US: In Danger of Losing Freedom of Speech, Replaced by Politburo
by Robert Williams • October 3, 2024 at 5:00 am
What [Biden-Harris administration climate envoy John Kerry] does not mention, of course, is who decides what is "disinformation," or if it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think.
Recently, a video of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has also been circulating in which he alleged that there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." Some have implied that Walz does not understand the First Amendment, but his statement, arguably, should not be viewed so much as being about what the First Amendment is, which he as Governor of Minnesota obviously knows, but what some political leaders would like it to be.
[Meta founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg also noted that he had agreed to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story on his social media platforms after the FBI, treacherously, falsely "warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election." As it turned out, it was 51 former US intelligence officials who deliberately lied in a 2020 letter that the laptop story was Russian disinformation -- lies that signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers still refuse to apologize for, with some of them instead referring to their treacherous behavior as "patriotism."
Evidently, according to some of those in power, government disinformation is good -- freedom of speech for the citizenry is bad.
In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration's Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded that social media stop certain people from publishing their expertise and views.
"We partnered with Google... For example, if you Google 'climate change,' you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources." According to Fleming, the partnership came about after U.N. officials were "shocked to see that when we Googled 'climate change,' we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.... We're becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do." — Melissa Fleming, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, yahoo.com, October 4, 2022.
In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration had attempted to do something similar in the US, when it actually created an Orwellian Ministry of Truth called the "Disinformation Governance Board," under the Department of Homeland Security. The initiative met with so much backlash that it had to be scrapped just three weeks later.
No one can tell you that some politicians do not have totalitarian ambitions. They have not even tried to hide it.
Some politicians in the US are itching to take away your free speech rights and, given the chance, if they get enough votes, they will. How do we know? Because they tell us that they will.
Last week, at a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on climate, former US Secretary of State and Biden-Harris administration climate envoy John Kerry complained that the First Amendment prevents the US government from shutting down what it deems to be "disinformation" on social media, which makes it more difficult to "hammer disinformation out of existence... particularly in democracies," he lamented.
What he does not mention of course is who decides what is "disinformation," or if it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think.