"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for the country!"
Liberals interpreted this tweet as affirmation that Trump was about to shut down the free press and eras the First Amendment with an Executive Order, putting a chill on the opposition.
The FCC itself immediately shot down this suggestion, stating only that the FCC believes in the 1st Amendment.
This is the last we've heard of this nonsense. Trump took no action whatsoever to follow up on this tweet.
There are a couple of ways to interpret Trump's tweet. Of course, the MSM interpreted it as a challenge to the First Amendment and as direct evidence of Trump's fascist inclinations.
I took it a little differently. Yes, it was a little too close to challenging free speech for my comfort. But tweets without action are meaningless. They are just tweets --petulant rantings. This tweet is nothing more than that of the guy at the end of the bar that exclaims, "there oughta be a law!" Trump was, however, correct to call out NBC and the Networks for propagation of unsubstantiated narratives, many of which were initiated with the support only of anonymous sources. He was wrong, however, to do so while making a statement that could be read to be an implied threat to their license. If a remark can be read two ways, it will ALWAYS be cast in the least favorable light by the MSM.
And this is the most confounding characteristic of Donald Trump. He is often right and wrong at the same time.
Meanwhile, while the press and social media were hyperventilating over this tweet, real threats to free speech continue to mount on university grounds across the country. Those threats have been sometimes backed by actual violence as at Berkeley or Middlebury. Threats of violence and disruptions have also become more common.
Just in the past week, a Princeton student published an opinion piece that asserted that conservatives have no 1st Amendment right to free speech. It is troublesome that Princeton actually admitted such an ignoramus, worse yet that The Daily Princetonian chose to print his absurd assertion. At UC Santa Cruz, protesters crashed a college Republican meeting, claiming that "fascists don't have a right to free speech." Incidents like these are now all too common across college campuses, the training ground for the next generation of our citizenry.
No, I don't like the way Trump expressed his frustration with the MSM, which often acts straightaway as a public advocacy arm of the DNC. But without follow up executive action by Trump, I am much less concerned about his misguided tweet than I am about the actual suffocation of free speech in our universities.
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