Tucker: Media embrace Big Tech censorship instead of pushing back
The only reason we have a free press is to fight back against authoritarian power structures demanding we read from approved scripts.
Tucker Carlson accused Twitter on Wednesday of "purg[ing]" political viewpoints one day after the social media platform "fact-checked" a tweet by President Trump opposing mail-in voting during elections.
The "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host opened his show by "stating the obvious," telling his viewers that Trump tweets "an awful lot, and many wish he wouldn't."
"Whether or not it’s politically wise ... Donald Trump has an absolute right as an American to express what he actually thinks, even if every other person on Earth disagreed with him," Carlson said. "When they used to tell you this was a free country ... that’s what they were talking about, the freedom of speech."
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Carlson then turned to the Twitter fact check of Trump, which read in part: "Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud."
"As a factual matter, that is a lie," Carlson said. "And there is no other way to interpret it. But worse than a lie, it is a form of political censorship."
He claimed that Twitter "openly purges users" whose views do not line up with those of company officials.
"It’s bewildering that they are allowed to do this," Carlson said. "Because like all the tech companies, Twitter only exists because Twitter enjoys key exemptions from federal law."
Carlson next discussed a Twitter official named Yoel Roth, who holds what Carlson described as the "Orwellian" job title of "head of site integrity."
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"In January 2017, Roth compared Kellyanne Conway to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. That same day he referred to the president’s new staff -- just moving into the White House -- as actual Nazis," Carlson said.
"So these are the people controlling what you're now allowed to think and say in America -- they are authoritarian. If they are willing to censor the president, they will think nothing at all of silencing you, and they don’t. They gladly do it."
Carlson concluded by noting the people responsible for pushing back against such abuses are the mainstrea media.
"Their job was to safeguard the First Amendment which is designed to protect the weak," he said. "Journalists were supposed to care about the weak, about the public, their readers and viewers. They weren’t supposed to be simply thugs hired to protect the powerful, but that’s what they have become."
He pointed to recent comments by CNN host Don Lemon, who urged Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to "stop hiding behind the First Amendment for profit" and "do the right thing" by deleting some of Trump's tweets.
"In the annals of cable news that must be the most unintentionally hilarious line ever uttered by a script reader,"Carlson answered. "As if exercising your God-given, inborn right to speech and thought and conscience is somehow wrong."
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