Mitch McConnell damages campaign by silencing citizen voices

In a brazen act of cowardice on November 6th, the GOP, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Committee to take Matt Jones, founder of sports blog and podcast Kentucky Sports Radio (KSR), off the air. Today, Matt Jones has announced that he will not be challenging McConnell in 2020 for his seat in the senate. Despite Jones being vocal about issues on his radio show, Jones is  nothing more than an American citizen who was stripped of his right to free speech because McConnell is fearful of the same strong showing of Democrats that voted out Matt Bevin. 

Around 80-90% of incumbents like McConnell get re-elected each year. Pair that with the fact that as the Senate Majority Leader, McConnell has nearly all media outlets in the country at his disposal. One wouldn’t think he would fear a potential opponent with no previous political experience, who runs a show discussing Kentucky sports. Nevertheless, he must, seeing as he decided to remove the driving force from a radio show that around 180,000 Kentucky citizens listen to daily. While this may seem trivial, this shows a clear lack of care for the citizens of Kentucky. 

Taking Jones off the air will not be beneficial to McConnell’s campaign. In fact it will be detrimental. A Matt-Jonesless KSR aired on November 7th and was flooded with calls from Republican KSR fans who have stopped supporting McConnell directly because of this incident. This was not an effective move in silencing Jones. In light of the incident, Pardon My Take, the most popular sports podcast in the country, had Jones on as a guest. Removing Jones from KSR also did nothing to shrink his relevancy. On November 7th  the hashtag #FreeMattJones trended number one nationally on twitter, and it still continues to be popular. Clearly, taking Jones off of the air does nothing to shrink his base, and if anything, shrinks McConnells. 

While reinstating Matt Jones to KSR would be the most logical course of action, such things are hard to reverse. Instead McConnell should look at his own message and focus on supporting Kentuckians, rather than silencing prominent citizen voices. Now that Jones has officially decided not to run he can use his voice in the community to speak out against this injustice and actively oppose McConnell.