That’s the chest of CNN’s Jake Tapper above. He was making a little frowny-face yesterday for the idiots viewing CNN who are too dim to realize that the accusatory headline is a non-sequitur, like “I like ice cream, can you swim?” The White House suspending the AP’s White House privileges—that’s privileges, which are distinct from rights, Jake—has nothing to do with freedom of speech or even the First Amendment, so the implied hypocrisy is more fake news.
Added: On “Twitter/X” J.D. Vance responded to another journalist making the same “point”:
The remarkably negative (and ignorant, and biased) Axis media reaction to J.D. Vance’s speech in Germany proves one again that as often as President Trump exaggerates, calling the news media the “enemy of the people” was neither excessive, unfair nor untrue. That’s exactly what it is. It is now the enemy of democracy as well, and nothing illustrates that better than the rush to condemn the Vice-President for telling European leaders to stop censoring speech based on political content.
It takes special chutzpah for any media organization to accuse Trump of stifling press coverage when he has made himself more accessible to the news media in less than a month than Joe Biden was in four years. I would also venture that the Associated Press could get more useful information surfing the web that it ever got from Biden’s idiotic, stumbling, incompetent, lazy paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre. The AP has proved itself conflicted, partisan and anti-Trump as well as unreliable. Why should it be entitled to attend press briefings instead of, say, Ethics Alarms?
Also on CNN, Nick Paton Walsh attacked Vance’s speech while defending censorship to prevent “authoritarian regimes.” This was the excuse used to justify banishing Trump from social media. I suppose it was also the excuse for blocking coverage of and commentary on Hunter Biden’s laptop on news platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Those who would punish and censor speech always have “reasons,” but the real reason is maintaining their own power and crippling the functioning of democracy. Just listen to this hack…
“Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In the smartphone and post-9/11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.”
Hilarious! Enshrined in law “but”! If speakers, writers and artists can be censored and punished for words and opinions that some authority rules “unsafe,” then there is no free speech. It’s amazing that advocates for censorship still use Oliver Wendell Holmes’ thoroughly discredited “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy. Ken White of Popehat, perhaps the sharpest and most eloquent blogger in captivity until he was infected with the Trump Derangement virus, decisively explained in “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough” how Holmes’s famous opinion has been misused to defend government censorship of speech that mentions or threatens violence without actually inciting it on the spot. This includes “hate speech,” which is what many of the European countries outlaw and what the totalitarian Left here would love to outlaw in the U.S. “Hate speech” would mean “speech that progressives hate.” (Knucklehead Tim Walz said on national TV that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment.) Walsh, like Walz, literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he is quoting an opinion he hasn’t read, and he definitely hasn’t bothered to read White’s explanation of why that defense of censorship is based on legal and constitutional ignorance.
CNN’s censorship rationalizing pales before CBS’s efforts, however. Incredibly, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan really and truly asserted to Marco Rubio that Hitler’s Germany used “freedom of speech” to spark the Holocaust. Kudos to the Secretary of State for not channeling Dan Ackroyd from the old Saturday Night Live “Point/Counterpoint” skit and responding, “Margaret you ignorant slut!” She deserved it.
Ethics Alarms 