A bum charge against John Kerry

So when Republicans and conservatives began berating Kerry over the weekend for the latest thing to "come out of his mouth," I figured at first that he had indeed said something egregious.

"John Kerry and other elite [D]emocrats hate the Constitution," Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, seethed in a post on X. In a column headlined "John Kerry against the First Amendment: Saying the Quiet Part Aloud," National Review's Andrew Stuttaford accused the former secretary of state of a "disturbingly authoritarian" desire to see media outlets "muzzled" if they disagree with him. The respected New York Sun and The Daily Wire played up the story, while the right-wing website PJ Media declared that Kerry had "literally" called for the "end of First Amendment speech rights." Even Elon Musk got in on the act: "John Kerry is saying he wants to violate the Constitution," he claimed.

But Kerry was saying no such thing.

Last week, during a World Economic Forum panel, Kerry fielded a question about "tackling climate misinformation." He responded by noting that there is considerable "anguish over social media" and its impact on society. That impact includes "our problem, particularly in democracies ... of building consensus around any issue." Few would disagree that the rise of the internet dramatically weakened the influence of traditional media outlets that were once trusted sources of information. The old system has "been eviscerated, to a certain degree," Kerry said. People now "self-select where they go for their news, for their information."

In such an environment, bad information competes on an equal footing with good information. That's as true of climate change as it is of immigration, the election, the Middle East, or anything else about which Americans sharply disagree. And there have always been those who would empower the government to punish disfavored opinions or shut down media that contradict the establishment view.

Sometimes those silencers have prevailed. In his chilling 2022 bestseller "American Midnight," for example, historian Adam Hochschild chronicled the Wilson administration's brutal assault on dissent and free expression in the years surrounding World War I. More recently, the Biden administration was credibly accused of using its power to pressure social media companies to suppress information about the COVID-19 pandemic. (The case went to the Supreme Court this year but was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.)

Kerry, however, didn't advocate such censorship. He explained, rather, why it is not an option under the Constitution.

"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," he said. "But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence."

Exactly right. The First Amendment does block public officials from "hammer[ing]" sources of information "out of existence," even if those sources are peddling one-sided disinformation, conspiracy theories, or worse. Kerry wasn't attacking First Amendment protections. He was telling the audience that those protections are a fact of American life. They may make it hard for a divided nation to see eye to eye on anything, but that just means advocates for change must earn a mandate the hard way: by convincing voters.

"What we need is to ... win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you're free to be able to implement change," he said.

Conservatives and Republicans are rightly outraged when their liberal opponents take their words out of context in order to attack them for things they never said. It is equally odious when they do the same thing. Ironically, Kerry has been falsely accused of an offense that other prominent Democrats have committed. Just last month, Hillary Clinton publicly suggested that Americans who engage in Russian-backed election "propaganda" ought to be "civilly or even in some cases criminally charged." Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, insisted in a TV interview that there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."

If Kerry ever says that, I will gladly lead a chorus of condemnation. But I'm not about to trash the man as an enemy of the First Amendment until he deserves it. My fellow conservatives shouldn't either.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."

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