How Late-Night Became a Free Speech Battleground

The same week ABC temporarily shut down Jimmy Kimmel Live!, JD Vance stepped in to host The Charlie Kirk Show, livestreamed from the White House. And with that, the ongoing crisis of American democracy had finally, inevitably, definitively stumbled its way onto the TV beat. It hasn’t been much framed this way, but, like Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk was a talk-show host. His eulogists preferred to romanticize his campus debates, his public outreach, his ministry, but for many people who knew of him, including some of his most ardent fans, he was famous for hosting a show they watched. While he modeled himself more on Rush Limbaugh than on David Letterman, and while his program aired online rather than through a broadcast or cable network, Kirk’s most public vocation was being the star of The Charlie Kirk Show, a podcast that was also streamed as online video.