House Democrats issued an explosive statement attacking Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, accusing him of a “corrupt abuse of power,” and calling for his resignation. Carr is being perceived by some as having pressured ABC to indefinitely suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over his comments about Charlie Kirk and President Donald Trump.

“Mr. Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a ‘concerted effort to lie to the American people,’ and that the F.C.C. was ‘going to have remedies that we can look at,'” The New York Times reported.

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”

READ MORE: ‘Following Russia’s Playbook’: Experts Shred Trump’s Antifa Declaration—But Warn of Danger

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team blasted the controversial FCC Chair.

Carr has “engaged in the corrupt abuse of power,” Leader Jeffries alleged in a statement. “He has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC, the employer of Jimmy Kimmel, and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration. FCC Chair Brendan Carr should resign immediately.”

“Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s war on the First Amendment is blatantly inconsistent with American values,” Jeffries added. “The censoring of artists and cancellation of shows is an act of cowardice. It may also be part of a corrupt pay-to-play scheme.”

On Thursday, Carr said he fully supports the right of Sinclair Broadcast Group to ask Kimmel to make a personal donation to Kirk’s family and his foundation.

“I think Sinclair has every right to call for that,” Carr told CNBC on Thursday morning.

“If Sinclair affiliates with Disney, they take Disney contract, they have a contractual relationship with Disney, and that’s between the two of them to figure out, you know, what’s going to make sense to make both of them comfortable with the relationship going forward,” Carr said.

The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC.

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“But again,” he continued, “over the years, it would be unthinkable for Sinclair, for Nexstar, for local TV stations to actually say, ‘You know what? You know, we’re not gonna take this particular programming that’s coming out of New York and Hollywood and send it to Pennsylvania and Utah.'”

Carr called “the idea that local broadcasters feel like they can push back,” a “much healthier dynamic for the country right now.”

According to The Independent, “Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Nexstar Communications Group, who operate large numbers of ABC affiliates between them, announced they would pull the show from Wednesday, branding the comments ‘offensive’ and ‘inappropriate’. This led ABC to ‘indefinitely’ suspend production of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in a move that has attracted widespread backlash.”

As The Guardian reported, “Kimmel said ‘many in Maga land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk’ and mocked Vice-President JD Vance’s guest hosting of Kirk’s podcast, saying Trump was ‘fanning the flames’ by attacking people on the left.”

“Within a day, Carr condemned Kimmel’s comments as ‘truly sick‘ and suggested ABC and its parent company, Disney, could face regulatory consequences for spreading misinformation. The FCC chair also argued the network had violated obligations to operate in the ‘public interest’ under federal broadcasting rules.”

FCC Chair Brendan Carr says Sinclair has “every right” to demand that Jimmy Kimmel to donate to Turning Point USA pic.twitter.com/SCmDC8ljkL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2025

READ MORE: ‘We’re Literally Sitting in the Building’: House Democrat Shreds GOP’s Spin on Violence

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In a fiery declaration, President Donald Trump announced he is designating Antifa a terrorist organization. Some experts say he lacks the authority to do so and will struggle to enforce such a move—while others warn it could give him sweeping license to target groups or individuals he disfavors.

“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” Trump wrote on social media on Wednesday evening. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

As many have noted, Antifa is not an organized group. It simply means “anti-fascist,” or “anti-fascism.”

But Trump has taken the step anyway. Here’s what some experts say.

READ MORE: ‘Depraved’: Vance Scorched for ‘Reprehensible’ Joke About Military’s Deadly Boat Strikes

BBC News reports that some legal experts have called into question Trump’s legal authority to declare Antifa a terrorist organization.

“The existing rules do allow the government, specifically the State Department, to make a list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ which makes it a crime to give funds or other ‘material support’ to those groups.”

“But the key word here is ‘foreign,'” BBC notes, “and those experts we have spoken to pointed out that free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment would limit Trump’s ability to ban – or restrict funding for – domestic movements like antifa.”

Rumen Cholakov, an expert in US constitutional law at King’s College London, “told us that if the government were to use its powers against them in the US their actions would be ‘potentially susceptible to constitutional challenges’ in court for violating these rights.”

Professor David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, told BBC Verify, “Under the First Amendment, no one can be punished for joining a group or giving money to a group.”

Meanwhile, other experts have also weighed in.

READ MORE: ‘We’re Literally Sitting in the Building’: House Democrat Shreds GOP’s Spin on Violence

Attorney and MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski observed, “Since Antifa is now designed as a terrorist organization it will be interesting to see how they determine who is a member and how they prove it is an organization.”

Politico senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney noted, “Trump says he’s designating ‘antifa’ a terrorist group and launching a probe into finding of antifa activities. The FBI has long said antifa doesn’t really have a centralized structure or leadership.”

U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), an attorney, told CNN Wednesday night that “there is no Antifa organization.”

He added, “the point” is that Trump is “using the Charlie Kirk murder as a pretext to go after people that he disagrees with. He, on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder — when the murderer had not even been caught or identified. This is all a pretext, and it’s a shame, I think … that Charlie Kirk actually stood for free speech. And instead, they’re using his memory to attack free speech.”

Political scholar Dr. Michael Mackey issued this warning: “‘Antifa’ is an artifact of Russian information warfare and the Kremlin-sponsored MAGA cult. No such entity exists in American civil society. Trump is owned by Putin.”

