Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

Censorship Industrial Complex

John Kerry tells WEF panel that First Amendment is ‘major block’ to pushing leftist climate agenda

Published

1 year ago

4 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Stephen Kokx

John Kerry complained to a World Economic Forum meeting that the First Amendment ‘stands as a major block’ that prevents the government from being able to ‘hammer’ disfavored opinions ‘out of existence.’

Former Biden climate czar John Kerry told a World Economic Forum meeting this week that free speech is an obstacle to forcing green ideology onto the world’s population.  

Kerry, 80, was speaking about energy on Wednesday when he expressed a desire to “curb” the flow of information about environmentalism in order to “have some accountability” for persons he believes are not promoting the facts.

“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,” Kerry said. 

Kerry has been one of the loudest voices in the Western world to push the green agenda in recent years. During his many public appearances, he has promoted the “Great Reset,” advocated for people receiving the experimental COVID-19 shot, warned about the so-called dangers of overpopulation, and has claimed that 15 million people are dying every year because of greenhouse gas emissions.  

In further disturbing comments on Wednesday, Kerry lamented that there is not a centralized authority that can determine truth from fiction. 

“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,” he said. “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.” 

Kerry provided additional remarks about this year’s presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. 

“I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough of 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?”

Kerry has been widely criticized on social media by an array of public figures for his comments, which betray an autocratic mindset.  

“John Kerry is saying he wants to violate the Constitution,” X owner Elon Musk recalled.  

“John Kerry says the quiet part out loud,” Townhall columnist Phil Holloway observed. “The [First Amendment] and the entire Bill of Rights was designed as a ‘roadblock’ against a tyrannical government. It’s a feature, not a bug.” 

Kerry was succeeded in his role as special presidential envoy for climate by former Clinton adviser John Podesta in March 2024. He was previously a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts and secretary of state under Barack Obama. During his lengthy career in public life, Kerry has worked to expand pro-abortion and pro-LGBT policies in opposition to his self-professed Catholic faith.  

Before Post

Related Topics:

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

More from this author
Business / 2 hours ago

Canada’s climate agenda hit business hard but barely cut emissions

Censorship Industrial Complex / 3 hours ago

Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis slams Liberal plan targeting religious exemption in hate speech bil

Energy / 7 hours ago

Canada following Europe’s stumble by ignoring energy reality

Censorship Industrial Complex

Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis slams Liberal plan targeting religious exemption in hate speech bil

Published on December 3, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Bill C-9 is being called an attempt to criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts in Canada.

Canadian Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis blasted a federal government plan to criminalize parts of the Bible as an attack on “Christians,” warning it sets a “dangerous precedent” for Canadian society.

“The Liberal government has agreed to remove the religious exemption in their hate speech bill, C-9, to secure Bloc support and push this bill through Parliament,” Lewis wrote Tuesday on X.

“This is not a minor adjustment. This shift comes at the direct expense of Christians and other religious communities across Canada.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, a government insider revealed that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws by modifying a bill.

Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act, as reported by LifeSiteNews, has been blasted by constitutional experts as allowing empowered police and the government to go after those it deems have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way.

A recent media report states that the Carney Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois want to amend Bill C-9, which would “criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre noted yesterday on X.

Lewis warned that “no government” should “ever negotiate away religious liberty in exchange for political support.”

“No party should decide which beliefs are acceptable and which ones carry criminal risk,” she warned.

She added that the Liberal government of Carney’s plan to amend Bill C-9 is a “dangerous precedent.”

Poilievre blasted the Liberals’ plan as well, warning Liberal-Bloc amendments to C-9 will “criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts.”

“Conservatives will oppose this latest Liberal assault on freedom of expression and religion,” he noted on X earlier this week.

In response, the party launched a petition over fear that religious texts could be criminalized.

Liberal MP Marc Miller had said earlier in the year that certain passages of the Bible are “hateful” because of what it says about homosexuality and those who recite the passages should be jailed. As reported by LifeSiteNews, he was recently appointed as a government minister by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Continue Reading

Censorship Industrial Complex

A Democracy That Can’t Take A Joke Won’t Tolerate Dissent

Published on December 2, 2025

By

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Collin May

Targeting comedians is a sign of political insecurity

A democracy that fears its comedians is a democracy in trouble. That truth landed hard when Graham Linehan, the Irish writer behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd, stepped off a plane at Heathrow on Sept. 1, 2025, and was met by five London Metropolitan Police officers ready to arrest him for three posts on X.

