If You Protect Only Free Speech on One Side, All You Have is Controlled Speech
The US has a long, long tradition that celebrates all-out commitment to free speech by ridiculing the great and mighty with humor.
As Trump continues to rant against Jimmie Kimmel for his latest stinging political humor, saying he will go after the ABC network, and as his words are backed by his FCC guy who continues to promise the FCC will go after any network that shows liberal bias, Joe Rogan made some astute comments.
His argument was simple and should be obvious to any conservative who feels empowered by Trump taking down liberal media and liberal commentators:
Rogan, who has been influential in American politics because of his large listener base—which exceeds 20.2 million subscribers on YouTube alone—said that if Kimmel could be canceled, right-wing figures could be too….
While some right-wing figures celebrated Kimmel’s removal, others questioned whether the right was embracing cancel culture, something Kirk spoke out against.
Of course, that is exactly what they were doing, though many would never admit that to themselves, while others would say, “We have to fight back, using their tactics.” Cancelling Kimmel is as cancel-culture as you get. He’s just a comedian, for crying out loud.
Rogan was equally simple with what should be obvious to anyone who respects the constitution:
Rogan said: “I definitely don’t think that the government should be involved ever in dictating what a comedian can and cannot say in a monologue. That’s f*****g crazy.”
Payback will come, as Rogan noted:
He added that people on the right who celebrated companies such as ABC “being pressured by the government” were “crazy” for doing so.
“You’re crazy for supporting this because this will be used on you,” Rogan said.
Of course it will, and why shouldn’t it be? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
“You don’t think that that the f*****g globalist lizard people who run the world are sitting here going: ‘Great. What do we got? Three years. We’ll wait this out. We’ll wait this out. Yeah, let ‘em say the government should be involved in censoring people’s speech.’”
That is exactly what the globalist wants, and this latest round of censorship plays right into their hands. Get Republicans or conservatives to buy into it when it serves them or pleases their leader, and then they won’t have a legitimate argument left when it swings the other way, which it certainly will.
It’s all good, in the views of some right now because Trump is getting due vengeance on liberals and knocking them down for what he called lawfare, but only by turning lawfare back on them. The way this kind of politics has always played out is that, whenever one side does anything underhanded or unconstitutional or overreaching in power, the other side feels empowered to do the same thing but do it worse.
Take for, example, rule by executive orders, instead of lengthy and compromising congressional debate and decision. Rule by decree been slowly growing from president to president as each one tests those powers further. So, expect the other side to push back with even more punishing censorship if we allow any of this to stand and don’t push back as citizens against the current administration.
Fortunately, some conservative Republicans are pushing back against Trump and his FCC czar:
Mr. Carr’s actions have raised alarms from many lawmakers on the left as well as some on the right, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, for stepping on First Amendment rights, while winning praise from President Trump, who has been ramping up efforts to punish his enemies and critics….
Trump’s head of the FCC has long been a champion free speech and an enemy of censorship:
Few people know as much about telecom law as Mr. Carr. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbus Law School at Catholic University, Mr. Carr worked as a telecom lawyer and then as general counsel for the F.C.C. before Mr. Trump appointed him to the commission in 2017….
Mr. Carr, who became the F.C.C. chairman in January, has argued in recent days that he has been a consistent champion of the First Amendment and said he was helping protect free speech by weighing in on local TV programming decisions that no longer serve the public interest….
Driven by the belief that liberal tech and media companies have unfairly silenced viewpoints on the right, Mr. Carr is working to transform the F.C.C. from a once sleepy agency best known for licensing local TV stations and expanding 5G cellular networks into a protector of conservative speech.
But you cannot protect one brand of speech without protecting the opposite just as strongly. Otherwise, you don’t have “free speech” at all; you have controlled speech with the allowable speech being only what the party in control allows.
In particular, he is working on broadening the agency’s mandate to referee what appears on televisions, according to interviews with 10 current and former F.C.C. officials.
