Lurching Towards Tyranny

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth seeing what John Kerry has to say about freedom of speech.

He’s following in the footsteps of Walz, Harris, Pelosi, and Brown Jackson, who have all intimated they would like to curb the power of the First Amendment in the US.

For those of you not Twitterfied, here’s my transcript (lightly edited to remove the stumbles and hesitations).

And I think the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing and it's 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's a fact and what isn't a fact have kind of been eviscerated to a certain degree and people self-select where they go for their news or for their information and then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it's really really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I've been involved in this and there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts etc.

But look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our first amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.

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. Now obviously there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other ways.

I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing. And to me that is part of what this race, this election, is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?

Let me do a rough translation of this

Governments are really angry that their corruption and lies have been exposed on social media. We can no longer get away with manufacturing a consensus and presenting it as some kind of fact. We need to hammer that dissent out of existence and the First Amendment is stopping us. We’re going to change that.

Does that sum it up well enough?

I think so. But the whole thing is really interesting.

The dislike and anguish over social media is certainly growing in government circles, but not amongst users - particularly if you’re on 𝕏.

𝕏 has freed up the marketplace of ideas somewhat. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than Cuckerberg’s Meta, or other platforms that routinely censor stuff.

What Kerry seems to be objecting to is that some ideas seem to win in this marketplace, and sometimes they are ideas the government doesn’t like. He wants to remove this aspect of free ‘market’ competition.

If Kerry & Co had the best ideas, wouldn’t they be the ones that were winning?

But much more interesting than this is his statement that “it's part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue”.

Particularly in democracies?

What he’s expressing here, of course, is the sentiment that he wishes the US were more like places that, erm, aren’t democracies.

Those non-democracies where they can censor and punish and jail people for saying the ‘wrong’ stuff - they don’t have this problem, see? We need to be more like them.

And note that here he is (probably deliberately) mixing up two meanings of the word consensus. There is the kind of consensus that emerges from a meeting where different points of view are expressed and argued. The committee will, eventually, come to some kind of consensus on some plan of action.

There’s also the kind of meaning of consensus as applied to facts - it basically means ‘majority opinion’.

He is mixing up the two here. Government consensus means a different thing to ‘majority opinion’ - it’s an agreement on some course of action or policy. This is not at all threatened by ‘social media’.

What IS threatened by social media is the government’s ability to present their version of events, their narrative, as the consensus, as ‘fact’.

The referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact have kind of been eviscerated to a certain degree

And about bloody time, too. They needed to be eviscerated and, as covid has amply demonstrated, they haven’t been eviscerated nearly enough.

But what does he mean by ‘referees’? Doubtless he is referring to legacy media and various bodies like the FDA or the CDC.

These are people you wouldn’t trust to count the fingers on their hands and get the right answer. Or to pour the piss out of a boot when the instructions are on the heel.

and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation

You mean like the legacy media? Or how companies like Google manipulate search results and their AI platform to massively skew things in favour of one political party?

And then, of course, there’s the money shot :

our first amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence

Yes. That’s precisely what it’s there for. It’s to protect the people from authoritarian arseholes that have managed to steal an election get elected.

It’s meant to be a major block you absolute fuckwit!

Sorry. I will make a cup of tea and attempt to calm down. It may not work.

free to be able to implement change

It’s pretty obvious that the ‘change’ he wants to implement is to curb the power of the First Amendment, isn’t it? That’s what this whole deranged spiel is about.

Disinformation¹? Nasty, dirty, toxic, dangerous, really bad for democracy, worse than Voldemort

First Amendment? Holding back democracy, really needs to be updated for modern times, stopping the government from doing what it wants.

This attack on free speech is not just happening in the US, of course, but across the ‘democratic’ western world. Democracy, they say, must be protected by preventing the very thing that allows democracy to flourish.

We can’t afford to lose this battle for free speech and the right to express our opinions and to be able to listen to the opinions of others. If it goes we may never get it back again.

We are lurching towards tyranny.

1. And we’ll be the ones who get to tell you what that is, thank you very much