Below is my column in the New York Post on the recent remarks of former Secretary of State John Kerry to the World Economic Forum, the latest in an array of powerful American politicians warning about the dangers of free speech and calling for government controls. He joins his fellow former Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton in reaching out to the global elite for help in censoring their fellow Americans.
Here is the column:
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.”
Free rein on social media
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 with 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 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.”
‘Will we break the fever?’
Kerry hit all of the top talking points for the anti-free speech movement.
He portrayed the First Amendment as hopelessly out of date and dangerous.
He argued that citizens would be far better off if an elite could tell them what was information and what was disinformation.
Other political contemporaries are working on the same problem.
Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to use the Digital Services Act to force the censoring of Americans.
She has also suggested the arrest of Americans who she views as spreading disinformation.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) 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.
There is, of course, another possibility: that there is no existential danger of disinformation.
Rather there are powerful figures who want to control speech in the world for their own purposes.
These are the same rationales and the same voices that have been throughout our history for censorship.
Give me liberty
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.”
Douglass denounced those seeking to deny or limit free speech as making their “freedom a mockery.”
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.”
John Kerry is truly an evil human being. At one forum he called for American farmers to reduce agricultural output to stop climate change. The ramifications would be horrible: without US exports world prices would skyrocket putting hundreds of millions of poor people in jeopardy. While that POS sips champagne and eats caviar in Swiss hotels after flying on private jets he advocates a policy that could lead to the starvation of untold numbers. An Israeli made pager is not good enough for the likes of John Kerry He is a monster!
Wonder how much disassembling his French chateau and shipping it to Aspen for reassembly cost the environment?
Turley– “Of course, Douglass…certainly never met the likes of John Kerry.”
On the contrary, Douglass was familiar with slave owners and their way of thinking.
Recent polls are showing significant gains by Trump among minority voters, e.g., Hispanics, Jews, Blacks, etc. He is approaching 40 percent support or better with these groups which is almost double what he got from them in 2020 and 2016. Now, why would that be? For one, our voting habits tend to follow our religious habits in how they were formed. Many of us are today what our parents were in terms of religious affiliations and our parents were what their parents – our grandparents – were and so forth all the way back to Methuselah.
It’s the same with voting. Most voters today follow the patterns in which they were raised. If your family was Democrat, you automatically adopted that persuasion, just as if your family was Catholic, you automatically adopted that persuasion. Oh yes, there are many deviations and we all know of people who bucked this trend. But do not mistake the exceptions to the rule for the rule.
A lot of our minority brothers and sisters grew up in families that were immigrants to this country and, therefore, had no family ties with American political parties. For this reason, today’s minority voter is less likely to vote party and more likely to vote for the person who represents his or her best interests.
Ironically, the immigrant voter, that is the naturalized citizen who votes, is more likely to represent the ideals of democracy than the old-fashioned homegrown voter that says in so many words, “my daddy was a Democrat, my granddaddy and his daddy were Democrats, and by God, I’ll be a Democrat till the day I die – for better or worse!” That sort of thinking is problematic in a democratic society. It also may explain why the best person is not always selected for the job.
Hats off to our minority voters for teaching us what we should already know and be doing!
I would tell the snooty, better-than-thou Herman Munster Kerry (though Herman was a sweetheart) that he lost me at the bakery where the 51 Intelligence officers decried that the laptop was Russian disinformation. They were not intelligence officers, they were “senior” intelligence officers. The list of propaganda B.S., especially during COVID is a litany of misinformation.
They view us mere citizens as surfs and rabble. I would love to see these arrogant elites dawn work britches and unplug a sewer line or swing a hammer. There might be some who came up through the ranks who could do it, but it would be comical to watch the rest of them with soft, lily white hands give it a try.
These guys are dangerous.
“They view us mere citizens as surfs and rabble.” Indeed. Carlin says it best:
Why do you think the founding fathers thought they needed to back freedom of speech with a law?
“ The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Words as true today as they were 2600 years ago when they were first written down.
The founders understood man’s depravity and tendency toward abuse of power. They experienced it firsthand.
John Kerry is a bandwagoner, a bounder and an intellectual pygmy. His value to Democrat Party power brokers is as a straw man who adorns his appointed offices with a picture of an adolescent summer spent in Kennebunkport tagging along with the young Kennedy rascals
That would be Hyannis; not Kennebunkport
They are mad they are losing their narrative. No one is listening to them. We switch off MSM and get our information from real journalists who not only report news objectively, but who call them out for their lies, corruption, or question them. To all the Clintons, Warrens, Kerrys of the wrold, we say to you, “No.”
Very true
I’m from the government and I’m here to help. NAH!
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help. ”
“Should the government…?” “Nope” – Ron Paul
The Left has gone in whole hog on the suppression of ‘politically incorrect’ speech ever since Frankfurt School NeoMarxist Poobah Herbert Marcuse outlined its dogmatic narrative in his 9most unfortunate) 1965 essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’.