The government constitutionally must not ever mandate what appears on television. They can only mandate that the airwaves play fair with the views of all sides in their duty to serve the general public’s interest. Conservatives have long argued that television media leans hard Left, and I think a strong case for that has been made. So, having someone right the balance on public air waves, has a place in my opinion; but it doesn’t have to go as far as censorship of individual comedians or commentators. The FCC can simply find ways to try to restore balance without censoring anyone’s speech.
Mr. Carr has appeared on conservative radio talk shows and Fox News to defend his actions, saying local broadcasters were finally serving audiences tired of biased programming. He has suggested the F.C.C. should investigate ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” over its political content. He said he planned to continue the agency’s work to empower local TV stations to reject the shows they disagree with….
Balance doesn’t happen by censorship of particular views; it happens by trying to make sure equal time is given on the public airwaves (a publicly owned resource) to opposing views and centrist views. Even that is a slippery slope, but what we have seen with Trump is the weaponization of government agencies to go after any individual who speeks sharply against him, and that appeared to be his biggest gripe with Kimmel. His pressure to take down Kimmel came when Kimmel said that Trump exhibited all the emotional sympathy of a two-year old when he was asked what he thought about what happened to Charle Kirk, and responded, essentially, “It was bad, but look at how beautiful the planning is going for our remodel of the White House with its new ballroom.”
There are plenty of areas where I can agree with Carr, such as his claim that PBS and NPR get lots of money from advertising. They give a lot of time to promoting show sponsors:
He is investigating PBS and NPR over accusations that the public news organizations violated rules that prevented them from airing commercials….
I have always thought their sponsporships are nothing but long-winded commercials; so I see no reason sponsorship shouldn’t be debated within the FCC and possibly changed. That isn’t censorship. That’s making sure you are holding public television and radio to their charter.
Likewise with what gets treated as news under FCC rules:
“They have something special that distinguishes them from lots of other speakers, which is that they have this right to use the federal spectrum, which is a scarce resource,” Mr. Carr said at the public meeting. “For a lot of years, the F.C.C. walked away from enforcing that public interest obligation.”
“I think it’s worthwhile to have the F.C.C. look into whether ‘The View’ and some of the programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs,” Mr. Carr told a radio host last week.
I don’t think most of what goes on The View or on Fox News, for that matter is news. It’s commentary that uses news, just like my commentary uses a lot of news. The news on my site is the list of headlines. The rest is my commentary, just like this editorial, about the content of those news stories. Broadcast media gave up straight news a long time ago. (And, of course, the headlines I provide have lots of commentary mixed in, too. Sometimes because I share what I see as good commentary of others, such as Rogan’s thoughts here, and partly because, well, try to find news that doesn’t include commentary.)
So, there is probably some legitimate basis for making sure that programs that use public airwaves should be balanced in their range of options, and Carr has stated clearly he is only talking about the public airwaves the FCC administers—that what people say on cable, etc. is up to them. So, he’s not stepping outside of his lane, EXCEPT if he bans certain views or people as a way of trying to maintain balance.
Even Carr has stated that getting government involved in deciding what views can be shared and what views cannot is just plain wrong:
In April 2019, he made his first appearance on the Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after criticizing an opinion piece by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, calling on governments to regulate speech.
“Outsourcing censorship to the government isn’t just a bad idea, it’s a violation of the First Amendment,” Mr. Carr said to the show’s three million viewers. “So I’m a no on that.” The appearance helped him to become a rising conservative star.
That would mean you don’t seek to fire Kimmel for saying the “wrong” thing. As Rogan said, who wants government being the arbiter of what is the wrong thing to say? Conservatives may find Trump’s censorship of voices that ridicule him a lot of fun or even a restoration of balance, but they won’t feel the same way when Democrats are in power and do the same thing to their favorite commentators, and I know exactly what that is like.
I’ve noted a number of times how much I was censored by Google for my expression of my views about Covid. Google long denied it, but, in today’s headlines, they admit it (and, of course, try to claim they have always been advocates of free speech. They were forced by President Biden. (I don’t, however, recall them making any serious effort to resist.)
