Yesterday I was minding my own business, getting ready for bed, and a video of NBC’s Lester Holt came on my screen:

NBC’s Lester Holt declares that “fairness is overrated” and that “the idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.”pic.twitter.com/qwya8lISz2
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 1, 2021

If you are a bit confused, don’t worry, your confusion is totally justified. What did Lester just do? He legalized his own plunder, a concept explained in The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

In The Law, Bastiat wrote about how socialists must legalize their plunder to make their immoral actions appear moral. When it comes to socialism, he put it like this: it is not natural to go to our neighbor’s home and steal food from their kitchen. Most humans would feel uncomfortable doing so because they understand that it is naturally wrong to take something from someone that they worked for an earned.

To combat these feelings of immorality, socialists work to convince us that stealing from others isn’t actually stealing; we are just taking back what is rightfully ours. One example: AOC telling us it is impossible to earn one billion dollars; you can only “take” one billion dollars. Her saying this creates the narrative that billionaire’s money was stolen in the first place, so it’s only right to take it back from them.

Now let’s take this same approach of “legalizing plunder” to “legalizing” other immoral behavior. When we think of classical liberalism, the concepts of free speech, protecting your political opponent’s right to free speech and debate without fear of consequence, and the suppression of truth, Americans have usually always understood wrong versus right. This is a trait that has set us apart from so many countries throughout history.

What Lester is doing is not only anti-American, but it’s also naturally wrong. At our core, we understand to stifle ideas, speech, thought and information is wrong.

But his argument in the video doesn’t try to make the case that he and others should be able to stifle honest debate, or opposing information and speech. Instead, he works to build a new narrative: that it’s actually immoral to let this opposing speech and information continue to be pushed because it is the speech and information coming from the right that is immoral.

He’s able to justify why we should stifle information, speech, and thought by convincing Americans that it isn’t worthy of being included in the serious and honest political debates and conversations in our country.

What a mind twist.