Crossing a Line

I'm not one who takes every word that falls from the president's lips seriously. Much of what he says is bluster, much else is a way of sticking his thumb in the eye of his critics, and much else is a way of intimidating those critics.

His recent tweet about reexamining NBC's FCC license is probably all three, but in any case it's not something I think he's serious about.

Even so, it's something he should not have said and needs to reconsider. He often comes close to crossing a line, if not a line demarcating legal from illegal, at least a line separating wise from unwise. This time he crossed the line as David Harsanyi explains:

[I]t’s never appropriate for a person sworn to defend the Constitution to threaten to shut down speech. Not even if that speech irritates him, or undermines his political priorities, or happens to be genuinely fake news.

Trump might have framed his contention in the form of a question, but he’s clearly comfortable with regulatory restrictions on speech. This puts in him league with those who support “fairness doctrines,” those who want to overturn the Citizens United decision, and so on....

[W]hen presidents play around with authoritarian ideas for political gain, a faction of Americans — always a different faction, depending on who is doing the speaking — are either comfortable hearing it or offer rationalizations for it. All the while we continue to abandon neutral principles for political gain. This is especially true on the issue of speech.

Here's what Trump tweeted:

With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!

If President Obama had said something like this about, say, Fox News, conservatives would be apoplectic and justly so. We should therefore certainly call out President Trump when he talks like this. Harsanyi goes on to cite polls which show how respect for free speech rights are eroding on both left and right in this country:

A forthcoming Cato Institute poll not only found that 50 percent of Democrats believe “government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public” but that 53 percent believe defending someone else’s right “to say racist things” is tantamount to “holding racist views yourself.”

It’s a position similar to the one that alleges anyone who supports due process for those accused of rape on college campuses is merely defending rape. Or, for that matter, it’s reminiscent of the position of Democratic senators who argue that Republicans’ demands for due process for gun owners make them no better than terrorists.

Recently, 200 staff members of the American Civil Liberties Union — an organization that bills itself a defender of constitutional rights — complained that the group’s “rigid stance” on the First Amendment was undermining its attempts to institute racial justice. Is this really the choice — liberty or “justice”? For progressives, many of whom are abandoning liberalism, it seems the answer is yes.

But they’re not alone. The Cato poll finds that 72 percent of Republicans would support making it illegal to burn or desecrate the American flag. More than 50 percent of them believe, as Trump once suggested, that those who do should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship. Fifty percent of Republicans believe the press has too much freedom in America. Other polling has found similarly disturbing results.

....what the polls illustrate is that our hierarchy of ideals has changed in destructive ways. Americans find free speech a secondary principle.

.... it doesn’t matter if most journalists now lecturing you about the First Amendment are a bunch of enormous hypocrites. Nor does it matter that their biased coverage has eroded your trust. There is a bigger marketplace for news than ever. Don’t read NBC.

But even if you’re not idealistic about free expression, it might be worth remembering that any laws or regulations you embrace to inhibit the speech of others, even fake-news anchors, can one day be turned on you. This is the lesson big-government Democrats and Republicans never learn.

When Americans invoke their principles only when it's convenient for them and mute their principles when it's their side that's flouting them then others are justified in thinking that our putative principles aren't principles at all. One lesson we should have gleaned from the massive decades-long cover-up by liberals of Democrat mega-donor Harvey Weinstein's predatory sexual behavior is that if we put party before principle we'll inevitably end up looking like phonies and hypocrites.

If we say we treasure the protection of freedom of speech from government intrusion, then we have to protect that right even when we believe the speech is mendacious and outrageous, as it often is on NBC and CNN.

The best antidote is not for the government to shut it down but for ordinary citizens to turn it off.