Former Secretary of State John Kerry recently argued that the First Amendment is an obstacle for government agencies to crack down on supposed “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
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Kerry’s comments were made during a panel at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in New York City.
He started by noting that the “dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing,” which is “part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue.”
Kerry lamented that “The referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact and what isn’t a fact, they’ve been eviscerated to a certain degree. People go and then people self-select where they go for their news or for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle.”
The former presidential candidate continued, explaining that it is more difficult to come to an agreement than it was in the past because of a more democratized media environment. Then, he said the quiet part out loud:
“There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, et cetera. But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out this information, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence. So what you need, what we need, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by, hopefully, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
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“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024
There it is, folks. Kerry essentially admitted what many of his ilk already seek to accomplish: Subverting First Amendment protections on freedom of expression – especially on digital platforms. He asks whether “Democracy can survive unregulated social media.”
Note how he labels “unregulated social media” as a threat to democracy. This talking should sound familiar to most who follow American politics. Democrats have taken to portraying anything they don’t like as a danger to our American-style democracy.
The First Amendment has been one of the most formidable challenges for authoritarian leftists seeking to exert government control over everyday Americans. In many ways, they have sought to work around protections on free speech to stifle voices with which they disagree by labeling them as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
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So far, the attacks on free speech have been indirect because of the First Amendment. But it is only a matter of time before they start attacking the amendment itself. It might seem unlikely that authoritarian leftists will ever get enough support to repeal this part of the Constitution. Yet, those seeking to do so are working gradually toward this end.
When they can cast speech as a danger to American society – and actually convince the public that this is true – it won’t be too long before they trick people into giving up one of their most important natural rights. One only needs to look at Kerry’s remarks to see what the agenda is.
