Hey, remember when JD Vance weirdly went on about the Biden administration’s alleged censorship during the debate with Tim Walz in order to evade saying whether the 2020 election was stolen? Yeah. They’re all very, very shrill on the subject complaining about Democrats allegedly destroying the 1st Amendment. It’s one of their major memes. And yet …
Get a load of this from Josh Marshall:
Florida has become the state where elements of a future second Trump presidency America already comes into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it reaches a 60% threshold. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder.
To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right – not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.
DeSantis will do anything to stop the pro-choice amendment from winning, And that apparently includes jailing journalists who run ads advocating for it. First Amendment for dummies.
Here’s the ad, by the way:
DeSantis’ reasoning as to why the ad is untruthful and should be taken off the air is that the law states that an abortion an only be done to save the woman’s life and in this case, because she has brain cancer, it would only extend it.
MY GOD.
Josh is right that this is a precursor to what we’ll see in a Trump administration. He’s already repeatedly threatened to take away the licenses of CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN for reporting news he doesn’t like. His mantra is “fake news” and “enemey of the people.” In his first administration he tried to tank the merger deal between At&T and Time Warner because he hates CNN. (CNN was owned by Time Warner.) I’m guessing there won’t be any “guardrails” on that in a second one.
Just look at what Elon Musk is doing on Twitter. He screeches about censorship and free speech even saying that the 2nd Amendment protects the first at that embarrassing Trump rally on Sunday. This is the excuse he uses to allow Nazis and foreign bots run wild on the platform dispensing massive amounts of disinformation. But he also freely bans people for posting things he doesn’t like, such as the fellow who posted a link to the emails Iran hacked from the Trump campaign. And it’s clear that he’s using the algorithm to boost his own posts which are filled with disinformation as well.
Watch Jon Stewart take Musk apart in this clip from the Daily Show last night:
Trump, Vance, DeSantis, Musk — they aren’t trying to hide what they plan to do in the future if they gain political power. They want to jail people for exercising their first amendment rights in the name of fighting censorship. Seriously.