Richard — er, Rachel — Maddow, brutal kingpin and top cable news lesbian, had Barbara McQuade, University of Michigan Law professor by day and MSNBC legal analyst by night, on for a censorship-cheerleading fiesta, which went exactly how one might expect such a show to go in the era of untreated TDS and Russiagate mania/Red Scare 2.0 that makes McCarthy look like a Russophile himself.
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Via Jonathan Turley (emphasis added)
We have been discussing the alarming shift in higher education in favor of censorship and speech regulations. These voices have been amplified on media platforms like MSNBC which has championed efforts to censor people and groups on social media and other forums. The most recent example is the interview of University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade by Rachel Maddow. In the interview, McQuade explains how the First Amendment is the “Achilles Heel” of the United States and why the public needs to embrace greater limitations on free speech.
Professor McQuade has published a book entitled Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. Despite my strong disagreements with her views on free speech, I am sure that it will be an important contribution to this debate. My forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage, takes a diametrically opposed view on the meaning and history of free speech in America.
Here's what McQuade had to say regarding the alleged threat of “disinformation” to Democracy™ in a segment titled “How Disinformation Erodes Respect For the Rule of Law” (the fact that she uttered this tripe on one of the largest purveyors of misinformation in the world notwithstanding):
Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to [disinformation] than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel. So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship…
I think any time someone tries to do anything that might limit free speech, people claim censorship.
Amazing.
The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one, which is to be expected on a network where cognitive dissonance is a job requirement. To paraphrase: “we respect free speech, but only insofar as it’s speech we don’t want to censor. We’re heavily in favor of censorship, but whenever domestic terrorists accurately accuse us of censorship they’re doing ‘disinformation,’ which is a danger to Democracy™ because censorship is critical to maintaining the protections enshrined in the Constitution against censorship.”
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