It takes a special kind of person to be handed a velvet-covered megaphone—and then whine that no one’s letting him speak.
Enter Scott Pelley. CBS’s veteran chin-scratcher, master of the furrowed brow, and lead correspondent of 60 Minutes, which is less journalism these days and more an extended segment of “This Is Why You’re Wrong, Middle America.”
Pelley recently delivered a commencement speech that read like a handwritten thank-you note to the Democratic National Committee—while, of course, posing as a martyr for free speech.
He was praised by the media echo chamber, hailed by blue-check sycophants, and applauded by the tenured faculty set. And then, in the same breath, warned of a climate of fear and self-silencing—as if he, of all people, were at risk of being muzzled.
Silenced? Sir, you are the literal voice of a multi-million-dollar news institution that broadcasts into the living rooms of millions every Sunday night.
You’re not Paul Revere. You’re not Galileo. You’re little more than the televised valet of the Acela corridor.
This is the same media grandee who believes dissent is dangerous—unless it’s his. Who insists misinformation must be rooted out—unless he’s the one peddling it.
Who sees government censorship lurking around every corner—unless it’s censorship he endorses, like silencing dissident doctors or squelching conservative outlets.
Who spins his own conspiracy theory that conservative voices are amplifying conspiracy theories.
Pelley speaks of fear like a hedge fund manager lamenting food prices—performative, tone-deaf, and best ignored.
It takes a special kind of person to clutch their pearls over the fear-based rhetoric he’s shilling while being chauffeured to a taxpayer-subsidized university podium in a climate-controlled Mercedes.
To tremble over the chilling effect of democracy while basking in the warm applause of faculty who’ve never lived paycheck to paycheck.
To cry “censorship” from behind the safety glass of one of the most powerful platforms in American media—all read, of course, from a teleprompter.
Legitimate question, Mr. Pelley: Do you own a dictionary?
You’re tossing around words like “censorship” and “fear” with all the self-awareness of a trust-fund poet. You might consider looking them up before the next standing ovation from your progressive handmaidens and beta vassals.
In short, to accomplish all of this takes a special kind of fraud.
Oh, one must really marvel at Pelley the Pretentious. Imagine pontificating—or more accurately, bloviating—that there exists some vast culture of suppression so cruel, so totalizing, that it threatens to grind this poor millionaire journalist into a particularly caustic powder.
And to do so not from a gulag, not from the docks, not in chains and an orange jumpsuit, but from a university stage—after being driven there by faceless chauffeurs, whisked from who-knows-how-many vacation homes, to return that evening to the glory and comfort of a Fifth Avenue fortress.
Mr. Pelley is little more than a preening peacock cosplaying as a disaffected dissident.
And if you fall for this cock-and-bull story, it says more about your critical thinking skillset than his fuss and feathers.
Meanwhile, the authentic culture of fear is out in the heartland, where Americans live in quiet dread that one wrong word will cost them their jobs, their business licenses, and their bank accounts.
It’s parents afraid to speak at school board meetings. Doctors afraid to question state-mandated narratives. Students afraid to deviate from campus orthodoxy.
The fear isn’t in the 60 Minutes studio—save and except the dread of the makeup artists that this low-rent Mike Wallace will have too much eye shadow—it’s in cube farms, neighborhoods, and campuses: places Pelley the Perfidious turns away from when he must leave the studio for his manicure.
Yet, the media class has perfected the art of self-mythology. Pelley doesn’t just want to speak—he wants to be applauded as if he were forbidden from doing so. He wants to be both celebrity and subversive, both power and victim, both aristocrat and rebel.
It’s the same formula elites use when claiming student protesters are under siege—while the protesters occupy libraries, shut down freeways, and get job offers from NGOs by sundown.
And since he delivered this gaseous oration just up the road at Wake Forest, a word to the Demon Deacons: it’s time to cut the mic.
If this is what passes for intellectual rigor at your commencement exercises—an empty suit spinning self-serving fables in a tone of priestly authority—then it is better to leave the podium at Groves Stadium empty.
At least an empty podium won’t lecture the nation about censorship while cashing residual checks from the most powerful media cartel in America.
At least an empty podium won’t insult the intelligence of your graduates by pretending that reading from a teleprompter on CBS is an act of defiance worthy of Solzhenitsyn.
But Scott Pelley will. With a big mouth, a bottomless ego, and a tragic lack of irony, he’ll bemoan persecution while living a life that 99.99% of Americans couldn’t imagine.
He’ll claim to be muzzled while appearing on national television, delivering sermons at prestigious institutions fattened on federal grants, and probably at Davos between panels on “The Crisis of Misinformation (Which We Define).”
And he’ll call that courage.
It’s not courage. It’s choreography. And the audience is finally starting to boo.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC
Image: CBS News, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.
