Jake Tapper showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner wearing a pocket square with the First Amendment printed on it. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Very bold. Very brave. Very six years too late.
Isn’t this the same Jake Tapper who refused to let election-questioning guests on his show because their speech was too dangerous for CNN viewers to hear? The same Jake Tapper whose network cheered when Twitter banned a sitting president? Now he’s wearing the Constitution on his chest like a fashion accessory. What a time to be alive.
Tapper didn’t just wear the pocket square. He made a whole production out of it. He announced that he and other journalists would be sporting these little First Amendment accessories to “remind” everyone about press freedom. Because apparently the press corps — the people with the largest megaphones on planet Earth — are the real victims here.
This is the man who hosted an entire CNN special about Jimmy Kimmel getting briefly suspended by ABC. Kimmel had gone on air and falsely identified the political affiliation of Charlie Kirk’s killer. When ABC suspended him for getting it wrong, Tapper called it — and we are not making this up — “pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
His lifetime! Jake Tapper has been alive for over fifty years and the worst free speech violation he’s ever witnessed is a late-night comedian getting a timeout for lying on television. Meanwhile, an MRC poll found that only 24% of people could correctly identify the political leanings of Kirk’s killer — because outlets like CNN spent weeks muddying the waters. But sure, the REAL crisis is that Jimmy Kimmel had to sit out a few shows.
You want to know where Jake Tapper’s pocket square was in October 2020? Because we remember October 2020. That’s when the New York Post — one of the oldest newspapers in America, founded by Alexander Hamilton — broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And social media platforms nuked it. Twitter locked the Post’s account. Facebook throttled the story. Silicon Valley decided that voters didn’t deserve to see verified reporting three weeks before a presidential election.
And Jake Tapper? He called the Hunter Biden story “misinformation.” He didn’t wear a pocket square. He didn’t host a CNN special about the most brazen act of election-year censorship in modern history. He helped bury it.
That’s the part that makes this whole performance so insufferable. Tapper doesn’t believe in the First Amendment. He believes in the First Amendment for Jake Tapper. When the speech being suppressed belongs to conservatives — when it’s the New York Post getting deplatformed, when it’s Trump supporters getting banned from social media, when it’s doctors questioning COVID lockdowns getting their videos yanked — Jake Tapper is nowhere to be found. Or worse, he’s actively cheering it on.
But the second someone raises a question about CNN’s coverage? Suddenly he’s James Madison in a suit jacket, ready to die on the hill of press freedom.
This is what drives people crazy about the legacy media. They want a First Amendment that works like a VIP rope at a nightclub. They’re in, you’re out. They get to say whatever they want — and when they get something wrong, it’s an honest mistake. You get to say whatever they approve of — and when you step out of line, you’re spreading “misinformation” that needs to be suppressed for the public good.
Tim Graham over at NewsBusters nailed it when he called this “liberal First Amendment arrogance.” That’s exactly what it is. It’s not a principle. It’s a privilege they want to keep for themselves.
Here’s a thought experiment for Jake. If a conservative news outlet had broken a story about Donald Trump’s son three weeks before an election, and Big Tech had buried it to help Trump win — would Jake Tapper have shrugged and called it misinformation? Or would he have set his pocket square on fire in protest during a live broadcast?
We all know the answer.
So wear your little pocket square, Jake. Put the whole Bill of Rights on a necktie if you want. But we were here in 2020. We remember who was defending free speech and who was helping the censors. And no amount of White House Correspondents’ Dinner cosplay is going to make us forget it.