“Curbing” Free Speech: John Kerry Criticizes the First Amendment as “a Major Block” for Censorship

By: Jonathan Turley | October 3, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/10/03/curbing-free-speech-john-kerry-denounces-the-first-amendment-as-a-major-block-to-removing-disinformation/

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 horrible 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.”