Google has confirmed in a letter to Congress that the Biden administration pressured YouTube to censor content about COVID-19 and the 2020 election that did not violate the platform’s policies, raising sharp concerns over government interference in free speech.
I’ve said, based on my own experience, they were censoring entire points of view. That’s not balance. Now—to a Republican-controlled congress—Google finally admits it in its own words. Of course, this is not exactly a mea culpa: (Google would never be that honest.)
“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content,” Donovan wrote. “The company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds….”
According to Google, senior White House officials “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” to the company, urging it to remove user-generated content related to COVID that did not violate YouTube’s rules. The letter confirmed that Biden’s administration created “a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”
You don’t want the government deciding which information is right or deciding which opinions are right. You just don’t.
Jordan said the revelations show that Biden pressured Google “to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies,” which he described as “unacceptable and wrong.”
So, no mea culpa. It was clearly all the government’s fault, though Google easily caved in. While Google laughingly tries to present itself as facing up to such pressure and being a free-speech advocate, I have emails directly from Google telling me it was cutting off advertising revenue from certain pages on my old web site. All of those pages turned out to be articles I wrote above Covid; so, the bias and control was obvious, especially since Google said it was doing it because the articles did not express the views of the CDC (government). So, Google is full of it when its CEO talks about trying to stand up for free speech. It even tacitly admits it did NOT:
In a reversal, Google announced that it will allow creators previously banned from YouTube for “political speech violations” related to COVID-19 or elections to return to the platform.
You cannot reverse something you never did. Clearly they admit they cancelled shows for “political speech violations,” making themselves the arbiter of what political speech is right enough to be allowed on Google, or letting the government arbitrate and dictate on their platform, instead of refusing to cooperate.
Google cancelled some pretty big voices, too, such as Steve Bannon, not just little guys like me. (It also told publishers who were paying for my articles when the government fired me over refusing the vaccine to stop carrying those articles, cutting off my alternate livelihood after cutting of my regular job, and they punished those sites at the cost of hundreds of thousands of readers lost per day by dropping them out of search-engine results.
So, don’t ever think the Democrats will not do the same thing when they get back in power and even amp it up if Republicans now get away with cancelling people like Kimmel for saying what they believe was the wrong thing. Republicans must resist payback, and simply say, “This stops here,” or it never stops. It only gets worse as each party gets even for worse things done to them.
“Reflecting the company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and election integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” Donovan wrote.
That’s a laughable lead in because they terminated many!
This shift could impact both everyday users and high-profile conservative figures such as Dan Bongino, Sebastian Gorka, and Steve Bannon, who were permanently banned in recent years.
Google and Youtube do not use the public airwaves, so the government cannot restrict the points of view; yet, Google cowered into ready complicity anyway.
For Trump it is about personal vendettas
Trump has never liked comedians who make him look ridiculous or laughable, and he always gets even. He never lets it go as just the lay of the land in politics—a long, long US tradition that is a form of celebrating free speech by ridiculing the great and mighty. His ego is too important to allow that.
Trump posted on Truth Social, “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.”
So petty that I’ve even heard very apolitical, balanced radio personalities call it out as petty. ABC broadcasts on public airwaves, but this sounds far more like a vendetta against a comedian for ridiculing Donald Trump than it does like a move to make sure the airwaves are used in a way that allows expression of all views the public holds dear or wants to hear.
Last week, after Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr warned the network’s stations over potential agency action, the network pulled [Kimmel’s] show. Trump celebrated the move, and called for NBC to drop Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
WAY too involved in micromanaging the nation. Both Fallon and Meyers are comedians who have been going after Trump now that he is president. Trump is so thin-skinned toward comedy that ridicules him that he even cancelled the traditional presidential roast.
Talk about weaponizing government to bring down your critics!
Payback is a bitch, but it also negates the validity of your ideals or, at least, your true regard for them, if you have to run opposite of those ideals just to try to even things out, which, really, is just to try to get even.