During a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel discussion last week, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry (D-Mass.) said the First Amendment was a “major block” to censoring climate misinformation. Responding to a question about “tackling climate misinformation,” he criticized media sources that disagree with his partisan narrative, complaining:
Look, if people go to only 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 the ability to be able to just you know hammer it out of existence.
Kerry said controlling media narratives has become difficult with the proliferation of alternative media sources, and described legacy media as fact “referees.” He also mentioned there has been discussion on how to counter mainstream media competition, stating:
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. People go 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.
Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) responded to Kerry’s comments on X, noting that elite Democrats hate the inalienable rights the U.S. Constitution recognizes:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agreed with Kerry’s conclusion that the First Amendment limits the ability to violate the free-speech rights of U.S. citizens, stating on X:
