Fox News certainly had some peaches in their past line-up, didn’t they? While Chris Wallace, now with CNN, is perhaps the most famous liberal to depart the network, Carl Cameron decided to make a bid for some attention on MSNBC recently. You may remember Cameron as a staple on Fox News, covering presidential politics from the mid-90s until his retirement in 2017.

In what I would describe as one of the more disturbing things I’ve heard a supposed reporter utter, Cameron suggested that the Biden administration should get a list of names together of those who spread supposed “misinformation” and start throwing them in jail.

Carl Cameron says it’s time to maybe start putting people in jail for misinformation. Said this on MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/hn3Ophq7MA

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) May 17, 2022

The Washington bubble is hard to fathom, and Cameron is a long-time member. Still, to think that his brain could be rotted to the point where he’d support putting people in jail for breaking what would be, by his own words, government-enforced speech codes, is incredible. Does the First Amendment just not exist anymore? And why would anyone trust the Biden administration, or any administration for that matter, to decide what is and isn’t misinformation?

But my questions are giving Cameron too much credit. You don’t appear on a lunatic like Nicole Wallace’s show to actually have a rational discussion. Rather, he’s just there to spew talking points, and nothing gets Wallace going more than proclaiming Republicans are a threat to “democracy.” That’s exactly what Cameron’s justification is in the video. Per his commentary, we now need to jail people, and he mentions journalists specifically, for not toeing the government line on whatever the “current thing” is.

It doesn’t matter that what constitutes “misinformation” is a moving target and highly partisan. Go look at some of the COVID-19 assertions that were censored in 2020-2021 only to be confirmed in 2022, from the vaccines not stopping the spread to the origins of the virus. Yet, what’s even more demented is that Cameron speaks this way because he feels confident that he won’t be the one thrown into the gulag. He’s fine with the government coming after you, but he’d cry bloody murder if he himself were ever targeted.

How did we get here? How did we get to a place where supposed journalists are now siding with the government and suggesting people be thrown in jail for voicing counter opinions? Further, to so bastardize the idea of “democracy” in this way is itself misinformation. Democracy is not about taking the freedom of others away to make yourself feel better or to scratch some partisan itch. Yet, that’s what Cameron is calling for.