AOC Admits She Wants To Deplatform People Who Disagree With Her
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is very happy Tucker Carlson is no longer working for Fox News. She released a video Monday night expressing her joy that Carlson was fired from the network.
Ocasio-Cortez first blamed Carlson for the death threats that she has claimed to receive. I assume this is due to his reporting on her various misdeeds and actions of her as a lawmaker. I assume that because there is no evidence of Carlson telling his viewers to call and threaten her life. You can criticize Carlson for many things, but to allege that he whips up mobs to threaten her is simply false and is bordering on defamation.
Ocasio-Cortez goes on the applaud deplatforming as a tactic. “Deplatforming works and it is important.” she said.
We have a member of Congress who is essentially applauding mobs trying to silence speakers. I would love to see how Ocasio-Cortez would like it if a conservative mob tried to silence her. I’m pretty sure she would not like that. But she shouldn’t complain because she endorses deplatforming as a tactic and she thinks it is important.
You shouldn’t be surprised that Ocasio-Cortez has tried to deplatform those who say things she does not like. Her most famous act of attempted deplatforming was in 2019 when she wrote letters to Google, Microsoft, and Facebook for sponsoring a libertarian student conference.
What did Ocasio-Cortez object to at the conference? The conference featured speakers who disagreed with her stance on fighting climate change.
The three tech companies never did respond to Ocasio-Cortez. The libertarian organization which sponsored the conference, Students For Liberty, also pretty much told her to pound sand.
Just this past weekend, Ocasio-Cortez called for more federal regulation of Fox News because she says the network incites violence. “I believe that when it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t. And when you look at what Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on FOX do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. Very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” she said on MSNBC.
It’s clear that Ocasio-Cortez is not really a fan of free speech. She seems to want to do whatever it takes to silence anybody she disagrees with. In all honesty, I like it when my enemies are honest about their intentions.
Ocasio-Cortez is right about one thing, deplatforming does work, at least most of the time. There are plenty of examples of people who have been “canceled” and have never been able to recover both in visibility and financially.
But deplatforming will not work with Carlson. Now that Carlson is out at Fox, what will most likely happen is that some streaming service or other company will sign Carlson to a contract for a stupid amount of money and he will simply launch a podcast and vlog. In other words, he’ll be the next Joe Rogan, who has a bigger audience than any cable news program.
The biggest thing from all of this is that Ocasio-Cortez is one of the biggest authoritarians in American politics. But yet we don’t have kvetching about her being a threat to democracy. I wonder why that is.
