The Grudge Report

When Jane Fonda invites you to Washington

You go. Here’s what I said at her rally for the Committee for the First Amendment.

Bess Kalb
Mar 27, 2026

A preface: I worked with the legendary Jane Fonda years ago when she was one of the monologists in the second season of our pandemic comedy special Yearly Departed. I loved collaborating with her then, and a picture of us on set together when I was very pregnant with my second child is (insane?) in a frame on his bookshelf.

Here’s the picture, taken in October, 2021:

One baby and many years later, I got a call when I was on the way back home from DC after delivering testimony about the first amendment to the House Judiciary Committee. It was Jane. Fonda. Here’s the screenshot I took because I wasn’t sure if I was having a visual hallucination:

Jane (Fonda) invited me to give a shortened reading of the testimony for a rally she was organizing for The Committee for the First Amendment. The rally would do what testimony couldn’t: unite artists across genres to stand together and speak out against the Trump regime’s attack on free speech. The rally would be in front of the shuttered Kennedy Center. She remains among the most unstoppable forces for good on earth.

I agreed to do it before she told me the date, which was today.

This afternoon, in the rain outside the Kennedy Center, after Joan Baez sang, here is what I said. The end is the real RALLY part:

I would like to begin the way I start most speeches: Thanks for that, Joan Baez. I would like to thank the Committee on the First Amendment for inviting me to be here with these legends today in the place where my mother and grandmother marched against similar tyranny. Here is a bit of what I said to the House Judiciary Committee last month.

I am a comedy writer, I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight years, and I am an author who recently got back from a national tour for my picture book series, Buffalo Fluffalo. So the fact that I have become a traveling spokesperson for the First Amendment means something has gone very wrong in America.

I gotta say. I didn’t see this coming. I thought we were entering a new golden age of free speech. On January 20th, 2025 President Trump, on his very first day in office for the second time, announced a Presidential Action called “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP.”

Which was a big relief… Because I had some concerns about how he felt about speech he didn’t much like.

My first brush with this President happened in 2017. At the time, I was doing a recurring bit on Twitter, before it was owned by the world’s richest and most online man, Elon Musk.

It was all fun and games until, one night, the president blocked me after I wrote a joke that hurt his feelings. It turned out that the man in the Oval Office couldn’t take a joke and wanted to make sure he didn’t have to hear one, either. The Knight Foundation sued him to get him to unblock me and several others. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ended up having to rule on this, and the Supreme Court took the issue up, too. He quite literally made a federal case of a joke.

The problem here is not that jokes bother this President, it’s that he is in the habit of looking for ways to silence the joke tellers.

That became clear this year when the administration went after late night television. When I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live from 2012 through 2020, it was never supposed to be a job where I’d have to know anything more about the founding documents than an off-color joke about John Hancock.

For late night comedy writers, the president is our best and worst audience. He is our best audience because unlike most Americans he watches late night television. He is our worst audience because his inexplicably bruised skin is very, very thin. He complained about our jokes frequently, often in real time, on his own social media site he invented so that nobody could make fun of him on it.

This went far beyond social media tirades when this year, after Stephen Colbert told jokes about the settlement CBS paid to President Trump, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was coincidentally bulldozed like it was the East Wing of the White House. Then months later, the administration had Jimmy Kimmel Live briefly yanked off the air for jokes that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr called “distasteful,” which really grabs me by the –I’m not going to say that word in front of Jim Acosta.

But these permanent and temporary cancellations aren’t just about controlling jokes, they’re about controlling criticism of this administration and its corporate bedfellows . It is the state using its power to shape what is profitable to say. And we’ve learned nothing if not this: the bottom line comes first – even before the first amendment.

And here’s how that trickles down. The censorship of free speech we have witnessed from the highest office in the federal government has emboldened Americans in sacred positions of power from the state to the local, to the school board level, which is where I found myself just weeks after Kimmel’s suspension.

This fall on a national book tour I read my book Buffalo Fluffalo and Puffalo to thousands and thousands of elementary school kids in small towns and suburbs in Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Montana.

In Montana the tour hit a snag. A group of parents, who had previously caused a stir at a school board meeting where they successfully campaigned to ban certain books from the library, decided to ban me. They emailed the school superintendent en masse with jokes I had written in my life as a political comedy writer, and told him that if I came to read my book about prairie animals and their feelings to their kids, they would show up and make a scene in front of the children until I left.

The visit was canceled.

It isn’t some great national tragedy that a story time was canceled. But it’s a harrowing indication of how a joke can be wielded against its writer by exactly the same movement that railed against cancel culture to defend jokes that punched down.

On that day in Montana, I was sad for the kids, but I was mostly sad for the librarian. School librarians are at the front lines of these school board fights over book bans with increasing regularity. They are tired. They are pissed. They just want to be able to give a kid a book they’re excited to read, even if that book is about a kid with two moms, which as of this speech is a legal amount of moms to have.

Because here’s the thing about those kids across America that I have met.

From deeply under-funded title one schools where most students were on free lunch, to immigrant communities where many of the kids are the first people in their families to learn to read and speak English, to fancy schools in oil money subdivisions where I was offered a choice of flat or sparkling water, I will tell you this: The kids were the same. The kids were the same.

When I read my books in auditoriums and gyms and libraries and classrooms, some fidgeted, some daydreamed, but they all laughed at the same parts, and when I asked if they had any questions at the end – to a school – they all asked me the same one: Why was Buffalo Fluffalo mad? Why was he mad?

I’ll tell you. The book is about a Buffalo who is at first tough and blustery and rude and pushes his friends away, and when it is revealed that underneath all his fluff, he is just this tiny, frightened guy who wants to be loved, his friends love and support him anyway. And he gives them gratitude and kindness right back. Call it left wing commie propaganda.

I believe that the impulse to censor speech comes from exactly this fear in the book. The fear of being seen as weak, or vulnerable. The desire to project an air of bravado and to silence and push off anyone who might pull the curtain back on the image of imperious strongman.

A true leader is only as strong as the joke he can take at his own expense. There’s nothing funny about the fact that we are living through a time when jokes about the government are a liability.

Today at this rally, surrounded by artists I admire – and two women whose songs were on my birthing playlists, Ms. Rogers, Ms. Baez – I have hope. The icons who spoke before me are proof that if they push artists off stage, artists will build a new stage they are proud to stand on.

And I am certain our message will outlive this administration’s attempt to silence it. Joan Baez has been out here in Washington standing up to tyrants since Donald Trump was getting a doctor’s note for his bone spurs. Jane Fonda has been arrested more times for standing up for what’s right than any of the men in the Epstein emails. And we don’t just listen to them because they are legends, but because they are leaders, holding the torch that will march us out of this dark time in solidarity. And when we march tomorrow we will send a message to the administration: The Un-American activity in this country is in Oval Office. And Mar a Lago. And the patriots are the ones exercising their first amendment rights to hold any would-be Kings to account.

May we keep speaking, keep reading, and keep marching, in the spirit of the leaders who keep lighting the way, and in the name of the children whose future may shine brighter than this passing storm over Washington.

Thank you.