Politics

After Years Of Working To Silence Conservatives, Liberal TV Hosts Are Terrified Trump Could Shut Them Down

2011 Summer TCA Tour - Day 7

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Robert McGreevy Reporter
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Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow are afraid that, if he wins in November, Trump will use his power as president to cancel their shows.

“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 unfounded concerns ignore the fact that, in the four years Trump was president, their shows carried on uninterrupted. Trump didn’t attempt to silence any of his critics through the IRS or advertiser boycotts.

The duo’s worries appear to be a case of left-wing projection, as the political left have been much more complicit in the suppression of speech they don’t agree with than conservatives have been.

Behar’s specific example of advertiser boycotts is a hallmark of left-wing advocacy groups like Sleeping Giants, who before they faded into irrelevancy by departing from Twitter, dedicated their platform to pestering advertisers to stop working with Fox News.

Another group erected by one of Sleeping Giants’ co-founders triumphantly blasted their victory horns when Fox News parted ways with Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson. The group’s founder Nandini Jammi claimed Carlson’s scalp for herself, writing an article titled “How we took Tucker Carlson Tonight off the air.”

But advertiser boycotts are simply surface-level efforts of suppression when compared to the left’s more insidious shadow campaigns to censor conservative speech. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson Is Going On Tour. CNN Is Trying To Shut It Down)

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.


Their investigations also revealed that intelligence agencies, left-leaning nonprofits and Biden’s State Department had a direct pipeline to Twitter staff to ask them to censor and remove content at their behest, requests Twitter often complied with.

“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.” (RELATED: State Department Funded Foreign Think Tank Working To Censor Americans)

Most recently, the Biden White House has cynically claimed that legitimate videos of him appearing increasingly more senile and frail are digitally altered disinformation.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called one video of President Biden wandering away from world leaders during the G7 Summit in Italy a “cheap fake.”


The president has also claimed executive privilege to stop the release of audio recordings of his interview with Special Council Robert Hur. The special council’s written record of the interview revealed that Biden struggled to remember the dates of his son’s death and his own vice presidency.

In her struggle session with Maddow, Behar also spoke of Richard Nixon’s enemies list, another bout of projection from the left.

In 2020 Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump allies to be archived “for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”

The McCarthy Red List-like suggestion was so abhorrent it drew condemnation from her congressional colleagues, including Republican North Carolina Rep. George Murphy.

“The fact that this far-left radical wants to put people on lists is un-American and flies in the face of our Constitutional rights,” Murphy said in a statement at the time. “This is a direct attack on the foundation of our democracy. I strongly condemn these deeply divisive words.”

But Behar’s own co-host Sunny Hostin rejected the notion that putting Trump allies on a list was akin to McCarthyism. (RELATED: Business Insider Compiles Database To Track Former Trump Officials)

“I don’t think that they should be forgotten, I don’t think we should look the other way,” Hostin said in 2020. “We need to remember because if you don’t remember things then past becomes prologue. I don’t think it’s reminiscent of McCarthyism at all.”

While Behar stuck up for specific individuals like short-lived Trump Press Secretary Anthony Scaramucci, she ultimately concurred with Hostin that there should be a list.

“I think you have to be specific about who you’ll target as collaborators,” she quipped.

While Maddow and Behar shudder to think of a world in which Trump takes them off-air, they completely ignore their own complicity in a system that seeks to destroy all dissent and push us ever-faster into a culture where only one worldview is allowed.