“The View” co-host Joy Behar and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow are afraid that Trump will use his power as president to cancel their shows if he wins in November.
“I think that he is so vindictive that he will go after … however he has to, through the IRS maybe, or even through sponsors to get us off the air,” Behar whined to Maddow during Tuesday’s episode of “The View.”
The baseless concerns disregard the fact that during the four years Trump was in office, their programs continued without interruption. Trump did not try to silence any of his critics through the IRS or by pressuring advertisers.
This is next-level stupidity. And first-class left-wing projecting. https://t.co/YOXfcZiwlL
— USA Features Media (@UsaFeatures) June 20, 2024
The duo’s concerns seem to be yet another example of left-wing projection, as the political left has been more complicit in suppressing speech they disagree with than conservatives, the Daily Caller noted.
Behar’s mention of advertiser boycotts highlights a strategy often employed by left-wing advocacy groups such as Sleeping Giants. Before their decline and exit from Twitter, the group focused their efforts on pressuring advertisers to sever ties with Fox News.
Another group, co-founded by one of Sleeping Giants’ co-founders, celebrated loudly when Fox News decided to part ways with Tucker Carlson, the co-founder of Daily Caller. Nandini Jammi, the founder of the group, claimed credit for Carlson’s departure in an article titled “How we took Tucker Carlson Tonight off the air.”
But advertiser boycotts are merely surface-level attempts to suppress compared to the left’s more covert campaigns to censor conservative speech.
The Caller noted:
In 2022 the Twitter Files revealed that Democrats engaged in suppression of legitimate information and viewpoints that undermined their preferred narratives and political goals.
The sweeping and comprehensive investigative work journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger conducted after Elon Musk granted them access to Twitter’s internal files revealed, among other things, the great lengths Twitter employees went to in order to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.
“Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation,” Taibbi tweeted in 2022. “There were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” he said.
“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi testified to Congress in 2023. “It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is, however, becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”
