John Kerry says First Amendment is the enemy, as elites try to stamp out free speech
Former Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit on September 24, 2024 in New York City.Getty Images
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If you want to know how hostile the global elite are to free speech, look no further than John Kerry’s recent speech to the World Economic Forum.
Rather than extol the benefits of democratic liberty versus dictatorships and oligarchs, Kerry called the First Amendment a “major block” to keeping people from believing the “wrong” things.
The former secretary of state and aide to the Biden-Harris administration told the sympathetic audience:
“You know, 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, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
“So 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.”
The “freedom” to be won in this election is to liberate officials who like himself can set about controlling what can be said, read or heard. Kerry insisted that the problem with social media is that no one is controlling what they can say or read.
“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue,” he said.
“It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.”
Kerry continued: “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are.”
It is not clear when in our history we allowed “referees” to “determine what is a fact.”
Since the First Amendment has been in place since 1791, it is hard to imagine when referees were used in conformity with our Constitution.
The Founders would have been repulsed by the idea of a “truth arbiter.”
Yet it was a pitch that clearly went over big at the crowd at the World Economic Forum.
Located in Geneva, Switzerland, it is funded by over 1,000 member companies around the world. It is the perfect body for the selection of our new governing “arbiters.”
The greatest irony was that, after fearmongering about this supposed parade of horribles that comes from free speech, Kerry insisted, “If we could strip away some of the fearmongering that’s taking place and get down to the realities of what’s here for people, this is the biggest economic opportunity.”
It was like Ed Wood denouncing cheesy jump scares in horror movies.
Kerry is only the latest Democratic leader or pundit to denounce the First Amendment.
In my new book on free speech, I discuss the growing anti-free speech movement being led by law professors and supported by both politicians and journalists.
They include Michigan law professor and MSNBC commentator Barbara McQuade, who has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote an op-ed declaring “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.”
He explained that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”
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