☕️ JAW BONED ☙ Friday, June 19, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A C&C Exclusive: The bipartisan JAWBONE Act evidences encouraging progress toward ending government censorship-by-proxy. Somehow, Trump got the Democrats on board.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Today we have another C&C exclusive— an incredible story that the corporate media has completely blacked out. A new bipartisan bill that appears to have muscular legs offers to do what the Supreme Court failed to do in the disappointing government censorship case. And, most surprisingly of all, Democrats are on board. You’re going to love it.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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A first, tender reed of new growth has sprouted from the apocalyptic post-pandemic Congressional wasteland. Left media heralded it first. Last week, the Verge excitedly reported, “The bill that would let Jimmy Kimmel sue Brendan Carr is here.” Two days ago, the libertarian Reason Magazine reported, “Two senators offer a bipartisan solution to censorship by proxy.” It’s garnering surprisingly strong coverage across Tier Two media (whereas corporate media is currently giving it the Mr. Magoo treatment). Both the far-left ACLU and the conservative group FIRE endorsed the bill— a moment of consensus rarer than a clear UFO picture, and one that hasn’t happened since before Congress last balanced a budget.

Today’s question is: How do you make the politically impossible possible?

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) jointly introduced a free speech bill. It’s named the JAWBONE Act (“Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression”). We’ve been waiting for something like this for years.

Basically, the bill would forbid the government from censoring people by pressuring their media platforms. If it does happen, JAWBONE provides for injunctions, discovery, attorneys’ fees, damages, and basically a giant gavel with which to club bossy bureaucrats. It also requires the government to publish all its communications with media platforms transparently. No secrets.

Let’s rewind to see how we got here.

In his January 2025 Joe Rogan interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed that Biden-era officials, including White House staff, would “yell” and curse out Meta’s moderators, pushing “super hard” for them to take down vaccine-related posts, including vaccine content that Zuck called “humor and satire” and materials that were factually true. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he regretfully told the House Judiciary Committee in a letter, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” I state my regret.

Zuckerberg also told the House Oversight Committee that the FBI came to Meta before the 2020 election and “warned” the platform about Russian “disinformation” related to the Hunter Biden laptop story. So, like good little doggies, Facebook throttled, shadow-banned, and buried all laptop posts deeper than Jimmy Hoffa, including those from major media platforms like the New York Post— which Zuckerberg now admits was “inappropriate.”

One appreciates the moral courage it takes for a billionaire CEO to express such profound introspection— years after the fact, under congressional subpoena, and with a team of lawyers present. But never mind.

As always, the technocratic platform billionaire was careful to blame himself, not the Biden team. Zuck said he should have been more resistant and outspoken, which is like saying it was your own fault the cops stole your bicycle because you forgot to lock it when you left it outside the police station.

Fast forward to Trump 2.0. Last year, unfunny “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel, who apologized in 2020 for years of blackface sketches and racial slurs, and who now serves as liberalism’s designated conscience, made nasty comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. So FCC chair Brendan Carr publicly ‘suggested’ that ABC and its affiliates could face withering FCC scrutiny or license trouble under “news distortion” or related rules if they continued airing the humorless jokester.

Shortly thereafter, ABC temporarily suspended Kimmel’s late‑night show (though just for a few tumultuous days).

Back when everyone found out about all the Biden-era censorship, liberals did not object. No, they loved it. They gushed about “responsible content moderation,” mitigating “dangerous misinformation,” and “effective public health communication in a digital age.”

But boy-oh-boy, when it was Trump’s turn, progressives devoted the three days of Kimmel’s suspension to screaming so loudly about censorship and “retaliation” that their complaints could be detected in low Earth orbit.

Behold! With the unlikely assistance of one of the least amusing late-night hosts in human history, and for the first time in a very long time, liberals have rediscovered that dusty old parchment, the U.S. Constitution— a document they have spent the better part of our lifetimes describing as a ‘living’ text in need of significant revision, and which they now find, in its original form, to be surprisingly useful.

And guess what? In the Constitution, they found these cool things called “amendments.” They started looking hard at the very first one.

🔥 So, defying all rational prediction, and within 24 months from progressives championing pandemic censorship, the ACLU, the fever swamps of lefty media, and NPR listeners still wearing double masks in their cars are all now championing a free-speech bill that outlaws exactly the sort of grey-area government censorship-by-proxy that they recently labeled as responsible moderation. In other words, progressives are now suddenly supporting a stronger version of what Murthy v. Missouri could have been if it had gone the best possible way.

How fully have progressives turned the corner on censorship? Get this: yesterday, the Daily KOS even renamed the Cruz-Wyden JAWBONE Act as, and I am not making this up, the “bipartisan Jimmy Kimmel Act.” To which I say, fine! Sounds great! Let’s use that! The bill is much better than Jimmy Kimmel’s blackface act, anyway.

But how did this happen? What dark alchemy is necessary to flip half the country from celebrating censorship as a “critical public health tool” to now claiming it’s even worse than Hitler, same-sex sports rules, or putting peanut butter back on school lunch menus?

