The Bill Hemmer show on Fox News spend a segment today complaining that conservative voices are being silences, apparently unaware that he was doing so on a nationally-broadcast cable news program.
Starting with a clip from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s address to the Voice of America staff–during which he repeated complained that VOA was reluctant to broadcast pro-Trump messages that were being dictated by VOA’s politically appointed, Trump-supporting director.
Breaking midsentence into a clip, Pompeo stated, “… censorship, [disguised] as political correctness, it all points in one direction: authoritarianism cloaked as moral righteousness. Similar to what we’re seeing in Apple and Twitter and Facebook and on too many university campuses today.”
Hemmer quoted Pompeo as saying at the end of his speech, “I read that some [Voice of America] employees didn’t want me to speak today. They didn’t want the voice of American diplomacy broadcast on the Voice of America. It’s time to put wokism to sleep.”
Voice of America employees have raised flags that its content is increasingly being turned into political endorsements for Trump and Republicans, not US policy or culture.
Ari Fleisher, the press secretary for George W. Bush then called it a “slippery slope,” saying, “Censorship never works. It creates a dangerous, more dangerous underground for the ideas to ferment in and it creates a worse bitterness and anger, and that is the problem of one-sided censorship, and that is increasingly what we are seein’. This will not end well.”
Fleisher failed to not that the messages and accounts being suspended or deleted are those that promulgate hate and violence, such as what was seen on Wednesday in the attack at the Capitol. In fact, Fleisher seemed to foreshadow more violence from conservatives.
“This ends in a terrible place,” Fleisher said. “This ends in even more anger and recrimination. If you were the one side this was being done to, if you start to realize that the only way you can communicate is to lash out, you will lash out. If you realize you can communicate is to speak your mind, be heard, maybe your ideas are so bad that they just filter into the ether and nobody pays attention, that is so much better. America has alway been a noisy country, but when we start to squelch debate when the private sector–which has the right to squelch debate if it wants to–decides to use that right, they’re not making anything better; they’re making it worse.”
Fleisher again did not address a key point of his argument that the points being propagated that led to the violence at the Capitol were all false and previously debunked.
Fox News than played a clip of Rush Limbaugh, the top radio talk show host in the country, saying, “We are being censored out of existence. We are being silenced out of existence. We are being pummelled. We are being threatened. We are being intimidated out of existence.”
Again, Rush Limbaugh, host of the top radio program in the nation, said this after a mob of domestic terrorists, stoked by hosts like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (#2), Mark Levin (#7) and Glenn Beck (#8)–as well as Donald Trump himself–pushed for violence and insurrection to undermine the legitimate election of President-elect Joe Biden.