NBC's Chuck Todd shutters the marketplace

Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press, recently announced that no one posing challenges to climate change claims would henceforth appear on his program.

What Todd meant, essentially, was that to him, open debate and the free exchange of informed arguments with intellectual enrichment and resolution the goals were negatives to be banished, not intrinsically rewarding phenomena from which all within earshot might benefit.

I suppose nearly any argument can seem plausible, when it stands alone on the battlefield.

With its 1919 Abrams v United States, 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court maintained a prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917 did not violate free speech rights.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an historic dissent. He argued, in part, that: 

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market...

Now, it is so that a privately-owned television network's program is not the public square. NBC and Todd have the right to establish guest-list standards, even when such reveal contempt for healthy intellectualism.

But respect for thought liberty that is not already within, that exists only when a law says it must, is meaningless.

Coming soon, perhaps, will be Meet the Press prohibitions of any ideas not in line with show producers' personal prejudices. That's not to say observable parameters aren't already in place.

When intolerant partisans like Todd strangle dissenting voices, it is not because they are assured that their own ideas are strong and can withstand challenge. Quite the opposite. It is because they sense the vulnerability of their asserted perspective, and intuit it would crumble in critical contest.

And, perhaps, because they despise Holmes' 'marketplace of ideas' concept, as surely must all despots.

Liberal media boycotts are terrible Wildmon legacy                            

Advertiser-aimed boycotts, fomented that conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Gavin McInnes can be silenced, are reprehensible for several solid reasons. 

One is that they represent an anti-intellectual impulse. Diverse perspectives are strangled away. Open discussion conducive to problem solving and due public conversation visibility are forestalled.

Another reason is that, regardless of boycott participants' supposed motives, they inflict suffering on average people. These rank-and-file workers do not necessarily share views to which boycotters object. They just want to pay bills and provide for their families. Boycotts hinder those legitimate aims.

The third reason? Current campaigns against media advertisers are inconsistent with sound, classical liberal thinking about open expression and advertiser pressuring.

In 1990, Burger King was the target of blue-nosed boycotters on the Right. Seeking to settle the situation, the corporation asserted in several hundred newspaper ads that it wished "to go on record as supporting traditional American values on television."

An 11/07/1990 New York Times article ("Burger King Ads Help End Boycott By Religious Group") addressed the effort. It had been launched by Clear-TV,  run by the Rev. Donald Wildmon. 

Like those who now protest conservative voices, the private group was pressuring advertisers in the hope that racy content it found objectionable would be banished from public airwaves and hence rendered inaccessible to everyone.

As the Times noted, in a passage sadly relevant today, the "skirmish" illustrated that "large corporations are quick to respond to even a flicker of consumer protest to keep from losing any potential sales."

"This is unbelievable," said Jeff Cohen, executive director of liberal media group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. "It's the equivalent of a loyalty oath. A major corporation takes out a major advertisement in a national newspaper to say nothing except the magic code words to assuage these interest groups."

Some nine years earlier, Wildmon-the-boycotter was profiled in People ("Advertisers Run for Cover as Tv Vigilante Donald Wildmon Decides It's Prime Time for a Boycott.")

"This is an effort of the Moral Majority to force its will on the real majority," CBS senior Vice President for Policy Gene Mater told the magazine. "We look upon it as the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced."

In a statement today echoed by Media Matters re Fox News, Wildmon said of one new CBS program: "We will write down who the sponsors of that show are. It won't be on long."

The People article noted that Wildmon's efforts against free expression prompted Norman Lear and others to form People For the American Way. 

"Most Americans believe in the Jeffersonian concept of the free marketplace of ideas," said PFAW's Greg Denier. "Wildmon thinks the first amendment means that only people who have the 'truth' are free to express it."

"It's the Wizard of Oz strategy," Denier added. "Stir up a lot of fire and smoke to intimidate people."

This is a different age than the one in which the Wildmons sought to control media speech and liberals decried the ambition. It is a moment of anti-Trump mania in which fine principles once harbored are heaved through the nearest window.

Liberals used to understand the importance of untrammeled expression. They wrote impassioned essays supporting unpopular speakers and waged landmark courtroom battles to protect the right to advocate controversial ideas.

But admirable principles were cast aside when the Trump campaign began its barnstorming. Anything and everything were acceptable to media and political elites, so long as establishment interests were served. 

The end justified the means.

Nevermind that, shorn of its specifics, it was the identical tactic. Whether organized back then by Wildmon or by Democrats today, pressuring media advertisers with the hope of constraining speech stinks.

Long-hailed stalwarts Clarence Darrow, Roger Baldwin, William O. Douglas, Lenny Bruce, Nat Hentoff, George Carlin, and Norman Lear were replaced by a new and philosophically distasteful left model that cared about nothing apart from totalitarian enforcement of politically correct values and power acquisition.

"How liberal activists harnessed social media to target Fox News' Tucker Carlson" was the CNN.com headline over a piece cheering Wildmon-style advertiser-pressuring now practiced by today's doggedly intolerant forces of tolerance.

CNN writer Fredreka Schouten noted uncritically that "independent journalist" Judd Legum posts online 'go get 'em' listings of Carlson's advertisers. 

According to Schouten, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone "has worked behind the scenes to encourage advertisers to walk away from some Fox News programming..."

The Wildmon legacy endures. It now sports 'woke' raiment.

When they attack Trump, regular America is their real target                    

                             
In 1984's Tank, James Garner played a principled military retiree facing off against a corrupt, small-town system. He sought to meet with the governor and discuss his son's judicial railroading. He became a national folk hero, the little guy against the callous ruling class.