The Left is never so tiresome as when it lectures on ‘truth’. It’s the Leftist version of Dana Carvey’s ‘Church Lady’.
‘There’s nothing more provincial than German intellectuals legislating for the world’ – Prof Michael Sugrue.
…'(most unfortunate)… 🙂
Kerry seems nostalgic for the days of his youth, when the Left controlled many of the major media platforms: most of the major newspapers, the news magazines, and the three large TV networks. In his mind, those were the arbiters of fact and they enforced a mostly liberal approach to most political issues in the US. Of course, there were other news and opinion sources, such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review, but they appealed only to conservative Republicans.
The attack on free speech is an attack on the Wild West of the internet, which undergirds much of the energy of the populism that Kerry objects to. Trump’s megaphone has always been Twitter and its alternatives. The Left depended (previously) on their relative control of Twitter and the other major social media platforms to promote their version of the truth. Without Elon Musk, we would not be having this argument.
A distinct feature of Kerry’s outlook is his certainty in the validity of his opinions. His education, his professional experience, his friends and his news sources, you see, all tell him the same thing. The elite are not only richer than we are; they are better informed. In the information age, where information (often) produces wealth, great wealth and power imply better information, better expertise, and hence the right to greater power.
“A distinct feature of Kerry’s outlook is… (the) elite are not only richer than we are; they are better informed.” Simplfied further…
I’m not certain that Al Franken would be my my first choice for rebutting Kerry. Just sayin’…
Why am I getting those Spanish Inquisition/Nazi interrogation/communist party vibes about this guy and all the ret of those who scream for “approved” messaging only?
Being Fascist isn’t funny…. We need to stop IGNORING THEIR CRIMES.
JAIL the Criminal Democrats by the thousands
Judges, congress, Cabinet, DOJ, FBI, CDC, etc Depriving Americans of Free Speech is a CRIME. Kerry doesn’t just have an Opinion…he is a GOVERNMENT Official!
We need a Nuremberg like trial to jail all these bad actors!
100% correct.
Since they have nothing but peace and love for their own kind, they should be jailed together in one undersized cell with only one commode (and a viewing window for public observations.)
First we need to disinfect our governments, media/ education industries if all progressives before we begin the reconstruction of our nation. You don’t remodel a house infested with termites.
Imagine being a Democrat Voter…voting for 1930’s German/Italian Styled Fascism?
Every Democrat Voters appears to Hate the American Constitution and are for a CIVIL WAR against America
It is time to round up the Criminal Democrats from across government, media, tech, banking, Health, etc and jail them by the 10,000’s for THEIR Crimes and WAR Against the US.
My monotonous reply to you, Professor. Great stuff as usual. You point out better than maybe anyone writing today that these people – your party too – are fascists. But you don’t say it. I suppose you have your reasons (you think more people will read you if you refrain, self-protection, your career, etc.), but it matters what they are called. It’s not name calling when it is true. They don’t refrain even when they lie and people need to hear them called that by rational, freedom-loving intellectuals like yourself.
As to Kerry, he has long been one of the worst of a bad bunch. In 2004 when he ran, I already thought him one of the most malicious and evil in politics, and back then, I was still the kind of moderate who thought both sides were about even in their misdeeds. He was the beginning of my seeing the dark change in the left.
I agree but coming from a military family I took an almost instant distaste to a man who made so much of his career on being on a Swift Boat and betraying his fellow sailors by calling them war criminals. His career- 3 purple hearts with no service days missed, 2 rich wives and all “public service”. I came from a military family where the emphasis was “it was a job to do, so do it”. “ we all just did our job”. They would not even mention the MOH in the closest or the Navy Cross in a box. Or the german 88 that put my dad in the hospital for 6 months. It was “ just part of the job”. “They invariably said that the real heroes never made it home”.
John Kerry needs to ride off into the sunset and fall off his horse somewhere out of mind and out of sight.
I’m. Reading 1917 by Arthur Herman and he shows that Woodrow was the first with this attitude.
Horse face and Cankles demand it so it must be! Doesn’t anyone see the complete irony and hypocrisy of this? Clinton spread more misinformation creating more disruption to a sitting President than any other in our history. Costing taxpayers an estimated $42 M dollars. Hopefully Trump wins and a new DOJ can address these criminals.
So just to understand your point of view. Anyone can say anything they want, except if you disagree with it? You’re upset that the current administration wants to hold people accountable for what they say. Yet you want trump to win so he can prosecute people for what they say?
ReallY?
It’s not for what they said, it is for the fraud they perpetrated and the millions of tax dollars they cost Americans. If you can’t see that the fraud they perpetrated against a sitting President is sedition and treason. Then I guess you should consider voting Xi.
The dems/left want to be free to spread even more Lies and Propaganda. The little bit of Free Speech we have must be eliminated by these Nazis.
“The little bit of Free Speech we have must be eliminated by these Nazis.”
And yet, here you are saying what you will. Did anybody knock on your door for your arrest for what you said? Not likely. And tomorrow you can rant again about how you can’t rant again. Sheeeeesh.
