On September 23, 1905, Norway and Sweden signed the “Karlstad treaty,” peacefully dissolving the union between the two countries.
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Sweden minus Norway
The UK police picked the wrong elderly cancer patient to badger for exercising her right to freedom of speech.
Whatever Deborah Anderson said on social media, it wasn’t harsh enough to justify clapping on the irons and hauling her away. Just a knock on the door and a polite request to Do the Right Thing. But polite in the way a mailed fist in a marshmallow glove is polite.
Anderson: “I’m a member of the Free Speech Union and I’m an American citizen. . . . I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch. . . . You’re here because somebody got upset? Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”
Officer: “You’re not being arrested.”
Anderson: “Then what are you doing here?”
“My plan was, if you were admitting that it was you who wrote the comment, you could just make an apology to the person.”
“I’m not apologizing to anybody. I can tell you that.”
“The alternative would be that I have to call you in for an interview. . . .”
Somebody complained to the police, and somehow that’s enough all by itself, regardless of the nature of the complaint, for the police of the United Kingdom to leap into nonsensical action.
Anderson then asked whether there are “no houses that have been burgled recently? No rapes, no murders?” Good question, but ineffectual. Not his task at the moment, the officer said.
At least we can be proud of one of these two interlocutors.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Wilson Milzner
Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
Wilson Mizner, as quoted by Jon Winokur, ed., The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).
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Emancipation Proclaimed
On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. One curious thing about the document is its promise of compensation:
And the executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion, shall (upon the restoration of the constitutional relation between the United States, and their respective States, and people, if that relation shall have been suspended or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.
The proclamation was signed by Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward:
Done at the City of Washington this twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.
The final version of the proclamation was delivered on January 1, 1863.
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Blaire White
They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi, they call you a Nazi so they can kill you.
Blaire White (@MsBlaireWhite) on X (September 12, 2025).
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At Salamis
On September 21, 480 BC, Greeks defeated Persian forces in the massive naval battle of Salamis.
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The Kimmel Question
What do people think of the firing of Jimmy Kimmel?
Well, not a firing exactly, as Paul Jacob mentioned yesterday, but, let’s agree, Kimmel’s exact employment status is not quite the issue. What’s at issue is what he said, and to what extent was the government influential in removing Kimmel from his on-air position even if only temporarily.
Dave Smith took, generally, Paul’s position: what Kimmel said was odd, dumb; and the FCC should not pressure a media corporation to remove on-air talent:
Joe Lancaster, at Reason, addressed the Kimmel FCC problem:
This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as “outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy.”)
Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI.
“The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear,” Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.
As for the influence of the FCC, one major player in the cancellation out-right denies any such influence: “‘The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,’ a Nexstar spokesperson told CBS News in an email Thursday.”
But, of all the reactions, The Babylon Bee aimed for a wider perspective:
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Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Dawn (1881).
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Chester the Stalwart
On September 20, in 1881, Vice President Chester Alan Arthur was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States, after the death of James A. Garfield the previous day.
Garfield had cut an impressive figure in mid-century politics and was surely one of the smartest men to inhabit the office — if so briefly, having been sworn on March 4th. He was also a reformer. His successor, Arthur, was the very opposite . . . as was his assassin, Charles Julius Guiteau, who shot him on July 2nd. Indeed, Guiteau’s words upon shooting the president troubled more than one faction in American politics: “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”
Guiteau was executed, rather than jailed for life. Chester Arthur went on to end the spoil system, but did appoint his old Stalwart patron, Roscoe Conkling, to the Supreme Court: the Senate confirmed the appointment, but Conkling declined the nomination.
Reverse cancel culture is here, so to speak.
For years, leftists hounded any and all offenders against politicalcorrectness — meaning they’d root out anyone they disagreed with, including for saying anodyne things like “women are adult female humans and men are adult male humans” — directing hysterical online mobs against offenders’ employers, advertisers, and even ISPs.
Now it appears rightists are doing the same. People have lost their jobs for saying horrific — tasteless, hateful — things regarding the killing of Charlie Kirk. And Jimmy Kimmel just lost his high-profile late-night “comedy show” with ABC.
He’s literally been cancelled.
What happened? The Sinclair and Nexstar affiliate groups announced they will not (barring some apology) air Kimmel’s show anymore, and the two, together, own over 70 ABC affiliates — suggesting a substantial hit to the network’s bottom line.
“‘Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely,’ a spokesperson for the Disney-owned network said in a statement,” reports the BBC.
The offense? “In his Monday night monologue, Kimmel said: ‘The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.’”
One could nitpick.
It has, after all, been embarrassing to watch the anti-MAGA folks desperately try to pin the accused shooter’s motive on some bizarre theory about “groyper” culture and “furry” larping; truth is, after an obviously political assassination, nearly everyone will aim to “score political points.” Kimmel one-sidedly points only to his opponents.
Missing in the back-and-forth? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates broadcast TV in the first place.
The FCC actually has a case that what Kimmel said was offensive and not “in the public interest.” But why should that count for anything? Were the broadcast spectrum privately owned — slots sold to the highest bidder, getting government out of any regulatory role whatsoever over media outlets — then, maybe, ABC wouldstand by its divisive host to satisfy only their core audience of partisan MAGA-haters.
And keep losing money . . . as is its right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.