Once again, we get a glimpse at the outlines of the astonishing Trump 2.0 master plan, this time to cut the deep state’s knees out from under it and curb Biden’s authoritarian excesses using durable laws rather than transient executive orders. Remember, Biden’s style of surreptitious censorship-by-proxy was devilishly hard to pin down. Since it was done in secret, you aren’t even aware it was happening until it was too late. And legally speaking, it was always in a grey zone, because the government never directly censored anybody.

In its view, Biden’s administration didn’t censor anybody at all. It only “encouraged” its friends in the media platforms to censor citizens. Since Facebook is a private company, not subject to constitutional constraints, there’s no legal problem. At least, that’s their argument. But government should not be allowed to do indirectly what it may not do directly.

So rather than trying to start by nailing legislative jello to the First Amendment’s wall, Trump just did the same thing that Biden did —pressured a media company, ABC, to control its content. Except instead of pressuring ABC secretly, Trump’s officials did it right out in the open on Twitter. It was vivid and concrete, with a Trump appointee as the villain, a far-left-beloved late-night comedian as the plucky hero, and democracy tied to the railroad tracks.

Jimmy Kimmel was the perfect counter-narrative. For progressives, that single, bold, in-their-face, Trump-related ‘censorship’ incident became an instant crisis, a moral panic, and an ActBlue fundraising email subject line— even though thousands or millions of sneaky, off-radar, pandemic-era Biden censorship incidents never troubled liberals at all.

You might conclude that the Kimmel showdown, which created these new political opportunities, was purely accidental. President Trump was only being Trump, a bull in a china shop. Or, it was mindless revenge! But once again, Trump just got lucky in how it lined the stars up to create perfect conditions for further swamp draining. (I’m sure you remember what I always say about lucky presidents.)

We’ve often discussed these sorts of political permission slips. When they happen, intellectuals call it a Hegelian dialectic— the triplet of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. It’s a fancy German phrase that just means “convenient crisis.”

Either way, these transformative events are defined as any convenient crisis that quickly changes voters’ minds about an otherwise politically impossible issue. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Like how the 9/11 attacks made the Patriot Act possible. We all just meekly agreed to half undress, to let barely qualified government agents publicly fondle our women without punching them in the face, and to voluntarily stroll across yards of bacteria and fungus cultures in bare feet to board airplanes. For safety.

In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court could have collapsed Biden-style censorship-by-proxy and rescued poor little Jimmy. But SCOTUS looked at the massive pile of documented evidence of government censorship and decided the real issue was standing,, and the case settled with a whimper.

But now it’s back, in the least likely but best spot of all: up on the Hill.

🔥 I don’t usually report on bills, especially newly filed ones. My warp speed political education has taught me that bills are common, but laws are rare. Bills die the death of a thousand cuts. They can be ignored till they go away. They can die in committee. They can be watered down by amendment into legislative oblivion. They can be passed by committee but never set for a vote. It’s like how grouper lay 10,000 eggs but only two survive to adult fishhood.

This bill is different, though. Different in some extraordinary ways that demand our attention even at this early stage.

First, behold all the attention. A long list of unlikely bedfellows, including FIRE and the ACLU, have already endorsed it. The brand-new bill is enjoying substantial coverage in tech and Tier Two media. So one of two things must be true, and either one is good for freedom.

It could be that someone made a heroic effort behind the scenes to coordinate all that support before the bill was filed, to make it appear to have fierce momentum coming out of the gate. If so, it implies there is much broader and stronger support than just two well-known Senators. Or, the bill is actually resonating in a bipartisan way, which means real momentum.

Second, the bill revealed that the censorship-by-proxy problem is not new. It’s just more obvious now. But it’s been happening since Lyndon Johnson, when the term “jawboning” was originally coined. The term describes government pressure to compel private companies to do things they don’t want to do. That’s a nice social media company you have there, it would be a shame if Section 232 destroyed it.

Do you recall ever hearing about ‘jawboning’ during the Biden era, when HHS and CISA were cursing out social media companies over ‘vaccine misinformation,’ or the FBI was ‘visiting’ social media companies, warning them to throttle their Hunter Biden coverage during election season? Me neither.

Since the Johnson era, “Jawboning” has always been there. Libertarians complained about it for decades. We just never heard that word used by politicians or in any “informative” corporate media articles during the Biden era. Now, thanks to Jimmy Kimmel, the term has come roaring back into the public discourse. NPR, last September:

So, if the JAWBONE Act ultimately passes, it will knock down another deep state soft-power tool that’s been sitting on the toolbench since the Cold War era and twisting American media into a Ramen noodle.

🔥 Third, and finally, the biggest story of all might be all the attention the fledgling bill is getting. Even if the bill doesn’t pass —which the stats suggest is more likely— the issue has now surged to the forefront, engaging both Democrats and Republicans.

In other words (so long as it never looks like Trump wants it), jawboning has become the latest 80/20 issue.

The Overton Window has shifted. We’ve gone from “jawboning is responsible pressure to fight misinformation” to “jawboning is an obvious constitutional problem with a named fix— the Jimmy Kimmel Act.”

All of that is terrific news, which fully justifies today’s departure from normal C&C protocol. The Supreme Court may have failed to stop jawboning, but Trump 2.0 had a Plan B. Thank you, Jimmy.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return in the morning with the Weekend Edition roundup, packed with more terrific essential news and caffeinated commentary. We have a lot to catch up on.

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