You may hate Hillary Clinton and John Kerry with a burning passion, but you don’t hate them enough. In a recent interview at the Clinton Global Initiative, the former First Lady, seated next to Hollywood’s own bobblehead Matt Damon, complained about the insufficiently obedient journalists: “The press needs a consistent narrative about the danger that Trump poses,” she suggested. She didn’t explain what mechanism should be implemented to ensure proper compliance, but in a later CNN interview, she expressed support for social media censorship.
Fellow Boomer and former presidential nominee Kerry appeared to be doing just that — he evidently proposed winning democratically to then do away with constitutional protections of individual liberties, presumably instituting a dictatorship:
[O]ur First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it [disinformation] out of existence. 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 blamed social media for the proliferation of undesirable information:
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. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.
Although the former senator echoed Barack Obama’s infamous lament that he doesn’t have the power of a Chinese president, he was wistful about some mythical American past when ruling the plebs was easy:
So it’s really hard to build consensus today, harder than at any time in 40-45 years that I’ve been involved.
Yet the consensus going back forty-45 years was passionately pro-free speech. Both the right and the left, the young and the old, generally agreed that First Amendment rights were a critical part of the American experiment — even if we disagreed about everything else.
To be sure, there were some attempts to undermine this most quintessentially American freedom. For instance, in 1985, the future Second Lady, then the wife of a Tennessee senator, Tipper Gore, tried to censor salacious popular music. However, having been met with resistance, including, most notably, from left-wing entertainers, she settled on Parental Advisory stickers on recordings.
Fifteen years later, her husband Al used his First Amendment freedoms to fear-monger disinformation about what was then called global warming. Before the advent of social media, his work hammered out something like semi-consensus for governing — it enabled the continuous efforts to restrict the use of energy, places of dwelling, and ability to move. In the process, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars changed hands. In the process, the Gores became multimillionaire beachside property owners. Freedom of speech served Boomer Democrats well — now they are working to ensure it can’t be used to challenge them.
Today, the popular pro-First Amendment consensus is shattering. If the 1960s student protests were inspired by the University of California, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the ability to express oneself was seen as a part of liberation, college students today are skeptical of these kinds of ideas. According to the 2017 Brookings Institution survey, 44% do not believe that the Bill of Rights covers “hate speech,” and 51% think it’s acceptable to shut down an unwanted speaker. It’s a complex phenomenon with multiple explanations, but I am not aware of a theory that blames America’s softening on freedom of speech on social media disinformation. Kerry’s argument that digital platforms dissolve consensus doesn’t hold water.
It’s not surprising that the new crop of politicians picked up censorious moods. For instance, in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked on Antifa/BLM rioters:
The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable. To those who complain that protest demands make others uncomfortable, that’s the point.
Four years later, she defended the Qatar-backed Students for Justice in Palestine, blocking Jews from sections of college campuses as “peaceful.”
The current Democrat Vice Presidential nominee and his wife display the exact inversion of a prohibition on speech and endorsement of violence. Gwen Walz recalled with odd fascination how she kept the windows open during the race riots to inhale the fumes of burning tires — our potential second family views goons with toxic reverence. At the same time, her husband, the governor of Minnesota, is on record believing that the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech and misinformation.
Walz and AOC are relative newcomers. On the other hand, Clinton and Kerry have been around for nearly half a century. Both started in the 1960s student and anti-war movements, where free speech was a rallying cry. They initially positioned themselves within the counterculture—it didn’t occur to anyone to question their commitment. It now looks like their commitment to the First Amendment was strategic.
The countercultural aura was anarchic and irreverent. It went along with the design of our nation—the Founding Fathers created a republic that would be difficult to govern because any significant change would require a consensus that would be near-impossible to arrange.
The fact that the opponents of the First Amendment bring up misinformation and hate speech — the supposed limits of free expression — while they assert the right to violence and intimidation through rioting and blocking roads suggests that they are trying to create entirely new power dynamics. The old consensus on tolerance and freedom of expression is in danger.
Individuals with access to power—think BLM and SJP, not January 6—are given the mandate to use the heckler’s veto. The Democrat Party vanguard, including legacy politicians, is waiting for the opportunity to consolidate their grip on the nation via the democratic process and manipulate social media platforms to ensure ascendancy. How many Americans want their votes back?
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