Former President Barack Obama has called for freedom of speech to be protected after ABC suspended late-night talk show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk's fatal shooting.

"This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel , MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents," he wrote on X. He went on to share an article in the New York Times by former attorney David French, who he said "devoted much of his legal career to defending the First Amendment rights of conservative writers and scholars."

The former president also shared an excerpt from an 1860 essay written by abolitionist Frederick Douglass titled "A Plea for Freedom of S

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