John Kerry, who was the 2004 Democratic nominee for president and a high-ranking member of the last two Democratic administrations, said at the World Economic Forum that “our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer” disinformation “out of existence.” Kerry was bemoaning that people could go to get information from any one single “sick” media outlet and that the First Amendment protects those outlets even if they push “disinformation.”

Kerry’s big complaint amounts to thinking that everyone is too dumb to seek out information for themselves and that he and a benevolent government could spoon-feed them approved information if not for that pesky First Amendment. Kerry misses the good old days when liberal journalists had a vise grip on “fact-checking” rather than the more open social media and alternative media environments we have now.

Kerry’s former boss, President Joe Biden, views it the same way. Biden said that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing “misinformation” about COVID-19 that contradicted his liberal bureaucrats. Biden also complained that YouTube not censoring videos about voter fraud claims in the 2020 presidential election would lead to “political violence.” The Biden administration even took steps toward acting on these claims, funding the “Global Disinformation Index” that blacklisted conservative outlets (the Washington Examiner included) to advertisers.

Vice President Kamala Harris will only further embrace censorship under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” She made that clear during her 2020 run for president, when she complained that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” Harris wanted Twitter to ban then-President Donald Trump at the time, even dragging that topic onto a debate stage and demanding that her fellow presidential contenders join her calls for censorship.

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Combine that her with running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) saying that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation and hate speech” (too broad a statement even for the context in which he spoke) and left-wing authoritarians in Europe and Brazil charting a censorship course that could offer Democrats a blueprint, and the writing is on the wall.

Democratic politicians have flirted with a full embrace of censorship since the 2016 election led them to lament “fake news.” An emboldened Harris administration would no doubt push the envelope with violating free speech protections, all in the name of fighting “disinformation” that all conveniently happens to go against approved Democratic Party narratives.