by Steve Levy
CNN had a Town Hall meeting with Donald Trump and liberals set their hair on fire.
As their bodies were recoiling over the thought of a political enemy getting the opportunity to espouse his views on national television, liberal pundits were claiming that allowing this former president to exercise his right to free speech would lead to the end of the 250-year experiment called America.
Take for instance longtime CNN liberal globalist Christiane Amanpour, who claimed in a speech at the Columbia School of Journalism — the place where upcoming journalists learn their biases — that the media must police itself to ensure that nothing Trump says should be able to get on the airways unless the substance would be able “to be proven in a court of law.” https://apnews.com/article/cnn-christiane-amanpour-trump-town-hall-f77ec2cfa3032de27dbe152548e260ac
This journalist had the audacity to state that as it pertains to free speech: “Maybe less is more.”
She made a faulty analogy to the old days of journalism where they supposedly practiced greater standards, and had stifled the speech of those who were promoting McCarthyism.
Newsflash to Ms. Amanpour: you have to get your facts straight. The reality is, the media did allow McCarthy to spout his often misguided and over-the-top beliefs. Indeed, it was through the televised hearings in which McCarthy‘s own words helped to destroy him. It was also his appearances on the Edward R. Murrow program See It Now that brought him to his knees.
McCarthy was not humbled by the stifling of his speeches, Ms. Amanpour. He was humbled because the American people were able to actually see him and hear him, and concluded he was out of control.
Apparently, Ms. Amanpour never heard the saying that the best disinfectant is more sunlight. Amanpour holds herself up as an open minded-liberal, but is actually uttering the most illiberal of theories espoused by today’s leftist elites. Stifling their political opponents is somehow a way to bolster democracy. It’s nonsensical. And dangerous.
Then there were the ridiculous comments from MSNBC’s Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough, the biggest Republican sellout in history, echoing Amanpour’s fascist statements that allowing the former president a forum was “bad for democracy.”
Why is it that the left is so obsessed with quashing the speech of its political opponents? Remember it was just last year when President Biden sought to develop a Ministry of Truth where an elitist Mary Poppins wannabe department head would be in charge of determining whose opinions were worthy of being aired and whose had to be banned from social media and beyond. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3472878-joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/
This is what George Orwell warned us about in his dystopian novel 1984. And the irony is that it’s liberals who are pushing it. They should go back and look in the dictionary as to the definition of the term “liberal.” As exemplified by philosophers John Locke and Jean Jacque Rousseau, liberal thought was the glorification of freedom of expression.