Watch Angelo Carusone explain how the Trump town hall exposes CNN’s willingness to facilitate and enable “the most extreme people"
Carusone: “It forces us to help prop up the very thing that will destroy and tear us down”
Published
Citation
From the May 12, 2023, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): It's a crazy dichotomy, but I would love to let you in on this because it does seem like that is kind of a standard for these sort of billionaire libertarians, whether you're talking about Elon Musk or you're talking about, you know, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. They all seem to have this same attitude. You must subject yourself to the nastiest crap out there or else you're not for free speech.
...
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): One of the effects of this massive right-wing echo chamber is it really does distort so much of the conversation, the lens, our understanding of where the center is.
And worse, in a way, it advocates this idea that free speech and defending free speech --which is a value that all Americans feel passionately about, or many Americans -- that somehow that's one and the same with this paradox of tolerance, which is that it doesn't matter how extreme, how ridiculous, how terrible, how violent -- if you're not willing to, as you know, subject yourself to it or even go one step further, facilitate and enable it.
Because they're not saying you have to watch this, they're saying CNN had an obligation to create this forum that gave Trump every advantage, including stacking the audience, putting 15 of his own people in there to function as lead steers, to know when to clap.
And that paradox of intolerance, and this is what's so scary about it, especially in this moment -- is that it fundamentally and inherently advantages the most extreme people. Because it constantly gives them a place and a seat at the table of power and influence that they don't deserve and they shouldn't have.
It forces us to help prop up the very thing that will destroy and tear us down. And so, I think the criticism of CNN is really valid right now because as you noted, Trump's attempts to overturn the election, all these other factors. This is really serious, and their participation in that, and their sort of conflation of free speech with sort of enabling this is dangerous deflection.