All you maggots rant about how you can’t rant. Don’t you understand how silly you all sound?
Self- awareness is not a strong suit when it comes to the Trump Cult. They worry about free speech and then vote for a disgraced twice impeached convicted felon who wants to jail journalists and strip licenses from networks.
💩💩💩
Annnnd it’s Fish dip falling further behind…
Kerry states it plainly and thinks that the First Amendment needs a “TRUTH ARBITER”! And who gets the permission to be the person telling us what is or isn’t truthful from politicians who make it a practice to lie and lie? Can that Arbiter come into our homes and take pictures off the walls, books off our shelves, sit at our dinner table, sift through our phones and tell us that our beliefs are wrong! The Constitution does not need to be REWRITTEN, it needs to be REREAD, and adhered to! Mr and Mrs IRRELEVANT need to be told, what the Constitution was meant to do, stay out of our private lives and thoughts. If Jack can stretch his illicit authority to stretch the truth in 100s of pages to stomp on Free Speech to question the “truth” to indict Trump then all of Congress, all 51, and the mouthpieces on The View need to be either “fined or jailed”, per Hillary! You see where this goes…if not, you are the mouse that is about to be crushed in the mouse trap. Not us. Texas has a phrase, “Come and Take It!”
“Horse face and Cankles demand it so it must be! Doesn’t anyone see the complete irony and hypocrisy of this?” They and everyone else sees it. “They” simply don’t care.
To save “George” the effort:
Turley does not give the whole context. He’s misleading you, is disingenuous, and is merely feeding MAGA rage. Plus, this piece is another pathetic attempt to sell his book, which probably isn’t doing well.
Anyone who disagrees with me has problems with reading comprehension.
Sam, his article is an opinion. You stup!d person.
Why do you call someone stupid!d? Why throw out 2nd grad insults? Are you following your cult leader that hasn’t evolved past the 4 year old level of civility?
Uh hem , you’ve defamed Sam.
How about your book Sam? You can plug it here. Let’s see it. Oh never published one huh? Stoopid person.
“Oh never published one huh?”
More than one.
But I think you misread my comment, which was a mockery of “George.” (Or did I misread your reply?)
Sam,
Good one!
You might find time to read his book, which is deeply researched and cogently written. Can you imagine John Kerry writing an opposing study of the value of speech suppression?
-it would be like George or Gigi or Dennis “writing an opposing study of the value of [their daily commentary].”
The First Amendment, viewed from a structural view point in a two party state, is the sole tool for preventing excessive actions of one party against the other. Currently, lawfare seems to be the activist’s shortcut, and appears to nullify free speech.
“Of course, Douglass knew nothing of social media and he certainly never met the likes of John Kerry….”
Oh, I suspect he did. The John Kerry sort of person is ubiquitos worldwide and throughout history.
I tried the cheese flavored Ubiquitos watching the NFL last week and they were great.
Kevin, I am just having fun with your typo, your comment was spot on! Kerry is nothing new, just another puffed up grandee thinking he is above it all. The guy seems mentally ill from being so rich for so long.
BTW, Kerry made his money the old fashioned way, he got it from his second wife’s dead husband.
My friend worked in the Pentagon as high high ranking military officer, he told me that Kerry was left of left. He’s a Commie.
Somehow these type never go extinct despite serving no useful purpose.
The conversion of the D Party is complete. There are now enough prominent members advocating controlled speech to make the accusation of censorship advocacy irrefutable.
Once the Government controls speech . . . the next move would be what . . . establishing the, “Thinkpol” department . . . as in George Orwell’s Oceania?
Kerry forgets about the time when LBJ and the Nixon could have selected the truth arbiters. He would have never had his chance to toss ribbons over the US Capitol fence in protest. (But were they his? Was he engaging in some disinformation? Lots of online articles about this).
Just another grifter
So are they asking for the 1st amendment to be done away with, or that people spewing lies actually be held accountable for those lies? I can’t tell by the quote.
When JD spewed lies about Haitians he dared to call out the moderators for fact checking him. How dare they fact check the lies he spews.
If JT had as much anger over those spewing lies as he does protecting those lies, he might have a bit more credibility.
‘If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.” (Carl Sagan)
How DARE that deplorable JD call out lying moderators that agreed they would not do ABC style “fact checking” on anybody – but then did exactly that to try bailing out Walz.
And how DARE deplorable JD point out that those lying moderators were lying (or wrong), by pointing out they came into the country ILLEGALLY after the moderators said they entered America legally.
Democrat moderators and their fanboys long ago lost any credibility after their firehose spewing lies for the last 16 years.
It’s strange, you come here everyday and use the same boring language and logic…it is so bad that I can only think you actually are trying to play devil’s advocate and don’t really mean any of it because your assertions and defenses and lies and obfuscations are so transparent, one can only conclude that you are simply making crap up for the sake of argument. gigi and pennis too – are these people turley’s students just exercising their debate skills? Surely they are not mature adults.