We haven’t heard too much from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr since his abortive attempt last year to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air. But Carr’s back in the news this morning amid a tangle with another late-night comedian: The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert. On his show last night, Colbert said CBS News had forbidden him from airing an interview with Texas Democrat and Senate candidate James Talerico, citing Carr’s threat last month to go after late-night programs for supposed violations of the FCC’s Equal Time rule.

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said of the interview, which was later posted online. “Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, okay?”

One quick programming note: Bill and Andrew will be going live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EST this morning, trying out something new: a video version of Morning Shots. (Morning Chaser, maybe?) The suits are talking about making this a recurring thing on Tuesdays—we’ll see if we scare them off that today. Happy Tuesday.

Why We Fight

by William Kristol

Last weekend, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state of the United States, spoke at the annual Munich Security Conference. He didn’t deign to discuss in his prepared remarks actual security challenges to the United States from, say, Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. Instead, he lectured world leaders about the Trump administration’s general view of the nature of politics, war, and patriotism. One of Rubio’s most striking statements was that “armies do not fight for abstractions.”

Rubio made this statement in the year in which we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That Declaration was also a declaration of war. The war for independence that the Continental Army fought was in defense of and on behalf of certain principles. You might even call them “abstractions.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are