Conservatives Ape Left RE: FCC

In an attempt to placate people justifiably alarmed by the government's response to Jimmy Kimmel's remarks about the Kirk assassination, Charles Gasparino of The New York Post (1) asserts that Trump's FCC "is not going after free speech" and (2) reminds us that the left has been stifling debate for years.

I will not belabor the well-known pandemic-era jawboning of social media platforms during the pandemic. That's common knowledge, and one would hope, generally understood to be wrong.

The right to free speech includes the right to spout nonsense that falls short of libel or incitement, and the right to property includes the right to allow a person using one's property to speak freely -- or to refuse to do so. Crucially, the government banning speech for any reason is censorship, and a platform owner independently deciding to enforce content rules of any kind is not.

The left has lately had a spotty record at best regarding both the rights to speech and to property. That much is true, but what of the right, which has of late been selling itself to voters as America's savior from the left?

I'll let Gasparino tell you himself:

The First Amendment supposedly protects all sorts of speech -- even the claptrap uttered by the host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" who breezily asserted that the "MAGA gang" was looking to capitalize on Kirk's assassination by making the killer out to be "anything other than one of them."

...

It didn't matter. The left and its MSM allies claimed the Constitution was being burned before our very eyes. Trump and his FCC chair were staging a totalitarian coup. Disney unsuspended Kimmel.

Sorry guys, Brendan Carr is far from the first -- or worst -- practitioner of alleged First Amendment overreach. In fact, you can make a good case that his invoking of the Communications Act of 1934 to enforce its "public interest" guidelines on free, local TV (as opposed to cable) is exactly what Congress meant when it sought to curtail stuff like obscenity or Kimmel's shameless prevaricating. [bold added]

Apparently, we're now supposed to accept the "public interest" canard that the leftist establishment long used to completely muzzle conservatives and others (and made broadcast media a boring wasteland for decades) -- and that it's just "overreach," rather than being completely unacceptable.

Today's situation, post repeal of the "fairness doctrine" is that we are at risk of returning to those benighted days that Ayn Rand described when she recommended privatizing the airwaves in 1964:

The result was what it had to be (illustrating once more the power of basic principles): by gradual, unobtrusive, progressively accelerating steps, the Commission enlarged its control over the content of radio and television programs -- leading to the open threats and ultimatums of Mr. Minow, who merely made explicit what had been known implicitly for many years. No, the Commission did not censor specific programs: it merely took cognizance of program content at license-renewal time. What was established was worse than open censorship (which could be knocked out in a court of law): it was the unprovable, intangible, insidious censorship-by-displeasure -- the usual, and only, result of any non-objective legislation. [bold added]

So, no, to use Gasparino's own sarcastic words, the Constitution isn't be burned before our very eyes, but it's getting dark around the edges, and he's obviously okay with that.

And the Republican Party isn't in a post-Nixonian wilderness yet, but the more it answers the call to end the blatant abuses of the left -- by adopting them rather than ending them -- the greater that risk becomes for them and for a country that urgently needs better and increasingly looks like it has nowhere to turn.

-- CAV