Former Jimmy Kimmel Show Writer ROASTS Trump Over Free Speech During Fiery Hearing | U.S News

I'm a comedy writer. I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight years, as ranking member Scanlon said, and I'm an author who recently got back from a national tour for my picture book series, Buffalo Fluffalo. So the fact that I am sitting here in a navy blue business suit in the Capitol building, surrounded by my esteemed co-panelists, at a hearing about the First Amendment, means something has gone very, very wrong. I gotta say, I didn't see this coming. I thought we were entering a new golden age of free speech. On January 20th, 2025, President Trump, on his very first day in office for the second time, announced a presidential action called, quote, restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship, which was a big relief because I had some concerns about how he felt about speech he didn't much like. My first brush with this president happened in 2017. At the time, I was doing a recurring joke bit on Twitter before it was owned by the world's richest and most online man, Elon Musk. Every time the president free-associated his feelings, in all caps, I would reply as his concerned mom, sweetie, you're clearly having a lot of big thoughts all at once, you need to do your five deep breaths, etc. It was all fun and games. Until one night, the president blocked me after I wrote a joke that hurt his feelings. I was confused at first and thought the account had mercifully been deleted. But it turned out that the man in the Oval Office couldn't take a joke and wanted to make sure he didn't have to hear one either. The Knight Foundation sued him to get him to unblock me and several others without my involvement, though I thank them. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ended up having to rule on this, and the Supreme Court took the issue up too. He quite literally made a federal case of a joke. The problem here is not that jokes bother this president. It's that he is in the habit of looking for ways to silence the joke tellers. I should tell you a little bit about one of my former jobs. When I wrote for Kimmel from 2012 through 2020, I was responsible for pitching about everyone. Democrats, Republicans, Kardashians. This was never supposed to be a job where I'd have to know anything more about the founding documents than an off-color joke about John Hancock. For, oh God, for late-night comedy writers. Hi, Mom and Dad. For late-night comedy writers, the president is our best and worst audience. He is our best audience because, unlike most Americans, he watches late-night television. He cares about what the network men in suits say about him. He is our worst audience because his inexplicably bruised skin is very, very thin. He complained about our jokes frequently, often in real time, on his own social media site he invented so that nobody could make fun of him on it. This went far beyond social media tirades when this year, as ranking member Raskin mentioned, after Stephen Colbert told jokes about that $16 million settlement CBS personally paid to Trump, the late show with Stephen Colbert was bulldozed like it was the East Wing of the White House. Then months later, emboldened by the Colbert precedent, the administration had Jimmy Kimmel Live briefly yanked off the air when the show's monologue displeased the president. I want to be fair. The Trump administration denies responsibility for these cancellations, much as the mafia is continuously surprised that so many people end up in the East River with cement blocks on their feet. But what we can say for sure is that this president, that so prized free speech and so loathed censorship was positively giddy on Truth Social about the literal cancellation of these comedians. He was so excited, he misspelled the word canceled. The president wrote, Great news for America. The ratings challenge Jimmy Kimmel show is canceled. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has zero talent and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that's possible. That leaves Jimmy Falun and Seth, two total losers on fake news NBC, their ratings also horrible, do it NBC, President DJT. Then he got back to authorizing strikes against ISIS in Syria. To kill a late night show doesn't just kill an enormous platform for speaking truth to power. Because late night comedy doesn't just speak truth to power, it speaks truth to an incredibly large number of people. I believe late-night hosts like Colbert and Kimmel are vital satirists who shape how millions of Americans absorb the day's news. At 11.30 every weeknight, millions of people all over the country, just before their melatonin gummies hit, listen to what these comedians have to say about what happened in America that day. And under any administration, they are powerful voices of criticism and dissent. Network late-night hosts like Colbert and Kimmel have used their huge platforms to make tangible, incremental ideological change through satire, dressed up in a suit, in the hope that maybe someone who stayed up after the evening news on CBS or ABC will hear the news reflected back at them through a lens that is openly critical of the government, no matter who is in the Oval Office, and that can shape an electorate's opinion. And let's be clear, they're also doing interviews with The Bachelorette. But these permanent and temporary cancellations aren't just about controlling jokes. They're about controlling criticism of the administration and its corporate bedfellows. It is the state using its power to shape what is profitable to say. And we've learned nothing if not this. The bottom line comes first, even before the First Amendment. I have little doubt that CBS was in part compelled to end Colbert's show to avoid regulatory retaliation by the administration after CBS's parent company, Paramount, merged with Skydance Media, which I believe is a trust fund for one of the Ellison kids. And there is no doubt that this September's retribution against Jimmy Kimmel Live was due entirely to the host's criticism of our current president, despite the FCC's contention that it was for misinformation and sick jokes, which really just grabs me by the, I'm not going to say that in congressional testimony. There is no doubt that the president is so personally bothered by what comedians say that the FCC is willing to disappear any mouthpieces that might hurt his feelings in a shocking and, according to people with many more degrees and expertise than I, unconstitutional way. And here's how that trickles down. The censorship of