The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show reveals what Elon Musk’s pledge to “legalize comedy” actually meant: making it legal for the right comedians. While Shane Gillis sells out Madison Square Garden and Sam Hyde gains millions of YouTube views, late-night television is moving in the opposite direction. Stephen Colbert was given the boot in May, and Kimmel went off the air after suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s killer was “one of them” — referring to MAGA — and mocking Donald Trump’s reaction to the shooting last week.

Some version of Musk’s motto has been the Right’s rallying cry ever since Gillis was dropped from SNL in 2019 over old podcast clips mocking Asian accents. It surfaced again when Hyde lost his Adult Swim sketch show after BuzzFeed “uncovered” supposed alt-Right ties during Trump’s first term. At the time, conservatives would claim (rightly) that they were being silenced for edgy jokes. Well, mission accomplished — just not in the way anyone expected.

The Right didn’t restore free speech in comedy: it only changed who gets to speak freely. What’s fascinating is how transparent the mechanism is. During a recent appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr claimed Kimmel was “appearing to directly mislead the American public”, saying that his comments were “not a joke” or “making fun”. Then, regarding FCC intervention, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” indicating that broadcasters were “running the possibility of license revocation from the FCC” if they kept airing Kimmel.

After Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC stations, said it was pulling the show, Carr thanked the media conglomerate “for doing the right thing” — this, while Nexstar happened to have a $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna pending FCC approval. Similarly, Paramount settled a Trump lawsuit and canceled Colbert around the time it needed government approval for its Skydance merger.

Comedy has now been fully absorbed into the same partisan wars which shape free-speech debates. The old late-night middlebrow style — Johnny Carson’s studied neutrality, David Letterman’s ironic detachment before his late-career lurch into turbo-liberalism — has been dead for decades. Since George W. Bush’s Iraq War inanities fueled the rise of The Daily Show under Jon Stewart, the airwaves have been an almost exclusive bastion of liberal comedy.

That has now changed. Today’s thriving conservative comedians include Greg Gutfeld, who opened the door for Right-wing comedy years ago and whose Fox show dominates the 10pm late-night slot with 3.29 million total viewers in the last quarter and 238,000 in the key 18-49-year-old demographic. Meanwhile, liberal comedy continues hemorrhaging viewers: even the supposedly “apolitical” Jimmy Fallon dropped from 1.54 million viewers in that demographic in 2014 to just 157,000 today. Kimmel and Colbert followed a similar trend.

Some might say the irony is delicious. The same people who decried Gillis’s SNL firing as cancel culture are now orchestrating their own government-backed cancellations. But the truth is that making comedy legal again was never about principles. The only difference now is that conservatives have the state and audience power to implement their preferences.

Where does comedy go from here? With the exception of Fox’s Gutfeld, it seems like the traditional late-night format is dead — killed by streaming, podcasts, and YouTube long before politics delivered the final blow. The future of cutting-edge comedy likely belongs to those comedians capable of building their own platforms independent of legacy broadcast gatekeepers, where they can secure the backing of both fans and rising politicians and cultural influencers willing to support their work.

Gillis and Hyde proved that resilience pays off. They were canceled, rebuilt their audiences online, and came back stronger, showing that cultural influence isn’t owned by any ideology. For liberal comedians, the lesson is clear: the rules have changed. Social media outrage and boycotts aren’t power — real influence now comes from who gets to define truth, comedy, and public discourse.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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