Only Tyrants Fear Free Speech

“It’s really hard to govern today,” former Climate Czar John Kerry complained at the World Economic Forum. “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 when it comes to a source that Kerry, the WEF and their political allies don’t like, “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

Four years ago, Obama offered a similar complaint that, “if we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” Obama and Kerry’s definition of democracy is a system where everyone agrees on what’s true and what isn’t.

This regime of facts was very much on display when ABC News moderators crudely intervened in the last presidential debate to support their chosen candidate. CBS News was barred from having its moderators intervene directly in the debate and instead resorted to showing promos for its website where its activist reporters will ‘fact check’ the vice presidential candidates.

Having debates is a curious thing under a government of facts whose premise, as Kerry and Obama argued, is that there is nothing to debate. Candidates for public office can state their views only to have the public be told which of those views is correct and which is wrong.

And then it’s the moderators and the agenda they represent that is really running the country.

Obama argued that there can be no democracy where there are disputes, but it’s actually the other way around, where there are no disputes, there is no democracy. The greater the disputes, the greater the democracy. The fewer the disputes, the less democracy there is.

Democrats claim to want to uphold democracy. They chant about the power of the people. But if what they really want is to implement the popular view, why are they so terrified of it?

The problem, as Kerry and many others have already explained, is that they are not doing what the people want, but convincing the people to want whatever the government does. Their version of democracy requires harnessing the will of the people and then disregarding it where it differs from their will. There’s a name for that sort of thing and it isn’t democracy.

Democracies can be justified by the will of the people but tyrannies rely on some abstract virtue. In a secular society where religion is a diminishing force, Democrats claim that their tyranny is based on the absolute truth of their beliefs as proven by science, by experts and the facts. Both science and facts however arise from a trial and error process not authoritarian assertion.

What the Democrats offer isn’t democracy, nor is it science: it’s dogma propping up a tyranny.

Scientists and democracy proponents don’t fear dissenting ideas. Democrats and tyrants do.

Ever since Hillary lost the election, Kerry has been the latest in a long line of Democrats complaining about social media. “”The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing,” he moaned at the WEF because it undermines any governing consensus.

“The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this,” Obama had threatened.

A year later the Biden administration was regularly intimidating Facebook and Twitter into taking down speech, including jokes, that it found objectionable in the name of fighting misinformation.

California’s Gov. Newsom just signed bills into law cracking down on AI generated memes. Congressional Democrats are mulling new forms of action over what they call ‘deepfakes’. These serial tech panics invariably relate to speech and the empowerment of individuals to dissent from whatever artificial consensus has been imposed on the public by the authorities.

The common denominator is a fear of ideas. If speech is decentralized then it can’t be controlled. And if speech can’t be controlled then, as Kerry put it, governance is impossible.

The purpose of government then becomes to control speech by controlling technology.

Big Tech monopolies that centralize technology allow for direct integration with the state. Wealthy Democrat donors fund media outlets which act as official censors through their ‘fact-checking’ operations. Tech platforms are pressured by the government into censoring whatever the media objects to and paying the media for the privilege of its censorship.

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and Mark Zuckerberg’s disinterest in continuing to prop up Facebook censorship have crippled the technological end of the public-private censorship regime which has infuriated not only Kerry but many other members of his political movement.

NBC News claims that “misinformation” about the election is “running rampant” on Facebook. Misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes and other similarly constructed terms treat speech as a dangerous thing. Misinformation “spreads” like a virus, it “runs rampant” until it’s censored. Its existence threatens the governing consensus through which the regime rules the people.

The obsession with stamping out “misinformation” has so overridden the liberal DNA of free speech that the ACLU now fights ‘misinformation’ rather than upholding free speech and PEN America urges that it is “important to correct misleading or false information”. It’s important because by controlling information, their political allies and agenda control the people.

John Kerry has a point. It’s hard to govern when everyone is free to speak their mind. That’s why America was a bold experiment in freedom whose purpose was to be hard to govern. Americans being hard to govern is not, as Obama and Kerry think, a bug, but a feature.

Pundits have been complaining that America is ungovernable not just for the last twenty years, but the last two hundred years, and being ungovernable is what makes us a free people. In the haze of trigger warnings, warning labels, hate speech mandates and speech crackdowns, it becomes all too easy to forget that free speech is our natural birthright as Americans.

And the establishment wants us to trade that birthright for some fact checking pottage.

European powers were terrified of a country where anyone could say anything. And they still are. Because a country where people are free to say anything is also free to do anything.

America’s accomplishments would not have been possible without its freedoms.

The war on speech is always carried on in the name of some imaginary crisis, hate, social justice or climate change, that requires the government to override those freedoms. Kerry and Obama object to allowing people to debate whether the crisis is real because the crisis is the source of their totalitarian powers. And if they lose the debate then they lose their tyranny.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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