President Donald Trump’s 44-year-old chairman of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is calling for “more civil discourse” following the attempted assassination of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice — and his call is personal.
Ajit Pai has been under intense incendiary attacks and even physical threat by the left and its mob followers. He has been threatened, his home surrounded by militant protesters, with his family and neighbors shaken.
Pai’s position makes him one of the most despised Trump appointees and is facing “ritual defamation” by activists tied to Occupy Wall Street, the “resistance” to Trump’s governance, the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s funded groups.
Had Trump not won last November, Pai told The Daily Caller News Foundation in this exclusive interview, “there was a lot coming” for heavy-handed regulation through the FCC.
At the end of the day, he says, the FCC was really “the leading spear of over-regulation over the past several years with the federal government extending that into ever more fields.”
“They were using the FCC for implementing policies that couldn’t get through Congress,” including possible content regulation.
Pai was born in Buffalo and raised in Kansas to parents who emigrated from India in 1971 with $10 dollars and a transistor radio. He went to Harvard, and then Chicago Law school, and has worked for several Senate offices. To be designated chairman of this agency on Jan. 23 was an “only in America” story for his entire family.
The popularized and deceptive term “net neutrality” “is really the question of regulating the internet,” Pai explains. He prefers the bipartisan light touch to government intervention that ruled until the Obama regulatory changes of 2015.
Pai explained the policy disagreements and the stakes in a recent speech, at the Newseum, noting one of the left’s leaders praised Venezuela for their government’s approach to dissent of the state.
One comprehensive report explains why the left assaults the integrity on the private sector with anti-capitalist rhetoric in order to grow the government’s hand.
Speaking of European pressures starting to engage in content control, Pai says it is “disturbing that there is pressure growing from the outside of those who want government to start choosing who gets to speak and who doesn’t get to speak on this platform.” Pai believes “the internet has been one of the greatest platforms for free speech and free expression that has ever existed.”
In Europe, pressures are mounting to use the government to challenge “extremist” speech in novel manners. Governments are increasingly looking towards pressuring private companies to censor by proxy.
But as Michelle Malkin explains, distinguishing terrorist speech from first amendment protected political free speech even here is fraught with peril as she has experienced firsthand.
Pai also discusses the digital divide and scandals of abuse of funding that have been uncovered.
For more on Pai, watch the FCC website, and follow him on Twitter @AjitPaiFCCas he has even read some of the “mean tweets” sent his way here.
Videographer Sean Moody is credited with the video work for this piece.
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