free speech we have witnessed from the highest office in the federal government has emboldened Americans in sacred positions of power from the state to the local to the school board level which is where I found myself just weeks after Kimmel's suspension. Talking about my brush with censorship this year might affect my broad appeal and livelihood as a children's book author, and I have not spoken publicly about this experience until right now in this room. But I have always said that if something is worth talking about with your family and closest friends and therapists, it is worth talking about with the ranking members of the House Judiciary Committee. The best part of being a children's book author is to actually read my books to children and to see them react and laugh and scrunch up their noses in delight and to get the kind of uncensored feedback and questions that no comedy writer's room could possibly contrive. I was once asked if I thought I would win in a race with a buffalo. Two years ago, when the first book came out, I was sent basically up and down the Amtrak Northeast Regional Corridor, but this year, after the books were a number one New York Times bestseller, the publisher decided to put me on airplanes and bring Buffalo, Fluffalo, and Puffalo to the country. This fall, through partnerships between school districts and my publisher, I read to thousands and thousands of elementary school kids in small towns, in suburbs, in Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and Montana. In Montana, the tour hit a snag. The evening before a scheduled school visit in a rural community in a Title I school, the wonderful school librarian emailed me and my publisher. A group of parents who had previously caused a stir at a school board meeting where they successfully campaigned to ban certain books from the library decided to ban me. They emailed the school superintendent en masse with jokes I had written in my life as a political comedy writer and told the superintendent that if I came to read my book about prairie animals and their feelings to the kids, they would show up and make a scene in front of the children until I left. The visit was canceled. I should say, the kids they were threatening to do this to are around the same ages as my own two boys, who are four and six and a half and are watching, and I love. These kids in the school who had never had an author visit and had been reading the book with their teachers and making art projects about a buffalo and preparing very thoughtful questions for me would have shown up for a scary event where their parents barged in to the library and screamed at the lady in the dress, holding up a picture book and doing a buffalo voice. It isn't some great national tragedy that a story time was canceled, but it is a harrowing indication of how a joke can be wielded against its writer by exactly the same movement that railed against cancel culture to defend jokes that punched down. For the members of the United States Congress who haven't read Buffalo Fluffalo, someone who went to Kennedy School in your offices should have prepped you, but I'll summarize. The book is about a buffalo who is at first tough and blustery and rude and pushes his friends away. And then when it is revealed that underneath all his fluff, he is just a tiny frightened guy who wants to be loved, his friends support him anyway. They love him just as he is. And he gives them gratitude and kindness right back. It's just left-wing commie propaganda. I believe that the impulse to censor free speech comes from exactly the fear in the book. The fear of being seen as weak or vulnerable. The fear of being seen as weak or vulnerable. The desire to project an air of bravado and to silence and push off anyone who might pull the curtain back on that image of imperious strongman. A true leader is only as strong as the joke he can take at his own expense. And there is nothing funny about the fact that we are living through a time when a joke about the government is a liability. In this room, surrounded by so many people who are as outraged and heartbroken by this administration's culture-shifting attack on free speech, I have hope. And I want to say thank you to the school librarians in red and blue and purple states whom I have had the genuine pleasure of meeting throughout my book tours, who are at the front lines of these school board fights over book bans with increasing regularity. They are tired, they are pissed, and they just want to be able to give a kid a book they're excited to read, even if the character in that book might have two moms, which as of this testimony is still a legal amount of moms to have. Because here's the thing about those kids across America that I met. From deeply underfunded Title I schools where most students were on free lunch, to immigrant communities where many of those kids were the first in their families to learn to read and speak English, to fancy schools in oil money suburbs where I was offered a choice of flat or sparkling water, I will tell you this. The kids were the same. The kids were the same. When I read my books in auditoriums and gyms and libraries and classrooms, some fidgeted, some daydreamed into Wonderland, laughed and awed at the same parts, and when I asked if they had a question at the end to a school, they all asked me the same one. Why is Buffalo Fluffalo mad? Why is he mad? And they also frequently told me the names of their dogs. I think we know why the Buffalo Fluffalo in the Oval Office is mad. But as I was saying before, I am hopeful because the members of Congress in this room today, like Representative Raskin and Representative Scanlon, who don't just posture and complain about this administration on social media, they are going to fight to stop the president from going unchecked in his vendettas against those who speak out against him. As a comedy writer and generally conflict-averse coward, I do believe that jokes can be an effective tool for speaking truth under authoritarianism. So I take comfort in the words of my fellow author, J.D. Vance, when he spoke last year at the Munich Security Conference, the funniest of all conferences. He said, in Washington, there's a new sheriff in town, and under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree. I'm not sure if anyone in the room can get the vice president a meeting with his boss, but that little whippersnapper from Yale has some ideas. Vance went on to the crowd in Germany. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War. Thank God indeed, and may God continue to bless the United States.