Tucker Rips Big Tech: ‘Censorship Does Not Work; Ideas Spread’

CARLSON: "Good evening and welcome to a special inside the issues edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight. Over the next hour we will take a deeper dive into some of the biggest matters affecting American life today. We start with speech. As you probably heard, recently many of the biggest tech companies joined in a coordinated effort to censor content from Alex Jones. Apple, Facebook, Spotify, Vimeo, YouTube, all of them pulled or froze Jones’ accounts on the grounds that his views are too dangerous to be heard publicly. The left which seeks to crush anything it can’t control applauded the news. The institutional right in Washington afraid of being criticized mostly stayed silent. That was foolish and it was cowardly. This isn’t about Alex Jones or any one person. It’s about the central principle of our society and it’s at stake here. Do people have a right to communicate their views? It doesn’t matter what those views are. Alex Jones’ views or anyone else’s views. They may be misguide or repugnant. They often are. There is a remedy for repugnant views, make a counter case. Defeat bad ideas with good ideas. Kill lies with truth. That’s how healthy society functions. We are moving in the opposite direction. Increasingly the people in charge use technology to silence criticism, mostly of them. The left will tell that you defending Alex Jones’ right to speak is the same as defending what Alex Jones says. That is a lie. They know it’s a lie. We would make the very same case on behalf of Jill Stein or Noam Chomsky on the left or anyone else the establishment was trying to silence. The left wing ACLU spent about 100 years representing radical extremists whose views they hated and they did it to make that point, free speech is for everybody, even the crazies. That’s the very definition of free speech. In a free country, everyone can be heard, in totalitarian societies only the powerful can be heard. The left used to understand that. But they don’t anymore. What changed? Why are the most powerful companies in the world suddenly so threatened by an independent radio show host in Texas that they are willing to lose business in order to make him shut up. And Jones is hardly their only target. Every day the big tech companies censor someone else whose political opinions they disagree with. You see it all the time. Last summer, the CEO of Google, who is a billionaire by the way, flew home from family vacation just to fire a low level programmer called James Damore. What did Damore do? His crime was writing a private memo that gently questioned identity politics. The reaction in both of those cases and many others like them was weirdly disproportionate. Almost hysterical, like shooting someone for looking at you funny. Confident people don’t behave like that. Insecured, terrified people do. That’s the point. Our establishment crushes dissent not because our establishment is strong but because it is weak and afraid. In the words of a perceptive essay this week, 'Censorship is what happens when powerful people get scared.' That piece was written by a former Wall Street executive called Michael Krieger and it's worth quoting the at length here. 'The elites aren’t afraid what Alex Jones says, Krieger writes. Trump didn’t divide American society. Alex Jones didn't cause our widespread distrust in institutions, elites did that with their spectacular failures. Trump’s election and Alex Jones’ popularity are merely symptoms of a corrupt and failed status quo. The stewards of which refuse to take a look in the mirror, accept blame and reform. Censorship by Silicon Valley billionaires will back fire spectacularly, ultimately it's safer for society to have open public forums where all ideas whether you consider them dangerous and crazy or not can be openly expressed alongside each other. Deep platforming popular content won’t make it go away. It will just shift to areas of the Internet you may not see, where it will fester and grow stronger. You will think it’s gone from society because it’s been safely cleansed from your corporate government Facebook time line. But it may grow even stronger in the shadows.' In other words, censorship does not work. Ideas spread. Good ones take root and they endure. People know what’s true. They can smell it, you can’t stop them from knowing that. You can’t control their minds. You can only humiliate yourself and undermine your own authority by trying. Our childish billionaire overlords may be geniuses they say they are, but they don’t understand that some day soon they will learn and that is a comforting thought at a time like this."