NEWSNATION ON BALANCE WITH LELAND VITTERT
8/26/24
7:47 PM
LELAND VITTERT: Some of the very best lines in American politics do not come from real politicians, but from our favorite movie presidents. One of mine is Andrew Shepherd.
ANDREW SHEPHERD (AS PORTRAYED BY MICHAEL DOUGLAS IN THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT): You want to claim this land is a land of the free, then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
VITTERT: The land of the free. With free speech. But both here and around the world, we've lost that concept of free speech. France just arrested the founder of Telegram. It’s an encrypted phone app that allows dissidents and political opposition figures to communicate secretly. You might remember an official from the European Union threatened Elon Musk over his interview with Donald Trump. The United Kingdom now promises jail time for those spreading misinformation, otherwise known as information that the ruling party in the United Kingdom doesn't like. The list goes on. Here in America, the most liberal among us want to ban speech they don't like. Hunter Biden's laptop, of course, comes to mind. In fact, within the past 20 minutes, the House Judiciary Committee just released a bombshell letter from Mark Zuckerberg. This is not the House Judiciary Committee's letter. This is Meta. Facebook's letter. Chairman Jim Jordan says the letter proves the Biden-Harris Administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans and the company jid- did just that by hiding the Hunter Biden laptop story from users. Of course, not since the Civil War have Americans faced more attempts to regulate our free speech.
