Naming Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission in November, President-elect Donald Trump heralded him as a “warrior for free speech.”

Now, after spearheading the Trump administration’s successful push for ABC to take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Carr has become a gleeful avatar of what critics say is a sweeping government crackdown on speech - and his backers see as an overdue reckoning with an instinctively liberal broadcast industry.

A lawyer who served as the FCC’s general counsel before being nominated as a commissioner by Trump in 2017, Carr’s résumé until recently fit the bill of a career policy wonk at a federal agency whose work rarely seizes the spotlight. Yet there he was on Wednesday playing the role of political enforcer while speaking to the promi

See Full Page