By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | October 01, 2024
John Kerry, maybe the most pompous politician of our lifetimes, admits that the First Amendment is an obstacle to the Democrats’ hard-left agenda. It’s a deeply disturbing statement perfectly in line with the party’s irrepressible authoritarian urges.
At last week’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings of the World Economic Forum, Kerry, a long-time U.S. senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state for four years of the eight-year Obama nightmare, Joe Biden’s climate czar and a failed presidential candidate, acknowledged that his party wants to censor speech that it doesn’t approve of.
“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence,” he said. “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.”
This was ominously followed by his warning that “there are some people in our country who prepared to implement change by other means.”
His party will take that as a reference to Jan. 6. But the rest of us should understand that he’s saying that Democrats can take power the easy way or the hard way – so just turn it over to us in November and we won’t have to be more coercive than we already are.
Kerry also complained that “it’s really hard to govern today.” This simply means that Democrats are finding that getting their way with policy is more difficult than in the past because the dissenting voices are now being heard on social media and from news sources that don’t believe it’s their job to put Democrats in office and keep them there.
It’s impossible to watch the video without feeling the chill winds of censorship. Yet there’s no surprise. The political left began to abandon free speech through political correctness, then slowly, as if it had been part of a grand long-term plan, move on to government suppression of speech.
Maybe it’s a mandate from the constituency. A Pew Poll taken last year found that “the share of Democrats who support government intervention has grown from 40% in 2018 to 70% in 2023.”
Or it could be the Democratic voters are taking the cue from party leaders, who want to crush free speech so that they can install a permanent one-party rule in our country. This was clearly the objective of the 22 Democratic state attorneys general and the Washington, D.C., attorney general, who earlier this year filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to reverse the decision of a lower court that ordered the Biden administration to cease pressuring social media to censor speech.
Either way, the Democratic Party is serious about quashing speech that inconveniences its campaign to establish a political power base that cannot be challenged. Liberty is on the ballot this fall, just as it is every time a Democrat runs for office anywhere in this country.
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.
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