From the Brownstone Institute

Mere words cannot restrain our aspiring censors from weaponizing their power to silence dissent. Enemies of the First Amendment vow to “hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry explained this week, and they are prepared to circumvent legal protections to achieve their aims at all costs.

Kerry, speaking on a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum, lamented what he regards as insufficient censorship of “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free be able to implement change” despite the “major block” of the First Amendment.

But a survey of the dismal state of free speech in the United States shows that Kerry and his allies have already developed means to sidestep the “major block” of our founding documents. Hillary Clinton herself has floated the idea of criminal penalties for the spreading of “misinformation.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly called for “reining in the media environment” so that people cannot just “spew information.”

Earlier this year, journalist Mark Steyn was forced to pay $1 million in “punitive damages” for mocking a climate scientist and comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

The prevailing attorney urged the jury to inflict the punishment to demonstrate the ramifications for engaging in “climate denialism,” which he compared to President Trump’s “election denialism.”

In New York, State Attorney General Letitia James has demonstrated the threat that change poses to our foundational freedoms. During her 2018 campaign for office, James proudly broadcasted her antipathy to the First Amendment, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association.

Her intolerance for dissent led her to target VDare, Peter Brimelow’s immigration-restrictionist website. Unable to find a crime, James used her office to drown the organization in legal costs until it was forced to cease operations. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot.

Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, Roger Ver, and Pavel Durov have undergone similarly brazen persecutions that debunk the supposed safety of free speech protections in the West.

Our Constitution cannot survive Soviet-style justice of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Brimelow, Assange, and Durov were targeted for their dissent, and the regime reverse-engineered means to punish them.

A similar process occurs in academia. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would sanction law professor Amy Wax, a critic of affirmative action, by suspending her for a year and docking her pay. Penn insisted that the sanctions did not implicate freedom of speech and instead concerned “professionalism” standards for its faculty.

But Wax’s sanctions are explicitly based on 26 incidents of wrongthink, including criticizing “anti-assimilation ideas,” “rap culture,” and cities being “run like third world countries” as well as commenting on differences between the sexes and racial groups.

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains, “Penn’s willingness to sidestep academic freedom protections to punish Wax sets a troubling precedent. If scholars with controversial views can lose their academic freedom merely for unspecified ‘unprofessionalism’ concerns, all faculty who hold minority, dissenting, or simply unpopular views are at risk.”

Americans more broadly face the same risk. Neither the First Amendment nor abstract free speech principles will stop the censors in their crusade. They will sidestep legal protections of our freedoms under the guise of ostensibly innocuous sloganeering.

Germany is already showing the way, with a guilty verdict for CJ Hopkins, an American living there who objected to Covid controls. With the documents already in place for “the future of the Internet,” the existing administration has a stated aim to close the Internet to free speech and install censors at all levels. This will necessarily run headlong into a confrontation with Elon Musk, but it will eventually hit Rumble and every other alternative source of information.

The target is the First Amendment but with a precise purpose: securing regime control over the whole population, with a public culture wholly controlled in the interests of protecting the administrative state against populist resistance. Those are the stakes.

Let there be no mistake about this. Your freedom to know the truth is what is at issue.

Author

Brownstone Institute

Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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.  

Kerry is “correct” in that the First Amendment “does stand as a major roadblock to them right now,” former presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted. 

John Kerry is correct. The 1st Amendment DOES stand as a major roadblock to them right now. https://t.co/1QJX2fbw3B

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 30, 2024

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

John Kerry is saying he wants to violate the Constitution https://t.co/im1BJNlfNI

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2024

“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.