Some politicians in the US are itching to take away your free speech rights and, given the chance, if they get enough votes, they will. How do we know? Because they tell us that they will.
Last week, at a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on climate, former US Secretary of State and Biden-Harris administration climate envoy John Kerry complained that the First Amendment prevents the US government from shutting down what it deems to be "disinformation" on social media, which makes it more difficult to "hammer disinformation out of existence... particularly in democracies," he lamented.
What he does not mention of course is who decides what is "disinformation," or if it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think.
What comes immediately to mind are government narratives such as the Russia collusion hoax, that Covid-19 was transmitted by bats, or that Hinter Biden's laptop, according to no fewer than 51 former intelligence officials, was "disinformation." All those allegations of disinformation, we now know, were themselves disinformation.
"The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing," Kerry said.
"It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle. So it is really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 40-50 years I've been involved in this. 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."
What is Kerry's solution to the Democrat conundrum of not yet being able to shut down the internet like they can in Communist China? Winning the upcoming election.
"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 said in what can probably best be described as a significant heads-up.
Earlier last month, Hillary Clinton was trotted out; she went on MSNBC with host Rachel Maddow to say that "disinformation," and "propaganda" -- seemingly codewords for any opposition to a political agenda -- should be criminalized, no less. But first, incredibly, she compulsively rehashed the Russia collusion hoax and disinformation campaign of eight years ago -- which her presidential campaign had fabricated. Clinton said:
"It's important to indict the Russians, just as [Robert] Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States."
Recently, a video of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has also been circulating in which he alleged that there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." Some have implied that Walz does not understand the First Amendment, but his statement, arguably, should not be viewed so much as being about what the First Amendment is, which he as Governor of Minnesota obviously knows, but what some political leaders would like it to be.
Alexandra Occasio-Cortez also joined in the call for censorship:
"We have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation. It's one thing to have differing opinions, but it's another thing entirely to just say things that are false. And so that is something we are looking into."
What are these politicians "looking into?" How to abolish the First Amendment? How to circumvent it?
Democrat megadonor Bill Gates recently implied that those who share drawbacks of vaccines, in which he is heavily invested, should have free speech curtailed:
"We should have free speech, but if you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries that even the U.S. should have rules? And then if you have rules, what is it?" he asked. "Is there some AI that encodes those rules because you have billions of activity, and if you catch it a day later, the harm is done."
Democrats have not stuck to fantasizing about totalitarian utopias – they have censored and misinformed Americans on several occasions:
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in late August, admitted that the Biden-Harris Administration had "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans around the Covid-19 pandemic and claimed to regret not having stood up to them:
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."
Will the Supreme Court, which in June threw out lower court rulings that the Biden administration had coerced social media companies to comply with its censorship on the grounds of lack of evidence, take up the case again?
Zuckerberg also noted that he had agreed to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story on his social media platforms after the FBI, treacherously, falsely "warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election." As it turned out, it was 51 former US intelligence officials who deliberately lied in a 2020 letter that the laptop story was Russian disinformation -- lies that signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers still refuse to apologize for, with some of them instead referring to their treacherous behavior as "patriotism."
Evidently, according to some of those in power, government disinformation is good -- freedom of speech for the citizenry is bad.
There are more examples of government-initiated censorship and disinformation campaigns directed at Americans. In testimony by journalist and author Michael Shellenberger in March 2023, he speaks of an entire "Censorship Industrial Complex," which includes a multitude of organizations, reportedly funded by the Biden-Harris administration that all contribute to growing and maintaining the censorship of US citizens. He mentioned, among other examples, the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory, and those who called the Covid lab-leak hypothesis as a "debunked conspiracy theory."
"This disinformation campaign was advanced by National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins and NIAID's Anthony Fauci, who oversaw the U.S. government's response to COVID. Emails made available show that at least two leading researchers told Collins and Fauci in February 2020 that a lab leak was possible and likely. Collins and Fauci publicly dismissed the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory even though they knew it wasn't, perhaps for fear of harming cooperation between the U.S. and China or of being implicated in the pandemic since Fauci was instrumental in offshoring this research to Wuhan after Obama banned it on U.S. soil."
One of the most exorbitant and costly government disinformation campaigns has centered on climate change. To get people to submit to this agenda, dissenting voices need to be censored, so that only one "consensus", as Kerry put it, exists. In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration's Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded that social media stop certain people from publishing their expertise and views.
"The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation," she told Axios, agreeing that "misinformation and disinfo around climate [is] a threat to public health itself."
In her preposterous self-righteousness and disregard for the First Amendment, she was in fact only parroting what her globalist colleagues at the UN are already implementing.
The UN's Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming announced in October 2022, at a World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Meeting that the UN "owns the science" on climate change and that it had therefore partnered with Big Tech, including Google, to launch staggering censorship and disinformation campaigns.
"We partnered with Google," Fleming said. "For example, if you Google 'climate change,' you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources." According to Fleming, the partnership came about after U.N. officials were "shocked to see that when we Googled 'climate change,' we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top."
"We're becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do," she declared with a straight face.
In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration had attempted to do something similar in the US, when it actually created an Orwellian Ministry of Truth called the "Disinformation Governance Board," under the Department of Homeland Security. The initiative met with so much backlash that it had to be scrapped just three weeks later.
No one can tell you that some politicians do not have totalitarian ambitions. They have not even tried to hide it.
Robert Williams is based in the United States.