Returning to the UK from Arizona, he was taken into custody on the charge of “suspicion of inciting violence”, an allegation levelled with increasing ease in an age wary of offence. His actual “crime” amounted to three posts, the most contentious being a joke about trans-identified men in exclusively female spaces and a suggestion that violated women respond with a swift blow to a very sensitive part of the male’s not-yet-physically-transitioned anatomy.

The reaction to Linehan’s arrest, from J.K. Rowling to a wide array of commentators, was unqualified condemnation. Many wondered whether free speech had become a museum piece in the UK. Asked about the incident, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended his country’s reputation for free expression but declined to address the arrest itself.

Canada has faced its own pressures on comedic expression. In 2022, comedian Mike Ward saw a 12-year legal saga end when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled five-to-four that the Quebec Human Rights Commission had no jurisdiction to hear a complaint about comments Ward made regarding a disabled Quebec boy. The ruling confirmed that human rights bodies cannot police artistic expression when no discrimination in services or employment has occurred. In that case, comic licence survived narrowly.

These cases reveal a broader trend. Governments and institutions increasingly frame comedy as a risk rather than a social pressure valve. In an environment fixated on avoiding perceived harm, humour becomes an easy and symbolic target. Linehan’s arrest underscores the fragility of free speech, especially in comedic form, in countries that claim to value democratic openness.

Comedy has long occupied an unusual place in public life. One of its earliest literary appearances is in Homer’s Iliad. A common soldier, Thersites, is ugly, sharp-tongued and irreverent. He speaks with a freedom others will not risk, mocking Agamemnon and voicing the frustrations of rank-and-file soldiers. He represents the instinct to puncture pretension. In this sense, comedy and philosophy share a willingness to speak uncomfortable truths that power prefers to avoid.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, noted that tragedy imitates noble actions and depicts people who are to be taken seriously. Comedy, by contrast, imitates those who appear inferior. Yet this lowly status is precisely what gives comedy its political usefulness. It allows performers to say what respectable voices cannot, revealing hypocrisies that formal discourse leaves untouched.

In the Iliad, Thersites does not escape punishment. Odysseus, striving to restore order, strikes him with Agamemnon’s staff, and the soldiers laugh as Thersites is silenced. The scene captures a familiar dynamic. Comedy can expose authority’s flaws, but authority often responds by asserting its dominance. The details shift across history, but the pattern endures.

Modern democracies are showing similar impatience. Comedy provides a way to question conventions without inviting formal conflict. When governments treat jokes as misconduct, they are not protecting the public from harm. They are signalling discomfort with scrutiny. Confident systems do not fear irreverence; insecure ones do.

The growing targeting of comedians matters because it reflects a shift toward institutions that view dissent, even in comedic form, as a liability. Such an approach narrows the space for open dialogue and misunderstands comedy’s role in democratic life. A society confident in itself tolerates mockery because it trusts its citizens to distinguish humour from harm.

In October, the British Crown Prosecution Service announced it would not pursue charges against Linehan. The London Metropolitan Police Service also said it would stop recording “non-crime hate incidents”, a controversial category used to document allegations of hateful behaviour even when no law has been broken. These reversals are welcome, but they do not erase the deeper unease that allowed the arrest to happen.

Comedy survives, but its environment is shifting. In an era where leaders are quick to adopt moral language while avoiding meaningful accountability, humour becomes more necessary, not less. It remains one of the few public tools capable of exposing the distance between political rhetoric and reality.

The danger is that in places where Agamemnon’s folly, leadership driven by pride and insecurity, takes root, those who speak uncomfortable truths may find themselves facing not symbolic correction but formal sanctions. A democracy that begins by targeting its jesters rarely stops there.

Collin May is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a lawyer, and Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, with degrees in law (Dalhousie University), a Masters in Theological Studies (Harvard) and a Diplome d’etudes approfondies (Ecole des hautes etudes, Paris).

Continue Reading

Trending

X