On Friday’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” we gained insight into the fact that some conservatives now share the left’s growing problem with speech authoritarianism.
The unveiling came when Maher challenged the panel over Parkland High School student David Hogg’s boycott of Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Hogg’s “chilling” assault on free speech, Maher said, was deserving of a challenge. Maher also made the point that by joining the public discourse on matters of political import, Hogg must expect (and is legally unshielded from) personal challenge.
The two liberals on the panel immediately disagreed, explaining that Hogg’s action was similar to the tactics of the civil rights movement. Or something.
That was unsurprising.
What was surprising, however, was that conservative columnist Max Boot then stepped in to echo the sentiment.
“[Laura Ingraham] has said much worse things, she is part of this Fox News propaganda machine which is bombarding the American people with alternative facts, i.e. fake news, every single day. And that’s a reason large companies should not be underwriting her,” said Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Washington Post columnist.
Boot’s words should alarm all of us. Whatever you think about Fox News, the network is hardly the Kremlin propaganda RT-type network that Boot presents it to be. Fox hosts such as Bret Baier, Shannon Bream, Chris Stirewalt, and Leland Vittert, among others, are straight-news journalists through and through.
Boot would have Fox News die in the absence of sponsors. He knows full well that it costs a lot of money to run a network news channel 24 hours a day and without sponsorship, no network could survive. After all, absent government funding of the kind that funds news networks such as the BBC, news networks need commercials to survive. And that was Maher’s central point: Boycotts do not counter speech, they silence it.
As a historian and columnist, and in a week that saw Kevin Williamson purged for his views, Boot should have known better than to translate his personal emotion toward Fox News into a call for restrictive speech. It’s embarrassing.
Still, at least the rest of us get a wake up call that speech authoritarianism is not a wholly liberal movement.
