In the last 48 hours, two extraordinary videos have arrived on X.
The first features John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President in 2004.
The second is of Bill Gates, the world’s fifth-richest man and, with George Soros, its top left-leaning charity funder.
Kerry’s video runs a mere two minutes. Gates’s lasts barely 30 seconds.
And both should terrify anyone who believes in free speech. Both reveal that the top of the American left now explicitly rejects the First Amendment.
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(The fight for our most basic rights is about to get ugly. And I need your help.)
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Gates then went on to suggest that artificial intelligence could be used to censor dissenting speech instantly, since allowing it for even a day would be too long.
The left’s antipathy to the First Amendment began in 2016, when Donald Trump overcame the hostility of the entire establishment and a massive fundraising disadvantage to beat Hillary Clinton.
It worsened in 2020 and 2021, when aggressive media and government coordination around Covid fearmongering and mRNA promotion could not completely suppress dissent on social media. That pushback led to open (and secret) pressure on the platforms to censor.
Now, the fact Donald Trump has much more than a puncher’s chance of returning to the White House in November appears to be driving the left insane. Thus the increasing calls for still more aggressive government-led censorship efforts.
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(This is no joke. They forced Twitter to ban me once. Stand with me. )
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Where this goes I do not know.
But as a wise man once said: when people tell you who they are, believe them.
Kerry refers to “disinformation,” a term I try not to use. Technically, “disinformation” can be defined as deliberate lying, but people like Kerry too often conflate it with “misinformation” – which they define as factually incorrect information but very frequently turns out to be simply information or opinion they don’t like.
For example, if I write that electric cars are not actually better for the environment than gasoline-powered cars, Kerry might call that “misinformation” – or even “disinformation.” In reality, it is OPINION and depends on one’s view of, for example, the costs of mining cobalt against the possibility of long-term carbon capture. I may be wrong, I may be right, but I am not presenting a verifiably untrue statement.
So much of what the left calls misinformation falls in this category.