The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—he made the Trump administration’s appetite for censorship unignorable.

Most of the administration’s efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference—one that prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel’s show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleaders; Senator Ted Cruz called Carr’s comments “dangerous as hell.” After a few days of public outcry, Kimmel was back on the air.

The whole episode was an unusual misstep by a skilled Washington operator. The hallmark of Carr’s tenure as chair of the Federal Communications Commission has been the exploitation of bureaucratic procedure to consolidate ownership of communications infrastructure in Trump-friendly hands, while keeping those actions out of both the court of public opinion and the literal courts. To liberals, this is an obvious attempt to rig the media. To conservatives, however, it is a long-overdue unrigging. Why should the national networks devote airtime every night to liberal comedians who incessantly mock Republicans? “For those that benefited from a two-tier system of justice, today’s even handed treatment feels like discrimination,” Carr posted on X in March, paraphrasing the economist Thomas Sowell. The left, in other words, got so used to controlling the media that it doesn’t even notice the bias.

“The public airwaves belong to the public, and yet for the past 40 or 50 years, they have been used and abused as a propaganda tool for one party’s political agenda,” Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative litigation nonprofit, told me. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching NBC, ABC, CBS, or PBS; you’re going to get the same left-wing viewpoints permeating both the news and the entertainment shows.”

Conservatives have been complaining about media bias for decades, but Republican officials were long averse to interfering with the decisions of private companies. Then came the second Trump administration, and its willingness to wage cultural warfare in more intrusive ways. Carr’s role in that effort is not to tell networks what to air and whom to fire. It’s to get to the point where he doesn’t have to.

Adam Serwer: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel’s mistake

Carr is bald, with a trim white beard and rimless glasses, which makes him look older than his 46 years. A D.C. lifer, he was born in the capital, went to college at Georgetown, and got his law degree at Catholic University. He joined the staff of the FCC in 2012, while in his early 30s, and never left. In 2017, President Donald Trump nominated him to serve as one of the five commissioners. (Carr did not respond to multiple interview requests, and the FCC press office did not reply to a request for comment.)

During this period, Carr was not considered particularly ideological.