Democrat John Kerry, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. presidency against George W. Bush and was Barack Obama’s second secretary of state, has landed himself in hot water after bemoaning the problems with having a First Amendment, which guarantees Americans the right to free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and a free press.
The First Amendment stands as a “major block” in hammering out ‘disinformation,’ and this election is about winning enough votes to change that, Kerry said.
The statement was made in response to a question regarding “climate misinformation” at a World Economic Forum panel discussion on economic development.
“It’s really hard to govern today,” Kerry said. “The referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact and what isn’t a fact have been eviscerated to a certain degree. So people self-select where they go for their news and for their information.”
Kerry seemed oblivious to the question of who should be the arbiter of ‘facts’—and instead talked about how it’s more difficult “to build consensus” today than “any time in the 45 to 50 years” he’s been in politics, blaming social media:
Look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
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.
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.
His statements unleashed a groundswell of outrage on social media, with many comments pointing to how progressives—including Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, before Kerry—are actively working to limit a free exchange of opinions. Comments included statements like “these people hate America,” “John Kerry calls for a new Ministry of Truth,” and “What John Kerry says here about getting rid of the First Amendment so they can enforce one officially approved viewpoint is exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect us from.”
In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris said in a CNN interview that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” Hillary Clinton, for her part, has said the media needs to be objective—meaning they should cover former President Donald Trump’s “demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world.”
Some degree of voluntary online censorship by Big Tech seems to already be in effect. Several people posting on Elon Musk’s X also reported attempting to post the video to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, and getting the posts rejected with the message that it had been removed as “spam.”
Musk himself reposted the video on X, with the comment: “John Kerry is saying he wants to violate the Constitution.”