Intelligence and foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance, a terrorism expert, said, “You cannot designate an idea as a terrorist group.  There is no organization called ANTIFA. There is no leadership or funding path. There is no membership.”

“What he is doing is setting the stage to designate ANY American as a terrorist,” Nance alleged. “That’s Fascism.”

CBS News national security coordinating producer Jim LaPorta, an award-winning journalist, wrote: “It’s unclear how Pres. Trump could designate a group inside the U.S. as a domestic terrorist group. The U.S. does not have a federal crime of domestic terrorism. Additionally, it’s been understood that the Govt. would run into 1st and 4th Amendment issues.”

But those hurdles aside, experts are still issuing warnings.

Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), an expert on Russia, and creator and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast series, expressed concern.

“So Trump is designating Antifa as a terrorist organization,” she wrote. “Problem is he thinks all Democrats are this so called antifa. He is following Russia’s playbook step by step to crush opposition. Hope everyone wakes up.”

On Substack, Lautman expanded her warning.

She pointed to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s remarks on Monday, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Calling the “radical left” a “vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” he vowed.

“Where have I heard this before?” Lautman said of Miller’s statement. “In Russia, where the Kremlin seizes upon every terrorist attack, bombing, protest, or act of violence (some of which they carry out in false flag operations) to justify new crackdowns, laws, and the systematic destruction of any semblance of independent opposition.”

Lautman continued her stark warning, writing, “what makes the current moment in America so perilous is how closely it now echoes this Soviet/Russian script, with the killing of Charlie Kirk already being transformed from an individual crime into the cornerstone of a supposed vast conspiracy of leftist violence — again, without evidence — a pretext for sweeping crackdowns that will not stop at violent actors but extend to protesters, grassroots organizers, and the infrastructure that sustains them.”

“Groups like Indivisible and MoveOn, platforms like ActBlue, that fund Democratic candidates,” she predicted, “will all be recast as pipelines of extremism, stripped of their democratic role.”

READ MORE: Six D’s and an F: Latino Focus Group Members All Regret Their Votes for Trump

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Vice President JD Vance is under fire for joking about the U.S. Department of Defense’s deadly strikes on several boats the Trump administration insists were smuggling drugs headed for the United States, despite claims by their government to the contrary. Some have suggested the strikes might be illegal.

Democratic and Republican U.S. Senators and human rights groups have expressed concerns.

“Let us be clear — this may be an extrajudicial execution, which is murder,” Amnesty International’s Daphne Eviatar told NPR. “There is absolutely no legal justification for this military strike.”

But on Wednesday, the Vice President disregarded any concerns as he relayed a conversation with the Defense Secretary.

READ MORE: ‘We’re Literally Sitting in the Building’: House Democrat Shreds GOP’s Spin on Violence

“I was talking to Secretary Hegseth, and you know what he said? He said, ‘You know what, Mr. Vice President, we don’t see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They’ve completely stopped.'”

“And I said, ‘I know why. I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.'”

The Vice President insisted that the killings of suspected drug smugglers are what should happen when “we just have our actual government fighting for the interests of Americans and nobody else.”

He claimed by doing so, “we can make this country safer, we can protect your jobs, we can make sure you’ve got the best wages anywhere in the world, and we can stop this terrible poison from coming into our country.”

Critics blasted the Vice President.

Veteran journalist John Harwood took the opportunity to call the Vice President “depraved.”

WUWM radio’s Joy Powers commented, “The Vice President of the United States is joking about murdering innocent people. Should someone call his employer?”

“There are actual fishermen in that area of world worried the United States is going to idiotically kill them,” noted Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman.

“Get it? The joke is that we might kill some totally innocent people! Haha that’s funny, right?” said attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a sarcastic remark.

READ MORE: Six D’s and an F: Latino Focus Group Members All Regret Their Votes for Trump

“Literally bragging that there’s a real chance we’re murdering innocent people,” wrote film producer Franklin Leonard.

“Nothing like a joke about US potentially murdering innocent people. Ha ha,” remarked Ron Filipkowski, an attorney and editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch News.

“Vance has a law degree, he will not be able to escape responsibility for this,” wrote former Republican and past trial lawyer John Jackson, calling Vance’s remarks “Sickening.”

“He thinks it’s funny that we threaten poor fisherman in a third-world country. This will be an exhibit in a court one day,” Jackson added.

“When JD Vance brags about the U.S. blowing up alleged drug boats and says, ‘I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world,’ he’s really saying: ‘We’re so reckless and dishonest that fishermen should worry that the U.S. will murder them and then falsely accuse them of drug trafficking,'” commented Mark Jacob, an author and former Chicago Tribune editor.

“In addition to everything else that’s reprehensible about this ‘joke’ about ‘accidentally’ murdering poor fishermen, don’t forget that Trump made this same ‘joke’ as well, so JD is also debasing himself by mindlessly mimicking Trump’s degeneracy,” remarked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

Vance on Trump's strikes on boats: "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world." pic.twitter.com/YdXmvCkV2B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2025

READ MORE: Navarro Demands Left Face ‘Accountability’ for MAGA’s Own Misdeeds—and Kirk Assassination

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