As of today, Venezuela’s oldest private broadcast station is closed for business, thanks to the country’s socialist leader, Hugo Chavez. According to VOAnews.com, “Venezuela’s government has refused to extend RCTV’s license, despite an outpouring of criticism from international human rights groups and press freedom organizations.” Bizarrely, Chavez announced that the station’s replacement will be a state-run channel that will, “democratize the media and enhance freedom of speech.” Such paradoxical logic is, unfortunately, common among socialist leaders and followers.

Enhance free speech by shutting down a private station and replacing it with state-sponsored media? This is the same kind of reasoning used by post-modernists to accumulate power, where meaning and truth are considered so subjective as to have no meaning– except of course for the meaning that is convenient to the achievement of their goals. Chavez, of course, lacks any originality as a socialist as well– taking a cue from Putin on the other side of the Atlantic, whose country’s journalists end up dead after too much criticism of the Kremlin.