a Starbucks napkin. Now, it could be that they just agreed that you can put anything on a cup as long as it's not obscene. It could be that they were just reiterating the policy or maybe clarifying. But boy, Starbucks didn't want a piece of this fight. If you were the Starbucks management, would you come anywhere near this topic if you could avoid it? No, you would not. You would stay as far away from getting involved in this as you possibly could. So when it came down to that, they were on the side of the people who wanted Charlie's name on the cup.

So it's taking on kind of a Spartacus vibe. I saw a video of a bunch of school children one at a time saying I am Charlie Kirk as in the movie Spartacus. There's a famous scene where the Romans were trying to figure out which of the many slaves was a slave called Spartacus because he'd caused all this trouble. And they were going to kill him and he stood up and said, I am Spartacus. So you thought, okay, it's over. He's going to get killed now because now they know who he is. They're definitely going to kill him. And then somebody else stands up in the crowd and goes, I am Spartacus. And then somebody else and somebody else and pretty soon everybody had stood up and said I am Spartacus and they did that because they were willing to take collective punishment over letting Spartacus die. So that was a quite impactful part of the movie and it looks like people are taking the Spartacus energy to Charlie Kirk which is kind of cool.

Here's a Jimmy Kimmel update. Are you all aware that things can happen for more than one reason at the same time? Do we have to argue whether Kimmel got fired because the government put pressure on Disney or because Disney and ABC were losing a ton of money and his contract was up at the end of the year and there's no way they could ever make money on him? Do we need to know which of those was the one reason? Those are both pretty good reasons, aren't they? I don't want the government to come down on me like a ton of bricks. I don't like losing money. Why isn't it obviously both? Do we really need to have a big old conversation about which one it is? Do you feel superior if you say the real reason was economics or the real reason was the government? It's obviously both reasons. Am I wrong? It's obviously 100%, no doubt about it, both reasons.

Let me put it this way. If Kimmel made $10 billion a year for Disney, do you think they'd take him off the air? No. Obviously it's about money. If the government put pressure on them like maybe you don't get approval for your mergers or acquisitions or whatever which are pretty important, do you think that they would just ignore the government and take their chances? No, not really. Not really going to take their chances. That's too big of a chance. You'd be letting down the stockholders. So let's just agree it's both. Anybody want to come with me on that journey? Just say, yeah, it's obviously both.

Apparently the viewership was even worse than we thought. It had been going pretty much straight down since several years. And it looks like nothing was going to change that. And they probably knew that they would never get conservatives back. I don't know if they had any, but they were never going to get conservatives back if they ever had them, or if they had them in the last few years. They probably already lost them because of the things he said.

Have you been paying attention to which people in the conservative and/or libertarian view thought that free speech was being violated by the government by putting pressure on the FCC? The FCC is part of the government and you assume that they're going to be at least influenced by the preferences of the administration of which they belong and they're the same party and they have a lot in common. So the president does not have to give a direct order to the head of the FCC. He chose him. He knew what he was going to get right when he chose him. So he chose him because he had a certain set of qualities and priorities and he liked him.

So the people who are seemingly concentrating on the attack on free speech would be Ted Cruz. So Ted Cruz is saying no, the government can't lean on people for their speech. And that's when it arguably there's an argument the other way. The counterargument is the FCC is literally just doing its charter. Its charter is to make sure that the airwaves, which are public and limited, that they're used for the best interest of the public. However, everything has a however. Every time you think, okay, I got it figured out, you have to go however. However, there's a judgment call here, isn't there? If it were not subjective as to what's too foreign and what's in the interest of the government, if it were not subjective, well, I don't think we'd have the conversation. We'd say, well, that's his job. That's what the job says. That's why the job exists. Do the job. But if there is a little judgment about how to do that job and when