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!

The infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to "investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and organizations." Initially focused on Nazi propaganda, after the war its focus shifted to anyone daring to challenge the U.S. government. Black nationalists, civil rights leaders, and antiwar activists were smeared as communist sympathizers, not for posing real risks to national security but for challenging government policies. While HUAC was disbanded in 1975 under public pressure, its legacy of smearing its opponents lives on in one of its most enduring legacies – the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA).