Why is it we hear the loudest shrieks for democracy coming from those who most clearly want to remove all limits to their own power and lord it over their fellow citizens?
In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen celebrities and even major political figures on the Left openly call for tyranny. They no longer bother to hide it.
The same people who insinuate that former President Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” long for dictatorship and are “existential threats to democracy” are seemingly eager to tell anyone who will listen that the answer to our problems is stripping citizens of their God-given rights and telling them what to think.
Democratic politicians with real access to power also have been cavalierly demanding the removal of roadblocks to one-party rule and are eagerly using the power of the state to punish their political opponents for wrongthink.
Last Wednesday, former Secretary of State John Kerry said the quiet part out loud at a World Economic Forum panel discussion on green energy, where he fretted over the state of “democracies.”
He lamented the fact that the United States has this icky thing called the First Amendment that protects the right of free speech, making it a lot harder for global elites to filter information they don’t like.
“You know, 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.,” Kerry said at the WEF, referring to social media platforms.
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.
Take a listen to this nonsense for yourself—if you can stomach it.
I actually know plenty of “sick,” biased sources of disinformation with an agenda that can and should be “hammered out of existence”—our leviathan of federal, state, and local bureaucratic agencies that shuttered the country during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
You know, actual democracy would take care of that. But that’s clearly not what Kerry is talking about. He certainly doesn’t want to limit in any way the power of unelected government agencies over your life. Just the opposite.
Kerry fears that the decentralized nature of our evolving media landscape will mean that the institutions his side of the political spectrum have controlled for so long will no longer be able to control political narratives as they once did. And those institutions may come under direct democratic assault from angry, fed-up Americans sick of being lied to.
In other words, he’s beginning to fear the people—as the Founding Fathers intended. How terrible for him.
It’s not just Kerry who desperately wants to run roughshod over the Constitution. A few weeks ago, another former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, suggested that people who amplify disinformation about Russia should be arrested. Oh, the irony.
Where the Clintons and Kerrys of the world could, for a time, rely on institutions to suffocate any idea they deemed verboten, now average citizens can seek the truth without strict institutional filters. And they have reason to do so, given how many of those institutions in recent years have proved to be hopelessly ideological and untrustworthy.
Instead of a mea culpa, the institutions and the people who control them want to double down on their power. They want to arbitrarily force people to accept what they say as truth and to stamp out any resistance to their power.
It’s they who want dictatorship, but one with the soothing sound of a certain kind of consensus, uniparty liberalism that they feel comfortable with.
And they are so confident in their iron grip over society that they are willing to go on TV and tell you that they plan to silence you and tear down constitutional government to get their way. Don’t you dare squawk about it. “Tone down the rhetoric,” they say.
But these liberal Democrats are neither liberal, nor democratic. It’s they who are bringing “fascism” and dictatorship to America.
This article was written by Jarrett Stepman and originally published by The Daily Signal.
