“Republicans are the party with a sense of humor,” comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said, chuckling, at last year’s now-infamous Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.

So much for that. In Trump’s America, you are now not only forbidden to criticize a certain foreign country (Israel), post impolitely about corporate executives, or have memes on your phone that mock the vice president. You’re now apparently also not allowed to make jokes about the president or his friends.

Last night, ABC announced it was abruptly pulling late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” mere hours after Trump and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened the network. Trump was already unhappy about ABC’s news coverage of his administration, and Carr specifically cited a part of the monologue that Kimmel, who has spent years getting under the president’s skin, delivered this past Monday.

Trump loyalists will say Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air because of the jokes he’s made. They say the real problem was he was whipping up violence, and that he was spreading misinformation — incidentally, the same excuses Democrats have used the past eight years when they pushed tech companies to censor their users. Here is Kimmel’s offending statement:

The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Kimmel’s critics are correct that he was factually wrong here in implying Kirk’s killer is MAGA: there is no indication yet he was a Trump supporter and, in fact, no evidence so far that he had any strong political views at all beyond being pro-gun and pro-LGBTQ. But you’re allowed to be factually wrong and on TV: most of the people on TV are, including on pro-Trump news networks — which are, at least nominally, actual news reporting outfits and not late night comedy shows, and which just straight-up lied to their viewers the other day about a different political assassination, telling them the Trump-voting antiabortion advocate who assassinated Minnesota’s Democratic House Speaker this past June was actually a Democrat.

There’s also no indication yet that Kirk’s killer was a “leftist” either by the way, or that he was radicalized by less than one semester at Utah State University. That hasn’t stopped Trump and every official, politician, and pundit associated with him from repeatedly claiming both of these things as fact, including on news networks loyal to the president. None of this has been met with any outrage from those on the Right who have suddenly become sticklers for the facts — because their outrage is plainly not motivated by any concern of the sort but with finding an excuse to punish and intimidate Trump’s critics and political opponents.

As absurd as it is to go after Kimmel, this is a serious escalation. It doesn’t really matter how bland Kimmel’s run-of-the-mill pro-Democrat, anti-Trump politics are, and it doesn’t really matter if the inevitable legal challenge ends in a court ruling that slaps down ABC and the FCC. The point here is to create a general climate of fear, particularly among the news business executives who have or might have business before the federal government — as Nexstar, one of the major ABC affiliate station owners whose criticism of Kimmel’s comments preceded ABC’s decision to cancel, has — and who have already proven themselves exceptionally cowardly.

Just like Democrats did when they repeatedly hauled tech executives before Congress and pressured them behind the scenes, the GOP’s goal here is to scare and coerce profit-driven entities into doing the censoring for it for the sake of expediency. Eventually, the hope is, no censoring even has to happen at all; people will just know what they are and aren’t allowed to say and will hold their tongues all on their own. The claim now being made by Republicans that this is just the free market in action and not a First Amendment violation isn’t any more convincing now than when Democrats were using that line the last four years to justify tech censorship.

Kimmel’s cancellation is only the most high-profile facet of an escalating censorship campaign aimed at silencing Trump’s critics. Trump’s allies are now pressuring social media executives to censor mean posts about Kirk, are pushing for Kirk’s critics to lose their jobs, are preparing to put pro-Israel billionaires in charge of the largely pro-Palestinian TikTok, and are planning a wider crackdown on left-wing groups opposed to Trump.

That’s all as they continue their campaign of repression against the pro-Palestine movement, whose criticism of Israel’s genocide growing numbers of Americans (including conservatives) are agreeing with. Somewhat lost in the current news cycle is that at the same time that Kimmel was taken off air, Palestinian antiwar activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil has been ordered deported from the country — less than half a year after his US citizen wife gave birth to their US citizen son — with apparently little hope for appeal.

It is not hard to see why this is happening. Trump is an unpopular, flailing president engulfed in a scandal around his close friendship with a notorious pedophile, and one who is lashing out at his critics in the media while struggling to stand up to a foreign prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who treats him like a doormat.

But the desperation of these actions, and the pathetically thin skin they are revealing, doesn’t make them any less menacing. There will quite rightly be legal challenges to what Trump is doing. But given that the whole aim is to prey on and encourage political cowardice among American institutions, the antidote also has to be to not succumb to such crude intimidation and to continue to speak out and criticize. There is, after all, no shortage of things to criticize, from Trump’s dismal economic stewardship and diversion of law enforcement from fighting crime to his warmongering and selling out to Israel — all major betrayals of campaign promises that this current assault on free speech is just the latest instance of.

People voted for this administration because they wanted things to be less expensive; they didn’t vote for it because they wanted to be told what they can and can’t say and what comedians they’re allowed to watch on TV. Continuing down this road will be terrible for both the country and quite possibly Trump’s presidency itself — and yet it seems it’s a road the president and the people around him are determined to keep going down.