Jeffrey Lord, a former adviser for the Reagan White House, said Saturday that AT&T's DirecTV deplatforming of Newsmax is part of a continuing effort by liberals to cancel conservative speech and that even though he doesn't use the provider, he'd cancel it in a "nanosecond" if he did.
"This kind of stuff just cannot be allowed to go on," Lord, a Newsmax contributor, said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It's anti-free speech. It's anti-American. You've got these people in these corporations who are liberal elites trying to please each other instead of their audience, and I think they're going to pay a price for it."
Lord's comments come after his column for The American Spectator, in which he examines the connections between members of AT&T's board of directors and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
DirecTV customers call toll free at 877-763-9762 to cancel/complain
For example, he writes, William Kennard, the chairman of the AT&T board, is a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union under Obama and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Clinton. Lord moves on in the article to include several other board members with ties or records of donations to Democrats and says that "quite obviously what we have is a board of directors of AT&T that is stacked with like-minded, far-left extremists who cannot abide conservatives or political dissent. AT&T has been changed from a politically neutral communications company to a woke, far-left censor which has charged itself with an obsessive mission of silencing conservatives — Newsmax in this case, and One America News before that."
"How about that?" Lord asked on Newsmax Saturday. "Shocking, I know."
But he added that he wrote a similar article concerning the late Rush Limbaugh in 2012, when "he said something on the radio that the liberals didn't like, and there was a concerted effort to take him off. He lost, I think it was, seven sponsors."
Lord said he wrote, at the time, an article by looking up all Limbaugh's sponsors and CEO names, along with their contact information, and ran it under the title of "Rally for Rush."
"Well, this went viral and people did rally for him," Lord said. "He had sponsors begging to take them back, and he refused to do it. He got new sponsors instead."
But still, "this business of canceling conservatives, whether it's Rush Limbaugh or some of the Fox hosts on occasion or now, you know, OAN, and now, Newsmax: This is who these people are. This is what they do, and you've got to stand up and, you know, and fight them."
The best way to do that, Lord said, is to cancel DirecTV's service.
AT&T's DirecTV deplatformed Newsmax from 13 million subscriber homes last week, the second time the service removed a conservative channel in the past year. The platform continues to carry 22 liberal news channels and all receive license fees but has denied Newsmax any ability to receive similar payments.
"This is a blatant act of political discrimination and censorship against Newsmax," Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said. "The most extreme liberal channels, even with tiny ratings, get fees from AT&T's DirecTV, but Newsmax and OAN need to be deplatformed."
Actions to Take Now
1. DirecTV customers call toll free at 877-763-9762 to cancel/complain.
2. AT&T customers call toll free at 888-855-2338 to cancel/complain for U-verse, cellular and wireless services.
3. Call your congressman or senator at 202-224-3121 and demand they stop AT&T/DirecTV's censorship of NEWSMAX — ask them to give you a date on the hearings!
4. Go to our online petition and get more info: iWantNewsmax.com.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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