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.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit on September 24, 2024 in New York City.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. “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.”Tim Walz fabricated key details of political ‘origin story’ that involved being turned away at George W. Bush rally: records John Kerry used pseudonymous email while in office just like Biden, Hillary, whistleblower claims to senators 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.”Since the First Amendment has been in place since 1791, it is hard to imagine when referees were used in conformity with our Constitution.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.”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 is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”Kerry hit all of the top talking points for the anti-free speech movement.He argued that citizens would be far better off if an elite could tell them what was information and what was disinformation.Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to use the Digital Services Act to force the censoring of Americans. has called for companies like Amazon to use enlightened algorithms to steer readers to “true” books on subjects like climate change to protect them from their own poor reading choices. Kerry explained how the true heroes are those poor suffering government officials seeking to protect citizens from unbridled, unregulated thoughts: “I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?” The “fever” of free speech is undeniably hard to break. You have to convince a free people to give up part of their freedom. To do so, they have to be very angry or very afraid.Rather there are powerful figures who want to control speech in the world for their own purposes.Each generation of government officials insists that they face some unprecedented threat, whether it was the printing press at the start of our republic or social media in this century. Only the solution remains the same: to hand over control of what we read or hear to a governing elite like Kerry. In 1860, Frederick Douglass gave a “Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” and warned them that all of their struggles meant nothing if the “freedom of speech is struck down” because “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”Of course, Douglass knew nothing of social media and he certainly never met the likes of John Kerry. However, if we embrace our new arbiters of truth we deserve to be mocked as a people who held true freedom only to surrender it to a governing elite. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”Union boss who threatened to 'cripple' economy lives in luxe 7,000 square-foot mansion with guest house — and a BentleyTrump cries 'I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID!' as judge unseals Jack Smith's evidence dump against ex-prez weeks out from election Jax Taylor gives Brittany Cartwright full custody of son Cruz, claims they were never legally married in new court docs Union boss who threatened to 'cripple' economy lives in luxe 7,000 square-foot mansion with guest house — and a Bentley
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