Obama’s Fundamental Transformation of the 1st Amendment

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The man who promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” is back at it. In an address at Stanford University last week, former President Barack Obama called for the government to regulate free speech.

Despite describing himself as “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” Mr. Obama outlined an approach whereby private sector social media’s own efforts at what he euphemistically called “content management” would be regulated by governmental authorities so as to control the dissemination of “disinformation.”

It’s hard to overstate the menacing implications of such an arrangement for our constitutional republic. Obama characterized the exercise of free expression by a domestic political opponent as “flood[ing] the public square with…raw sewage.” Such an impetus for censorship is not a characteristic of a First Amendment absolutist, but someone absolutely determined to silence speech of which he does not approve.

This is Frank Gaffney.