reported multiple ABC and Disney executives didn’t think Kimmel had crossed any lines, “but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.” They suspended him. The ; maybe that’s the point.听

Two things are changing, and one is not. One, unlike the firing of late-night host Stephen Colbert, the leaders of the MAGA movement are barely even pretending this is anything other than punishing wrongthink using government power and trying to make it illegal to hurt the president’s feelings. Kimmel was suspended and seven years after then-President Trump wanted Kimmel censored.听From the top down, this is a .听There is no animating principle here except ,听revenge, and control.

“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump 鈥� they’re licensed,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “They’re not allowed to do that.”

Trump is trying to revise reality as authoritarians have always done, and there are echoes: The way Mao听Zedong revised history during the Cultural Revolution; the way Josef Stalin suppressed dissent; the way Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin eliminated independent media. Joseph Goebbels , denouncing in the process听the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause 鈥� parasitic scum.”听Authoritarianism is also defined by how brittle and thin-skinned it is, underneath its bravado.

The second change: America’s slide into authoritarianism is accelerating. The president is suing the New York Times for $15 billion (all figures US) for, among other things, endorsing somebody else for president. His allies have already bought the company that controls CNN; CBS is bringing in right-winger Bari Weiss to run its news division; TikTok’s American operation is poised to be sold to a group controlled by the far right, as well. CBS and ABC听already paid what amounts to bribes to settle frivolous presidential lawsuits. Kimmel, in this case, is more of the same. A blood sacrifice.

As the Star’s Allan Woods writes, this is how authoritarians attack a state: control the media, attack the universities, corrupt the courts and corrupt the elections.听Prominent right-wing influencers, who were already bloodthirsty and feverish before the assassination of Charlie Kirk,听have called outright for repression in just about every sphere of American society.

It is a pitiless vision. They have set aside billions to expand migrant detention facilities. They have already sent masked agents of the state to round up suspected immigrants, largely Latinos, without due process; the Supreme Court recently ruled in its shadow docket that this sort of search and seizure is allowed. They have tried to , and adults too, to prisons where they are tortured.听

They are 听with a committee of cranks and true believers, one of whom has written in the past, ”.”听They are trying to rewrite American history with brute force, by ,听and .听

It is an attempt to jam the whole of society into an airless MAGA box. Which brings us to what isn’t changing: there seems to be no meaningful opposition. Democrats don’t have union organizing power behind them; they don’t have control of media operations; they don’t have a card that can trump a corrupted Supreme Court. They can’t produce mass mobilization consistently, and in fact seem cowed more often than not. The midterms next year may be a false hope: elections can be corrupted, too, so there are fewer and fewer off-ramps, here. The firing of Kimmel is a troubling signpost, but there are too many signposts to count. Silencing Kimmel can feel small.

But it’s a reminder, too. Laughing freely at leaders is central to a free society. Laughing at a movement with no sense of humour, and which has no ability to remake popular culture in a way that’s any good, matters. Remember what was good, and what can be good again, because the MAGA project is cheap, mean, ugly and soulless, and .听Maybe the only way it can be defeated is with mass protest, with solidarity. But also, with a societywide fight that includes laughing at them every chance you get. It can start anytime.