See below for video and highlights from Sen. Tim Kaine’s appearance this morning on Fox “News” (in air quotes) Sunday.
- “Well, Shannon, I’m going to go back to the first sentence of what you read me from the Federalist. I hadn’t seen that. When it says it doesn’t implicate free speech issues, they’re just wrong about that. When you have the head of the FCC bragging, we’re going to go after you and we can do it the easy way or the hard way and he’s giving a message to Kimmel’s employer who has a merger application pending before the FCC. Even Republicans like Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and Karl Rove have said that goes way too far. You shouldn’t be using the power of the FCC to undermine somebody because the president thinks he’s too much of a critic. I’ve heard some of the talk show commentators in recent days say, ‘look, I’ve been on TV under multiple presidents, and I give all of them grief and I give all of them trouble, but none of them are ever so thin skinned that they come after me.’ And looking at the president’s tweets and celebratory words following Kimmel being pulled off the air, I hope you’re right and that discussions are going forward about coming back. Look, you had a colleague Brian Kilmeade 10 days ago who suggested that homeless mentally ill people should be lethally injected. He apologized the next day. He said, ‘OK, those were callous comments.” He didn’t get pulled off the air. And…I just hope that there’s a a path here where we don’t use the power of the FCC to muscle people who the president, you know, doesn’t like what they’re saying.”
- “You know, Shannon, there’s a difference. You know this, there’s a difference between political speech – where we tend to allow a really wide and robust area of political speech – and dangerous misinformation. Give you an example. Congress passed a couple years back a bill…that requires social media companies to take down information that could be used to foment human trafficking. Now that it is a speech regulation, but it’s an appropriate one and Congress passed that overwhelmingly positively. Similarly, information that’s misinformation about Covid that could lead people to to be seriously ill or even die, that’s a little bit different than somebody expressing a political opinion about whether or not they like Tim Kaine as a senator or whether or not not they like Donald Trump as a president. We are a society that needs to tolerate a pretty wide variety of opinions when it comes to politics. And that’s made us stronger, not weaker. Some countries crack down on all kinds of political speech. I lived in Honduras when it was a military dictatorship and you had to keep your mouth shut about politics. Thank God we haven’t been that way as Americans and I hope we never will be.”
- “Glad to be with you, Shannon. We always have a good civil dialogue and that’s what this country needs right now. Civil dialogue among people who disagree, but we can listen to each other and respect each other.”
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