Bess Kalb testified before the House Judiciary Committee on February 23:

I am a comedy writer, I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight years, and I am 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 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: “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 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 and reassuring mom. “Sweetie. You’re clearly having a lot of big thoughts all at once but you need to do your 5 deep breaths.” 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 his 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. The 2nd 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. [Continue reading…]