“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.
By John Leake
During the World Economic Forum’s ‘Sustainable Development Impact Meetings’ during last week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York City, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry stated that the First Amendment is an impediment to governing the people as he sees fit.
When I was an undergraduate at Boston University, the then Senator dated my 22-year-old girlfriend’s best friend, and he was gracious enough to include me and my girlfriend on dinner dates. Apparently to improve the optics of going on a double date with undergraduates, the Senator usually invited a couple of his political cronies to join us.
He was always extremely polite, and I was grateful to him for allowing me to tag along. On his mother’s side he was descended from the Shaw family—an old Yankee clan that included Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the famous 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War. I too descend from an old Yankee family (the Sears) on my mother’s side, and I often tried to engage him in conversation about American colonial and early federal history, but he never showed much interest. While he served in the Navy during the Vietnam war, my father served in the Marine Corps, but I couldn’t get him to engage on the subject of Vietnam either.
It’s fair enough that he had no interest in speaking frankly with a male undergraduate about history and political philosophy, and I never begrudged him for it. He was interested in my female friend. Nevertheless, his cool aloofness struck me as strange, because I’d never had trouble before in getting an older gentleman to engage me in conversation about history and philosophy. I ended up wondering if maybe he just wasn’t interested in these subjects.
For some time it has occurred to me that our ruling class is no longer interested in the American Constitutional Republic that Madison, Adams, et al. bequeathed to us. Maybe Kerry’s statement at the WEF meeting is the naked truth of how he and his colleagues feel—that is, that the First Amendment is “a major block” to governing the people as they see fit. In making such statements, he seems to be expressing the desire for oligarchic power, unimpeded by Constitutional restraints.