Democrats speak of the fight against “Russian disinformation,” while the Republicans pledge to combat “fake news” about Israel. Whatever you choose to call it, there is a bipartisan effort to rein in our First Amendment protections, which former Secretary of State John Kerry recently referred to as a “major block” to the government’s ability to combat misinformation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Kerry went on to lament that the inability to control the message makes it difficult to govern absent the existence of a truth arbiter, a role government has increasingly tried to assume through backdoor means.
For example, the Twitter Files exposed government collusion with social media platforms to censor stories like the Hunter Biden laptop report before the 2020 election. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya and other dissenting voices were shadow-banned or censored under White House pressure.
These examples highlight the government’s growing reliance on private-sector cooperation to stifle opposition under the guise of protecting public discourse. Yet the idea of labeling speech as “misinformation” or its messenger as a “foreign agent” is not new – it echoes historical attempts to discredit dissent.
This tactic has resurfaced with a vengeance with the rediscovery of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), now a favored tool for deplatforming speakers under the pretext of transparency while stigmatizing dissent as foreign interference. As you will soon see, FARA is Un-American!
Hellbound and Down 