URGENT: The left is going to war on the First Amendment
They're no longer even trying to hide their disdain for free speech. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
In the last 48 hours, two extraordinary videos have arrived on X.
The first features John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President in 2004.
The second is of Bill Gates, the world’s fifth-richest man and, with George Soros, its top left-leaning charity funder.
Kerry’s video runs a mere two minutes. Gates’s lasts barely 30 seconds.
And both should terrify anyone who believes in free speech. Both reveal that the top of the American left now explicitly rejects the First Amendment.
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(The fight for our most basic rights is about to get ugly. And I need your help.)
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The video featuring Kerry comes out of a World Economic Forum (naturally) event last Wednesday. Near its end, Kerry was asked about climate change skepticism.
But he answered far more broadly. Kerry first attacked social media outlets, saying:
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 -
Before pivoting to an even broader assault on basic Constitutional rights:
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… our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it [dissenting opinon1] out of existence.
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Yes, Kerry openly called the First Amendment a “block” to his desire to regulate social media outlets that allow dissenting points of view.
Meanwhile, in his video, which came from a CNBC interview, Gates offered an even more specific example of speech that needed to be curtailed - vaccine skepticism:
We should have free speech, but if you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, you know, where are those boundaries, that even the US, ahh, should have rules...
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(He’s just a kindly old guy, he’s not evil at all. Really!)
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Gates then went on to suggest that artificial intelligence could be used to censor dissenting speech instantly, since allowing it for even a day would be too long.
The left’s antipathy to the First Amendment began in 2016, when Donald Trump overcame the hostility of the entire establishment and a massive fundraising disadvantage to beat Hillary Clinton.
It worsened in 2020 and 2021, when aggressive media and government coordination around Covid fearmongering and mRNA promotion could not completely suppress dissent on social media. That pushback led to open (and secret) pressure on the platforms to censor.
Now, the fact Donald Trump has much more than a puncher’s chance of returning to the White House in November appears to be driving the left insane. Thus the increasing calls for still more aggressive government-led censorship efforts.
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(This is no joke. They forced Twitter to ban me once. Stand with me. )
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Where this goes I do not know.
But as a wise man once said: when people tell you who they are, believe them.
Kerry refers to “disinformation,” a term I try not to use. Technically, “disinformation” can be defined as deliberate lying, but people like Kerry too often conflate it with “misinformation” - which they define as factually incorrect information but very frequently turns out to be simply information or opinion they don’t like.
For example, if I write that electric cars are not actually better for the environment than gasoline-powered cars, Kerry might call that “misinformation” - or even “disinformation.” In reality, it is OPINION and depends on one’s view of, for example, the costs of mining cobalt against the possibility of long-term carbon capture. I may be wrong, I may be right, but I am not presenting a verifiably untrue statement.
So much of what the left calls misinformation falls in this category.
Kerry has an odd take on what consensus means. It’s hard to build consensus unless you can shut down your opposition?
I think we need to name the information that some people didn’t get because they don’t read widely or that information was censored. I just had an unpleasant weekend with my longtime friend who loves to throw around the mis and the dis words, but she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know because she never encountered different ideas and opinions and different facts. What do we call information you don’t know because of censorship or or lack of curiosity about another view.