'They can't have it both ways': Rick Wilson smacks down MAGA hypocrisy on First Amendment

Republican political consultant Rick Wilson blasted MAGA on Tuesday for cheering a decision giving the federal government more control over entertainment — and potentially over social media platforms.

Late night entertainer Stephen Colbert told his audience that he had to drop an interview with Democratic Texas U.S. Senatorial candidate James Talarico from his Monday broadcast because of a letter by Trump FCC appointee Brendan Carr’s seeking to rein in opinions on late-night shows.

Carr, alleging that Colbert’s show falls under the FCC “equal time clause” complained that Colbert could not air the show unless Colbert also featured an opposition opinion to Talarico. Colbert said that CBS lawyers had told him “in no uncertain terms” that the interview he had planned with State Rep. James Talarico would not air, despite Talarico already being in Colbert’s studio.

Colbert later released the interview on the show’s website, which is not constrained by the FCC, but MAGA celebrated the censoring.

Wilson told Bulwark podcaster and Republican speechwriter Tim Miller that he didn’t “want to hear another freaking word about free speech absolutism on the right,” mainly because “they are now aggressively trying to suppress free speech, and they can't have it both ways.”

“If the government's going to get in and regulate platforms, which it is regulating CBS as a platform right now, then I want the folks on the MAGA side who are cheering this decision to recognize that at some point there will be somebody who's not Brendan Carr in charge of the FEC,” Wilson told Miller.

“And he's going to say — or his FCC is going to say — ‘you know, X is a platform, Twitter's a platform, we're going to regulate them. Facebook's a platform, we're going to regulate them. YouTube's a platform, we're going to regulate them.’” Wilson warned. “The problem with these excursions into greater government interference is it invites more government interference left or right down the line.”

Wilson also mocked the MAGA world’s frequent claims that Colbert’s influence is trivial compared to the viewership of Fox News shows.

“You can’t pretend that Colbert is a trivial entertainer on the one hand, but an interview with James Talarico is of such immediate danger to the balance, to the fairness and balance of the FCC's regulations, that it's got to be yanked off the air. “They just Streisand’d the sh—— out of themselves,” Wilson said, referring to the process of inadvertently attracting additional attention to something by attempting to hide or censor it. The phenomenon is named after entertainer Barbra Streisand, who in 2003 sued a photographer to remove an image of her Malibu home from a public online archive — which only encouraged interest in the photo and made it an internet sensation.

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