Toward the end, Garner slowly maneuvered a tank through a block-long, sustained hail of gunfire from snipers tactically arranged on building tops; their passion was to obstruct justice and truth. 

Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy, pressbox pipsqueaks unfit to carry his copy of the Constitution have maintained without pause an attack on him remarkable for viciousness worthy of MS-13, cartoonish spectacle, and unapologetic unethicalness.

But while President Trump may be their ostensible target, it is the American people who are under assault. Our 'crime?' Daring to think we can determine our own nation's course and choose a president who reflects our values, wishes, and intentions.

Every hour, they attack us -- the common Americans who thronged to Trump's campaign rallies, stormed voting booths across the country to endorse him, and who believe a government selected by citizens can exist and fight for our interests every day and in every way.

Our country. The way it was in the classroom history books we grew up reading, when hardscrabble men and women from all walks of workaday life forged a new land, created a glorious experiment in liberty, built great industries, raised an economic powerhouse, and defeated terrible tyrannies like Nazism and Communism.

When we boosted Trump on our shoulders and carried him to the Oval Office, we were standing up for ourselves, for the ideas real America represents: Fairness, equality, and a patriotic faith that is rightly proud and pursues American interests before any others.

The war against the president and common Americans is waged not by media vermin alone, but also by an amoral, entrenched political bureaucracy and more psychologically tilted Hollywood deviants than you can shake a Roman Weinstein at.

Evident from their words and actions is that the sneering poobahs of the ruling, propaganda, and entitled classes hate anything that imperils their death-clutch on power. 

Of course, their neverending witch hunt against Trump is often within the rules. They designed those rules for their own, opportunistic employ, to solidify their authority and crush popular dissent. T's are crossed and i's are dotted.

And when their evil crusade dictates they pursue obscenities beyond on-paper propriety, they simply rely on their beholden judiciary to grant them indulgence. And proceed on their merry, grotesque way.

It's monstrousness, refined.

There is a way in which upper crust-bombardments can be turned to our advantage: Let each enemy's attempted knife-stab make more resolute your determination that we the people will stand strong in defending the president we chose over the disapproving sniffs of the powdered and pompous. 

Lending to President Trump the popular support he needs and deserves, we can keep the faith, fight the good fight, and advance real America on to its manifest destiny.

Tucker Carlson attacks American President Trump for foreign audience
But free speech protects flawed ideas, as well as sound ones

"[President Trump's] chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done any of those things." - FNC host Tucker Carlson, in a recent interview with Swiss Die Weltwoche.

Elsewhere in that interview, Carlson wagged a finger at the president's flamboyance and questioned his suitability for the office. 

His answers bothered for several reasons. One was that he ragged on America's Commander In Chief to a foreign audience. That was pretty Dixie Chicks of him. Also, he gratuitously supplied ammunition to the anti-Trump Resistance. 

Masked Antifa reprobates might not have beset Carlson Manor, had they known of the host's sympathetic perspectives.

But the primary reason for bother was that he was right, and one wishes he weren't. The items cited were ones of which candidate Trump made much in his 2016 barnstorming. We Trump backers desired them. And they have not been thusfar realized.

Carlson was unfair, though, in attributing responsibility exclusively to the president. This is not a dictatorship. 

Carlson seemed to acknowledge that later in the interview, when he said the president is not supported by Congress or his own agencies.

Much blame is due congressional refusal to pass legislation that resolves real-world issues. Republicans and Democrats allow problems to fester, that they might please lobbies, aggravate bases, and advance momentary electoral fortunes.

"I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress [sic] and then does," Carlson said. "I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus."

Pay no mind to Carlson's unsolicited personal slashing. That Trump has given conversational prominence to average concerns of significance is hardly an unimportant thing. From such can ultimately come satisfactory resolution. 

But the wheels of government grind slowly. Those of us who support the president are well aware that this is a profound revolution, and not one in which complete victory should be expected to pop up, overnight.

After all, Obama and others had years to befoul our government. Things can be put right again, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Long is the list of President Trump's accomplishments. In October, the Washington Examiner compiled a list of 289. 

Under Trump, America has seen record-high employment and consumer confidence; accelerated enforcement of immigration laws; the cutting of onerous regulations; a wonderful reemergence of patriotic pride; healthy reassertion of national sovereignty; withdrawal from poor trade and climate deals; and the appointment of constructionist Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Kavenaugh.

In fact, Trump's impact on the judiciary, through appointments to various levels, will endure far beyond his time in office.

Carlson's sudden anti-Trump postures disappoint. He surely knows better.



******


Here's cause for self-reflection: Carlson's acidic condemnation of Antifa during that interview can be applied no less to his right-spectrum critics, some of whom have called for a boycott of Tucker Carlson Tonight because the host strayed from acceptable belief.

"They're saying that I am saying naughty things that shouldn't be allowed to be expressed in public. Basically, it's a totalitarian movement," Carlson said, of Antifa.

The Die Weltwoche interviewer noted that Antifa hoped to silence Carlson.

"Of course. I would never, of course. That's a cornerstone of Western Civilization, is expression and freedom of conscience. You can tell me how to behave, you can force me not to sleep or take my clothes off in public, that's fine. Every society has the right to control behavior. But no one has the right to control what you believe. You can't control my conscience. That's mine, alone. Only totalitarian movements do that, and that's what they're attempting."

No one should suffer, either personally or professionally, for political ideas they express. Carlson should not. His show is a rarity among programs, in that guests representing diverse views are granted respectful platforms, and intellectual debates are conducted civilly. 

At other times, Carlson shreds opponents with easy humorousness, airtight logic, and remarkable intellectual sharpness. It's really quite entertaining.